By Tom Blumer | February 18, 2015 | 3:36 PM EST

Several outlets have looked over the Facebook posts of Craig Hicks, who was indicted Monday for the February 10 murders of three Muslims in North Carolina.

Hicks's alleged murderous motivation appears to have had nothing directly to do with religion, but instead is said to have involved "a dispute over parking spaces at the condo community where Hicks and two of the victims lived." Whether we need to know anything else about the guy is an open question, but since it was inevitable that people would go there, it's worth noting that most outlets (examples here, here, and here) have focused on Hicks's Facebook-expressed atheism and an accompanying hostility towards all forms of religion. As will be seen, that take wasn't satisfactory to Associated Press reporters Allen G. Breed and Michael Biesecker.

By Tom Blumer | January 16, 2012 | 11:58 AM EST

In the annals of fawning coverage of scandal-plagued Democrats, Michael Biesecker's Saturday morning report on John Edwards's illness and its effect on his upcoming trail on campaign finance violations surely must be among the worst.

Biesecker missed at least a half-dozen natural opportunities to tag Edwards as a Democrat, finally doing so in cryptic fashion in his 15th of 17 paragraphs. He didn't identify Edwards as the 2004 vice-presidential candidate until that same paragraph, and in doing so named who was at the top of the GOP ticket (George W. Bush) without naming who was at the top of the Dems' (John Kerry). The AP reporter threw obsequious virtual kisses at a man who betrayed his terminally ill wife while omitting two clearly relevant recent reports, one from an outlet which has scooped the look-the-other-way establishment press time after time in this sad, four-year saga. Here are several paragraphs from Biescecker's blather (some of the many clear opportunities to tag Edwards as a Dem and examples of over-the-top fawning are bolded):