LA Times Backs Away from Bias – But Not All the Way
A July 31 Los Angeles Times article about a new House ethics bill lists seven corrupt Republicans, but not a single Democrat.
The August 1 version of the article makes a small gesture to fairness, adding a brief reference to a single corrupt Democrat near the end of the story.
You'd never know from either version that the top Democrat in the Senate and the top Democrat in the House, along with several colleagues, are currently facing unresolved corruption allegations, or that Democrats as a party have historically been at least as corrupt as Republicans.
A central strategy in the successful Democratic effort to retake control of Congress in 2006 was to criticize the Republican “culture of corruption” in
“The measure grew out of scandals that led to the imprisonment of Cunningham, former Rep. Bob Ney of
The article ignored recent and current Democratic lawmakers, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who have lately been dogged by serious corruption charges.
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Rep. Pelosi violated federal law by failing to disclose her position as an officer of a family charity; her campaign committee was fined $21,000 in 2003 for accepting donations over federally prescribed limits. Just this year, Pelosi was accused of trying to exempt the Samoan operations of StarKist Tuna, a major corporation headquartered in Pelosi's district, from a proposed hike in the minimum wage. Pelosi is also accused of directing federal funds to a
A presumably shamefaced Times editor added the following line to the August 1 version of the article: “Democrats also have come under an ethical cloud, with Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) being indicted after FBI agents reported finding $90,000 in cash stuffed in his freezer.”
David Niedrauer is an intern at the Culture and Media Institute, a division of the
