So what was John Solomon's competition at the AP for their weekly contest?

Below is the full text of the internal Associated Press email lauding Solomon for his work on the Reid story. This text includes the long list of stories deemed insufficiently controversial to deserve the editors' plaudits - like, for example, coverage of a riot in Kabul.

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As Josh points out at TPM, the AP thought that John Solomon's reporting on Harry Reid was just swell. In the internal email sent out to AP staff announcing Solomon's award, this section jumped out at me:

The story and video won widespread play on the Web fronts and newspaper fronts, and stirred an enormous debate in the blogosphere, generating more than 10,000 postings and more than a dozen newspapers wrote editorials chastising Reid, including USA Today.

Hmm. Yes, that "enormous debate" in the blogosphere. As the author of eight of those 10,000 posts, I confess I'm surprised that it doesn't matter to editors at the AP that the debate was over the AP's reporting.

There's no such thing as bad publicity, apparently.

Wednesday evening I received a lengthy reply from the Associated Press responding to my criticisms of John Solomon's initial piece on Harry Reid - I called Solomon, who passed me off to AP's corporate media relations. The reply, unsurprisingly, is a mix of flat-out falsehoods and off-point rebuttals. But it's important that we reply, so I've posted it with my point-by-point response below.

First, let me just say that I would have gotten to this Wednesday night if Solomon hadn't followed up with a still more misleading story. That kept me pretty occupied until yesterday afternoon. So you won't find the issues from Solomon's follow-up addressed below. The reply deals strictly with Solomon's initial piece.

OK. But before I get into the nitty-gritty, let's not lose sight of the big picture.

We went after Solomon's piece for a simple reason. At a time when Congressional corruption is arguably worse than it has ever been, leading to a spreading net of criminal investigations, Solomon used the most powerful organ in the land to attack Harry Reid for what is at very most a minor ethical transgression. Solomon did not allege a quid pro quo. He did not even allege that Reid violated ethics rules. What he argued was that Reid should have avoided accepting the seats in order to "avoid the appearance he was being influenced by gifts." And remember the supposed influence here was from a governmental body with interest - but no demonstrated financial interest - in pending legislation.

You don't have to look far in Congress to find examples of Members who could have exhibited more exemplary behavior. As the conservative-leaning Las Vegas Review Journal wrote in an editorial, "on a scandal scale of 1 to 10, these free fight nights rate about a 2." To puff that story up into an 8 is just bad journalism.

Solomon excluded key exculpatory details that weakened his case. As is clear from the AP's response below, it wasn't that he'd failed to gather these details - it was that he decided readers didn't need to be bothered with them.

And I should mention that in his follow-up piece, the distortions got much worse.

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AP reporter John Solomon seems to think that the best defense is yet more bamboozlement.

Remember back to Solomon's initial version of his story on Harry Reid's acceptance of ringside boxing seats. Solomon claimed that Reid shouldn't have accepted them to avoid the appearance of impropriety. He didn't explicitly note that Reid actually voted against the guys who gave him the ringside seat credentials. But he didn't allege a quid pro quo either.

But now he seems to be saying that maybe it was a quid pro quo.

Check down in today's piece on Reid:

Reid told AP the free tickets did not influence his position, noting he voted for the legislation when it passed the Senate. However, Reid had forced a change in the bill that let the federal commission regulate the TV networks when they promoted fights. After the change, the House never approved the legislation.

For those of us who speak the English language these two sentences have a pretty straightforward meaning. Reid says the tickets didn't influence his position, "however", ergo, on the contrary, he pushed for this change about regulating TV networks. And "after the change" the House didn't approve the bill. Again, going by basic English, the pretty clear suggestion is that Reid's change had something to do with the bill not making it through the House.

In other words, Solomon is saying one of two things, or maybe both. Either the Commission -- the folks who gave Reid the credentials -- wanted this TV network change or maybe the TV network change was a poison pill, meant to torpedo the bill the House, a backdoor way of killing the legislation.

If there's some other way to understand Solomon's words, seriously, let us know.

I don't know much about boxing regulation. So I got on the phone to make some calls.

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Oh my. John Solomon just keeps it comin'.

Via Greg Sargent, I see that John Solomon has rewritten the lead to his follow-up piece on Harry Reid. The distorting lead I pointed out yesterday has been replaced by a more narrative approach.

But he didn't stop there. And really, why should he? It's so much easier to cherry pick facts to boost your story than submit to the drudgery of countervailing details.

So here's another example of Solomon's bamboozlement. And, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to take you once again into the weedy specifics of this story. But it's worth it, believe me.

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John Solomon's at it again.

Tonight, the AP released a new story on Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). It purports to show Reid admitting that Solomon was right all along, that Reid mistated senate ethics rules when he initially defended himself against Solomon's piece -- and now he's coming clean.

We were pretty surprised to see Reid admit that. And as it turns out, he didn't.

Solomon just arranges the lead in such a way as to mislead readers into thinking Reid said something he didn't.

Going through all the details involves slogging through some minutiae. But it's worthwhile because it's a good illustration of Solomon's MO in his reporting about Reid: write a hit piece and then distort a follow-up response into looking like the target admitted you're right (he did a similar thing after his earlier story on Reid's ties to Jack Abramoff was undermined).

Solomon's piece begins with the following lead:

Reversing course, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid's office acknowledged Wednesday night he misstated the ethics rules governing his acceptance of free boxing tickets and has decided to avoid taking such gifts in the future.

99% of readers - and the AP has many, many readers - will read that lead paragraph and interpret it to mean that Reid has admitted that he misstated Senate ethics rules when he said they allowed him to accept the tickets. He's chastened and he's agreed not to do it again.

But as Solomon writes in his next paragraph, Reid still thinks it was "entirely permissible" to have accepted the tickets. It's hard to square that with Reid's admission, though, right?

Let's jump down into the details.

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