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The AP is at it again. The largest North American news service is continuing in their anti-Obama trajectory with an "analysis" that, like Ron Fournier's last week, seems more agenda-driven than actual analysis. This time, it's Charles Babington, a little known writer from the Washington Post (and I've been assured it's not a nom de plume of Fournier) whose shots at Obama had MSNBC host Keith Olbermann wondering what speech Babington had been watching

I feel impelled to read something from the Associated Press, which is a service that is distributed to thousands of newspapers around the continent mostly, our continent. This is called ‘Convention Analysis'. I'm not familiar with the writer, he's identified as Charles Babington. But let me read part of this in full:

Barack Obama, whose campaign theme is "change we can believe in," promised Thursday to "spell out exactly what that change would mean."

But instead of dwelling on specifics, he laced the crowning speech of his long campaign with the type of rhetorical flourishes that Republicans mock and the attacks on John McCain that Democrats cheer. The country saw a candidate confident in his existing campaign formula: tie McCain tightly to President Bush, and remind voters why they are unhappy with the incumbent.

"Of course," he went on to write, "no candidate can outline every initiative in a 35-minute speech - especially one that also must inspire voters." Mr. Babington got the length of the speech wrong by at least seven minutes. And this is analysis that will be printed in many, many newspapers, hundreds of them around the country. It is analysis that strikes me as having done...as having borne no resemblance to the speech you and I just watched. None whatsoever. And for it to be distributed by the lone national news organization in terms of wire copy to newspapers around the country and websites, is a remarkable failure of that news organization.

Charles Babington, find new work.