No, it's not because they're French, although that doesn't hurt.  It's because they have such rotten news photos.

A typical AFP story might be, say, about a cat which saved its owner's life by waking him up by clawing the owner's face into shreds when the apartment they were in caught on fire.

The photo linked to the story will be of a horse in a field, and will be captioned "A quadruped.  A cat, which is also a quadruped, saved its owner's life. . . ."

Do they have a picture of the owner?  Nope.  Of the apartment?  Nope.  Of the cat?  Nope.  Of *A* cat?  Well, ok, maybe sometimes.  (A recent one was of "A street cat somewhere on the planet, probably in Paris.  By the way, cats in China. . . .")

But this one takes the brioche.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Challenger explosion.

AFP's take on the whole deal.

AFP photo and caption: This bird's-eye view released by NASA on 04 January combines a self-portrait of the spacecraft deck and a panoramic mosaic of the Martian surface as viewed by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. Twenty years ago, the loss of the US shuttle Challenger dealt an enduring blow to confidence in manned space flight yet also helped open up a golden era of exploration by machine. (AFP/NASA/JPL/File)

Not only is it not even their photo, they celebrate the concept that the world (read: the U.S.A.) now has a largely unmanned "golden era of exploration" by machine, while taking a dig at the U.S. manned space program.