More inclusive storytelling.

Does that sound like the sort of thing that should be a priority for any legitimate news organization, much less one as massive, influential, and ostensibly objective as the Associated Press?

It didn’t to us, either, but that’s precisely the idea behind a little-known and deeply troubling multimillion-dollar partnership between the AP and an array of leftist foundations, whereby those foundations bankroll the news agency’s reporters when they write about certain left-wing causes. As The Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross reports:

The news organization last year announced a series of “partnerships” to subsidize reporters covering climate change, race, and democracy. A review of the donor roster shows that the vast majority fund left-wing political causes, while none are supporters of conservative initiatives.

The Ida B. Wells Society, founded by “1619 Project” lightning rod [and founder Nikole] Hannah-Jones, has teamed up with filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s Hearthland Foundation, for example, to foster “more inclusive storytelling” at the Associated Press.

The AP proudly announced its partnership with the Ida B. Wells Foundation in a press release last May: “Inclusive newsrooms benefit from well-trained news leaders equipped with the right skills for significantly addressing the inequalities that, like every aspect of our culture, have impacted journalism through the years,” said AP Vice President and Head of News Audience Amanda Barrett, who along with Deputy Managing Editor Sarah Nordgren was responsible for building the initiative. “The collaboration announced today sets in motion a journalism future we all can be proud of.”

Hmm. Instead of “inclusive” newsrooms and racially biased storytelling, how about focusing on balanced reporting instead? How about focusing on the whole truth instead of a glaringly incomplete version of it? And how about focusing on the inclusion of conservative voices? Or is ideological inclusion not the right kind of inclusion?

As Ross notes, for example, the leftist Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, which recently blasted the Supreme Court for its decision to overturn the pernicious form of racial discrimination known as affirmative action, forked over $500,000 in 2022 to the AP’s “democracy journalism initiative.” And, Ross continues, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which also happens to fund Planned Parenthood’s promotion of transgender ideology to children, spent $2.5 million on the AP’s climate and education reporting in addition to coughing up $400,000 to the aforementioned democracy journalism initiative.

Nice graft if you can get it.

Given this sort of bankrolling, who thinks the AP is going to play it straight when it comes to matters that are controversial — like, say, race, and climate, and illegal immigration, and politics, and elections?

A few weeks ago, when The New York Times’s house centrist “conservative” David Brooks briefly pondered whether he and his fellow elites were in fact the bad guys in our increasingly fraught left-right divide, he offered this remarkably honest assessment about himself and his fellow elites:

Over the last decades, we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession; we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of college students graduate from the super-elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.

If, as the AP argues, “The glaring and persistent lack of diversity, equity, and belonging across journalism has deeply eroded the credibility of this craft, particularly in the eyes of communities of color,” then newsroom editors need look no further than this confession of rank and exclusive elitism.

Sadly, though, they’re looking in all the wrong places — if they’re looking at all.

As our Nate Jackson noted, Brooks, having momentarily exposed himself and his crooked profession, picked up where he’d left off, writing, “Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.”

Then, as if he hadn’t been paying attention when he typed the previous sentence, he posed the $64,000 $57,600 Bidenflation-adjusted question: “When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?”

You tell us, David. You tell us.