UNDER CLINTON: 3 SEPARATE CASES OVER 7 ½ YEARS.
UNDER BUSH: 3 ADDITIONAL CASES OVER 4 ½ YEARS, plus the continued activity of a case begun under Clinton's watch.

This is OT, I know, but adds to the pile of "Skews Reporting" we've been collecting.

The Associated Press issued this interesting report that "Iran gets army gear in Pentagon sale". They don't mention until almost the 700th word of the 1600-word piece when these arms sales happened.

They list six cases from 1994 through 2005. There are probably more. But it makes for a very interesting headline, since only one of the mentioned cases refers to Iranian destinations while two others involved Chinese buyers. If you just read headlines and/or skim first paragraphs, you'd get a completely different sense of what the article actually reports. Which is what AP is counting on.

Here's the way I might have re-written it, for truly fair and balanced reporting:

1 YEAR UNDER CLINTON:
_Items seized in December 2000 at a Bakersfield, Calif., warehouse that belonged to Multicore, described by U.S. prosecutors as a front company for Iran...

1 YEAR UNDER BUSH:
In 2005, customs agents came upon the same surplus F-14 parts with the evidence labels still attached while investigating a different company suspected of serving as an Iranian front. They seized the items again. They declined to provide details because the investigation is ongoing.

2 YEARS UNDER BUSH:
_Arif Ali Durrani, a Pakistani, was convicted last year in California in the illegal export of weapons components to the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and Belgium in 2004 and 2005...

1 YEAR UNDER BUSH:
_State Metal Industries, a Camden, N.J., company convicted in June of violating export laws over a shipment of AIM-7 Sparrow missile guidance parts it bought from Pentagon surplus in 2003 and sold to an entity partly owned by the Chinese government...

2.5 YEARS UNDER CLINTON, 1.5 YEARS UNDER BUSH (Bush took office in Jan. 2001, many Clinton policies would have had residual effects for much if not all of that year):
_In October, Ronald Wiseman, a longtime Pentagon surplus employee in the Middle East, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing surplus military Humvees and selling them to a customer in Saudi Arabia from 1999 to 2002...

6 YEARS UNDER CLINTON:
_A California company, All Ports, shipped hundreds of containers of U.S. military technology to China between 1994 and 1999...