http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedra_PicklerCareer
Pickler was hired by the Detroit offices of Associated Press shortly after graduating from Michigan State University<4>. In March 2000, she transferred from the Lansing bureau to the Washington, D.C. bureau where she won the annual John L. Dougherty award for her work covering Michigan's congressional delegation.<5>
AP promoted Pickler to cover national political issues in December 2002. She was the lead reporter covering the Democratic Party candidates in the 2004 United States Presidential Election. After that election, Pickler worked as a White House correspondent until September 2006, leaving to cover national politics, including the 2008 United States Presidential Election. According to Austin American-Statesman reporter Ken Herman, President Bush bid her farewell personally, saying: "Nedra, baby, I’m gonna miss you. I’m sad you’re leaving."<6>
In 2007 the AP sent Pickler to Indonesia to investigate Senator Barack Obama's childhood education. She interviewed some of Obama's childhood friends and teachers and reported that, contrary to some rumors then in circulation, he had been educated in Roman Catholic and public schools. <7>
Accusations of unfair reporting
Her reporting of both presidential elections has repeatedly engendered controversy, including factual objections raised by other national political journalists.
2004 Democratic presidential race
In her coverage of the 2004 presidential race, Pickler acknowledged having misquoted Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. In January 2004, Dean had mentioned by name one U.S. Senator and one U.S. Representative who had shared his stand at a certain moment on whether the United States should go to war against Iraq in 2003; but Pickler misquoted Dean as maintaining that no member of Congress had shared his stand.<8>
In June 2004, an article by Pickler on higher education costs was criticized by the Columbia Journalism Review for accepting Bush advisor Steve Schmidt's criticism of John Kerry as fact without evaluating the accuracy of Schmidt's claim. CJR found Schmidt's claim to be misleading.<9>
2008 Democratic presidential race
On 27 March 2007, Pickler wrote that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama (who had declared his candidacy 10 February) had "delivered no policy speeches and provided few details about how he would lead the country" in his campaign up to that point in an article entitled "Is Obama All Style and Little Substance?".<10> Three weeks earlier, a major American daily newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, had reported what it termed "a major foreign policy speech" by Obama.<11>
During the season of presidential primaries, on 23 February 2008, Pickler wrote an article<12> that drew approximately 15,000 letters of complaint.<13> Pickler detailed Republican Party efforts to arouse skepticism about the patriotism of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, relying chiefly on statements by Roger Stone, a Republican party operative often implicated since the 1972 reelection campaign of U.S. president Richard Nixon in "dirty tricks" political maneuvers featuring incivility and/or clandestinity.<14>
On July 8, 2008, Pickler authored an analysis that the presumptive presidential nominees, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, had opposite stances on the policy goal of balancing the federal budget by the end of the next presidential term (January 2013).<15> However, McCain and Obama were actually in concurrence on this issue according to a Bloomberg News report available prior to Pickler's analysis. The lead to Pickler's article stated that McCain's announced goal of balancing the federal budget "is not a goal he's even trying to reach. Not only does Obama say he won’t eliminate the deficit in his first term, as McCain aims to do, he frankly says he’s not sure he’d bring it down at all in four years". However, this misrepresented McCain's own aim, according to a statement McCain's economic adviser had made the preceding day, 7 July to Bloomberg News. That same day, Bloomberg News reported,<16>
" revived a pledge he made in February to balance the federal budget. . . . In February, McCain said he would balance the budget by the end of his first term in 2013. He backed away from that goal in April. McCain senior economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin repeated the 2013 goal in a conference call before McCain's speech today. After the speech, Holtz-Eakin said: 'The senator has always pledged to balance the budget by the end of his second term.' A McCain second term would end in 2017."
Pickler's analysis of Obama's budget program did not mention either that McCain had reversed himself twice on the issue since April 2008 or that adviser Holtz-Eakin had reversed himself on the issue the preceding day. Talking Points Memo responded to Pickler's article by repeating the information from the Bloomberg News report.<17> Pickler was criticized for the article in the Columbia Journalism Review.<18>
On November 7, 2008, Pickler was the first reporter chosen by Barack Obama to ask a question at his first press conference as President-Elect.
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