AP's Jordan Is Wife of Partisan Political Operative

When you read Associated Press stories, pay close attention to the byline. Some AP reporters are pretty objective and try to get things right, even if we might not like the message. Others from AP sound a lot like partisan political hacks.

Washington correspondent Lara Jakes Jordan is one of them. Her reporting uniformly undermines almost anything to do with fighting terrorism, and she's been sloppy (to be polite about it) in her reporting on Blackwater.

Small wonder: Her husband, Jim Jordan, is an accomplished partisan political operative. Jim ran Senator John Kerry's political operations for five years, serving as manager of Kerry's presidential campaign.

Veteran newsman Joseph Farah commented on Lara Jakes Jordan's partisan political connection a few years back. He said, "When I got started a quarter century ago, there was an old newsroom saying that went like this: 'I don't care if you sleep with elephants as long as you don't cover the circus.'

"Mrs. Jordan violated that old newsroom ethic. She abdicated her right to cover the circus because she was sleeping with an elephant – or, in this case, a donkey."

Jordan, he wrote, is a "politically motivated reporter with a big ax to grind. . . . The largest news-gathering organization in the world, the Associated Press, owes the American people an apology for continuing to assign Lara Jakes Jordan to politically sensitive stories."

Makes you wonder whether she's part of the trial lawyers' highly partisan effort to discredit the company. A PR firm in Washington, Levick Strategic Communications, brags that it has planted "thousands" of stories in the press for its clients - clients that included captured enemy combatants in Guantanamo. Trial lawyers hired Levick to trash Blackwater. Jordan has been out front covering both the Gitmo detainee issue and Blackwater. It would be interesting to go back and check if Jordan has served as a mouthpiece for Levick's paid propaganda.