AP Studies Palin's New Book, Health Care Bill

Meredith Jessup | November 20, 2009 3:16 PM

James Taranto has a bit today in the Wall Street Journal where he looks at the Associated Press' "fact-check" on Sarah Palin's new book and the attention they are devoting to the Democrats' health care overhaul:

An Associated Press dispatch, written by Erica Werner and Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, compares the House and Senate ObamaCare bills. We'd like to compare this dispatch to the AP's dispatch earlier this week "fact checking" Sarah Palin's new book. Here goes:
Number of AP reporters assigned to story:
   • ObamaCare bills: 2
   • Palin book: 11
Number of pages in document being covered:
   • ObamaCare bills: 4,064
   • Palin book: 432
Number of pages per AP reporter:
   • ObamaCare bill: 2,032
   • Palin book: 39.3
On a per-page basis, that is, the AP devoted 52 times as much manpower to the memoir of a former Republican officeholder as to a piece of legislation that will cost trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. That's what they call accountability journalism.