Name-Dropping

I am going to engage in a bit of name-dropping--names that have been in the news of late. Let's see how many you recognize.

Rod Blagojevich. Rahm Emanuel. William Jefferson. Tony Rezko. Eliot Spitzer. Chris Dodd. Charles Rangel.

There are many more I could drop, but I will stop there because these are the most noteworthy.

Do you notice anything in common about these individuals other than they are involved in politics in some way and they each have been implicated in serious corruption schemes?

If you answered that each are Democrats you would be correct. But you wouldn't know it by watching or listening to the mainstream media. The MSM has perpetrated a self-imposed conspiracy of silence concerning the Party affiliation of any corrupt politician who is engaged in scandal who also happens to be a Democrat.

Funny that a mere 2 years ago this very same media, with the very same personalities reporting the news, constantly referred to a Republican 'culture of corruption' when speaking about Larry Craig and Mark Foley.

Funny also that the major Republican scandals that year involved sex and not the far more serious issues of selling Senate seats, squandering taxpayers' money, or making illegal, under-the-table deals with mortgage brokers.

But now that it is the Democrats' turn to take the heat on corruption issues far more serious than someone's sexual indiscretions, the mainstream media suddenly play dumb at the very least and at the very worst contend that it is 'no big deal,' as PBS' Jim Lehrer actually had the gall to say about the Blagojevich scandal.

No story in the news today depicts any more clearly the glaring bias of the media when it comes to reporting political corruption. If a Republican goes bad, it is front-page news that he/she is a Republican and that the Party is up to its neck in a 'culture of corruption.' But when a Democrat goes bad, you are lucky to discover the person's Party affiliation without doing some digging.

An essay at Newsbusters entitled 'What About the Democrats' Culture of Corruption?' fills in all the details of this travesty of journalism in our time.