You be the editor

James Taranto, who writes the Best of The Web Today blog for The Wall Street Journal, points out the coverage of two presidents by The Associated Press. If you were the editor at The AP, what would you do?

Remember "accountability journalism"? As we noted in 2007, this was an Associated Press innovation designed "to report whether government officials are doing the job for which they were elected and keeping the promises they make." It started in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, and was exemplified by stories like these:

WASHINGTON (AP)--The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent's identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn't match the public's view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast.

WASHINGTON (AP)--The fatally slow response to Hurricane Katrina unleashed a wave of anger that could transform people's expectations of government, the qualities they seek in political leaders and their views of America's class and racial divides. It's a huge opportunity that neither party seems poised to exploit.

Nearly five years later, we have a different president, facing a new crisis in the Gulf of Mexico after having promised in 2008 that his winning his party's nomination would be "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." And how is the AP reporting whether he's keeping that promise? Here's a Saturday dispatch from the wire service's Ben Feller:

President Barack Obama keeps reassuring the nation that stopping the Gulf oil spill and limiting the fallout on the region are his top priority.

Yet so is protecting the country against attack. And getting people back to work.

Presidencies usually don't allow for a dominant priority--just a list of priorities. . . .

Like presidents before him, Obama is having to work through unforeseen problems: offshore drilling and an environmental disaster, mine safety, the earthquake in Haiti, piracy off the Somali coast. . . .

Obama's ability to calmly handle many competing issues simultaneously is viewed as one of his strengths.

He has tried to let everyone know that what's unfolding in the Gulf is more than a momentary crisis. The spill, he said Friday from Grand Isle, La., is nothing less than "an assault on our shores, on our people, on the regional economy, and on communities like this one."

The president is also fond of saying he will not rest until the problem at hand gets fixed. The trouble is that there's always more trouble.

I don't recall this kind of writing when I was working for The AP way back when. Then again, I have trouble remembering yesterday.

Taranto's point, of course, is that The AP has a political viewpoint. I think it does, which historically the wire service was not supposed to have, since it provided news to all manner of publications.

What bothers me more is that the last piece on Obama says nothing at all. "It's just words," as my editor at AP Newsfeatures once said of a less than stellar piece I turned in. It's just drivel.

OK, you're the editor. What do you think?