We’ve written before about the Palin-hating Nazgul at the Associated Press. Their coverage of Palin has been so biased that even the equally Palin-hating Anchorage Daily News has complained about it. Other distortions by the AP involving Levi Johnston, along with the ADN’s foray into Trig Trutherism, were the causus belli for a ‘Cuda Attack on executive editor Pat Dougherty of the ADN last month.

Let’s name another one of the wraiths in the picture above – AP stringer Anne Sutton, who is apparently the AP’s person in Alaska.

When Governor Palin announced her support for a parental notification law yesterday, the ADN sent out an e-mail “breaking news alert” which linked to this article (link to cached copy) by Sutton. The following paragraph jumped out at me immediately:

Just days after being named John McCain’s running mate, Palin announced that her teenage daughter was pregnant. Bristol Palin gave birth Dec. 27 to a boy named Tripp and recently told a Fox News Channel host that it was her own choice to have the baby.

Now maybe you guys can tell me – just what in the hell does that have to do with support for a parental notification law?

I wrote ADN‘s David Hulen, who posted the original breaking news on the Alaska Politics Blog, to ask just how the gratuitous Bristol-inclusion was relevant to the legislative story. He replied “That’s a very good question” and told me that the ADN would replace Sutton’s piece with one of their own that didn’t mention Bristol Palin. That did happen this morning, when they pulled Sutton’s story and replaced it with one by Lisa Demer, the ADN‘s crack Trig Truth researcher.

However, I’m still seeing Sutton’s garbage being picked up off the wire by other news outlets, like the Fort Mill Times and the Juneau Empire.

Sutton has also been doing yeoman work for Palin-bashers by trickling out the travel repayment story in dribs and drabs. Sutton loves to omit inconvenient facts that are favorable to Governor Palin, such as the family travel habits of previous governors, her large and young family, the fact that she is holding herself to a higher standard than any law requires, or that she has saved the state nearly a million dollars compared to her predecessor.

It’s a shame and a disservice to our democratic process that AP writers like D’Oro and Sutton can’t put a lid on their blatant bias, especially since it seems that with dead-tree newspapers failing left and right, the AP seems to be gradually moving into the “newspaper of record” role.