The Times shows a double standard on political "gaffes" in California. Prepping for an interview for Sacramento TV last Wednesday, California Republican Senate primary winner Carly Fiorina was caught on an open mike mocking opponent Sen. Barbara Boxer's hair. On Friday, Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer called Fiorina's impolitic but innocuous comments a "classic campaign gaffe' that 'could haunt her throughout the campaign [1]."
Not content with a full story on the non-story, the Times followed up with a small illustrated story, headlined "Fighting Words," on page 2 of the Sunday Week in Review, featured dueling quotes from Fiorina and Sen. Barbara Boxer's campaign manager.
Meanwhile, this weekend the Democratic nominee for governor Jerry Brown compared his Republican rival Meg Whitman to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels in a off-the-cuff conversation with California radio journalist Doug Sovern. The rant has so far been totally ignored by the Times; a Monday afternoon search at nytimes.com found no reference either in print or online.
Holly Bailey at Yahoo News [2] picks up the story:
....KCBS radio reporter Doug Sovern was biking near his home near Oakland over the weekend when he ran into Brown, the state's attorney general and Democratic nominee for governor. According to Sovern, who posted the account on his blog, Brown, 72, was jogging and had paused at a water fountain when the two started chatting about the governor's race, in particular Whitman's willingness to dip into her personal fortune for her campaign.
Brown suggested his GOP rival would use that money to smear him. "You know, by the time she's done with me, two months from now, I'll be a child-molesting ..." Brown, according to Sovern, paused. "She'll have people believing whatever she wants about me." But Brown didn't stop there. "It's like Goebbels," Brown told Sovern, referring to Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's Minister of Propaganda. "Goebbels invented this kind of propaganda. He took control of the whole world. She wants to be president. That's her ambition, the first woman president. That's what this is all about."
Whitman responded on her campaign website, calling Brown's comments "deeply offensive and entirely unacceptable [3]." But not even that has so far moved the Times to even mention Brown's offensive comment.
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