On April 1, Washington D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray was denied a second
term, defeated in the primary by upstart city councilwoman Muriel
Bowser. The beginning of the end came on March 10, when the U.S.
Attorney struck a plea bargain with a wealthy businessman who confessed
he’d spent $668,000 on an illegal “shadow campaign” to fund
get-out-the-vote efforts that helped Gray win the mayor’s office in
2010.
So the corrupt mayor of America’s most important city is thrown out. A
political scandal? The same networks that were utterly breathless over
the local story of Gov. Chris Christie’s aides slowing traffic on a
bridge into New York City didn’t breathe a word about corruption in the
nation’s capital. Unlike Gov. Christie, the mayor is a Democrat.
The TV networks seem to have two tracks in covering Democratic
scandals: ignore them, or if coverage is unavoidable, ignore the party
label of the unethical politician under investigation. Often,
Republicans in an ethical probe are blown up into alleged national
problems for the GOP.
On January 24, “NBC Nightly News” had the audacity to report on a
dilapidated Trenton high school and blame its disrepair on Chris
Christie. "For his part, Governor Christie tonight is responding to an
issue that's been festering for years, right there in the shadow of New
Jersey's state house," anchor Brian Williams noted of the school.
Nowhere did NBC ever wonder about Tony Mack, the Democratic mayor of
Trenton. Associated Press reported that Mack's "administration of New
Jersey’s impoverished capital city has been plagued by accusations of
cronyism and reckless spending."
Or
take San Diego Mayor Bob Filner. Last August, he was preparing to
resign after 18 charges of sexual harassment. Amazingly, ABC and NBC
couldn’t utter the “D word” in their stories. One has to go out of his
way not to attach a party label to an elected politician. These networks do so continuously.
When ABC aired a story on Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst allegedly
intervening for his step-niece that was arrested for shoplifting, guess
what? ABC made sure to note that Dewhurst was a “rising national
Republican star.”
The last few weeks have seen a stream of ethics probes for Democrats,
but the networks can barely be bothered while they obsess over a
vanished Malaysian jet. So there’s either one story, or none.
On March 26, NBC anchor Brian Williams reported that Charlotte Mayor
Patrick Cannon was "busted today by the FBI after a sting operation
several years in the making." NBC aired the whole story with no mention
that Cannon was a Democrat. CBS and ABC skipped the story altogether.
Also on March 26, California state Senator Leland Yee, a Democratic
candidate for Secretary of State, was arrested in San Francisco. A
gun-control fanatic, Yee was accused of trafficking guns – not just
automatic weapons, but shoulder-fired missiles! NPR covered it days
later, with the online title “The Story Of California Senator's Arrest
Reads Like Pulp Fiction.” Jon Stewart had a field day with it, too.
But the networks? Nothing on CBS and NBC. ABC gave it two sentences on
“Good Morning America,” no party label: “And a California lawmaker who
pushed for gun control has been arrested in a gun trafficking scheme.
State Senator Leland Yee is fighting those charges.”
Yee is the third Democratic state senator in California in ethical
trouble, and the state Senate voted to expel all three. But it’s still
not newsworthy. Why? Consult a headline from Cathleen Decker in the Los
Angeles Times, who sums up the reason for all this bias by omission:
“For Democrats, politicians in handcuffs point to image problems.”
Solution? Don’t show them at all.
