James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal highlighted an amusing example of Guess the Party bias: a newspaper that finds the party of Gov. Eliot Spitzer irrelevant in a prostitution story, but not the party affiliation of a prostitute. Frank Main's crime story in the Chicago Sun-Times began: "She didn't charge as much as Ashley Dupre -- the call girl who cost Eliot Spitzer his job as New York governor. But authorities say Barbara Anderson Cohen did not come cheap." Taranto can take it from there: The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Barbara Anderson Cohen was arrested for prostitution earlier this month "after she flew in from Las Vegas and agreed to have sex in a Loop hotel":
Her price, $1,000 for two hours, was the highest rate of any of the 120 women arrested by the sheriff's office in stings over the last two years, Patterson said.
"The significance of this is that we have been doing Internet sex stings for a few years now and this is the first one that charged us $1,000 for services," he said.
The Sun-Times notes, however, that Eliot Spitzer was forced to resign as New York's governor "after it became public that he met for over two hours with a $1,000-an-hour prostitute," though not in Chicago.
What was Spitzer's political party? The Sun-Times doesn't say. It does reveal Cohen's however: "Public records show she is a registered Republican and holds a hunting license in Nevada."
