Name That Party

A number of center-right and New Media outlets have noted Politico Magazine's disingenuousness in the opening photograph in its "Race and the Modern GOP" article. At the item's top is the iconic "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" photo showing onetime segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace "try(ing) to block the entry of two black students" into the University of Alabama. The aforementioned…

Beginning on Monday afternoon, Democrat and former Mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin began a 10 year prison sentence for corruption charges that were as result of his actions following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina and subsequent flooding of the city in August 2005. When it came to reporting on the story during their evening newscasts, ABC World News Tonight with David Muir refused to cover the…

What’s the difference between a political scandal involving a Republican and one involving a Democrat? When it comes to news coverage, reporters almost always identify the political party of a Republican caught in a scandal, but when the culprit is a Democrat, the party label is usually left out of the story. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but not many. To prove the point,…

On Wednesday, ABC and CBS's evening newscasts punted yet again on reporting Ray Nagin's Democratic affiliation, after the disgraced former New Orleans mayor was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for corruption. World News and CBS Evening News previously omitted Nagin's party ID when he was indicted in January 2013, and after a jury convicted him in February 2014. ABC's Diane Sawyer…

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was sentenced to 10 years in prison today on fraud, bribery and related charges. In a January 2006 appearance on PBS's Tavis Smiley Show, Nagin, who in many several previous news reports had been described as a Republican who became a Democrat once he sought political office, told Smiley that he "never was a Republican" and he has been a "life-long Democrat…

News reports indicate that Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci, who was Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island from 1975 to 1984 and 1991 to 2002, is again running to be mayor of the Ocean State's capital city. The opening sentence at the Associated Press's Thursday morning story calls him a "twice-convicted felon who led Providence as mayor for 21 years," who is going "to run as an independent." Local web…

[UPDATE 16:00: Two and a half hours after posting, Reuters updated and used the word "Democrat."] According to Reuters, the ex-mayor of North Carolina's largest city admitted on Tuesday that he accepted bribes totaling at least $50,000 "in exchange for using his official positions to help people seeking to do business in the city." Yet the article by journalist Emily Harris avoided identifying…

On Wednesday, the Washington Post ran a news brief on page A3 about disgraced former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, but the paper conveniently forgot to mention that Nagin is a Democrat. The blurb began, “A federal judge says that former New Orleans mayor C. Ray Nagin will have to pay the government more than $501,000 as a result of his conviction on bribery and other charges.” The brief went…

In September 2010, Lachlan Markay at NewsBusters put up a post entitled "Eight Dems Arrested in Bell, CA 'Corruption on Steroids' - Not a Single Mention of Party Affiliation From Media." Almost four years later (!), reviews of search engine results and specific news stories on the sentencing of Robert Rizzo, the community's former city manager, are again returning no mentions of the fact that…

It's no secret that the folks who run the New York Times are big fans of gun control. It turns out that they also favor controlling the use of the word "gun" in headlines about Democrats. Over at National Review's Campaign Spot yesterday, regarding the news of Democratic California Senator Leland Yee's arrest, Jim Geraghty noted: "The New York Times greeted that news with a one paragraph…

ABC, CNN, MSNBC and PBS on Wednesday and Thursday all covered the "shocking" corruption involving the Democratic mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina. Yet, while talking about the tens of thousands of dollars in bribes he sought, none of these networks identified Patrick Cannon's political party. Only a Fox News host referred to him as a Democrat.  On ABC's Good Morning America, Amy Robach…

Here's another entry for the "name that party" file. Ambulance-chasing lawyer cum melodramatically hyper-partisan Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson (Fla.) has been accused by his estranged wife of violently shoving her during a dispute. The Orlando Sentinel has the story. The paper buried the party affiliation at the tail-end of the article, but they at least mentioned the "die quickly!"…

Can MSNBC's Rachel Maddow go a single day without descending into laughable hackdom? Any previous doubts about this were erased by her show last night. Mere seconds after she was introduced by colleague Chris Hayes, and after Maddow offered a chirpy "happy snow day" to viewers (this during one of the most brutal winters in memory), Maddow began her show with this -- "The administration of…

Former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin was convicted on 20 of 21 counts of corruption and bribery today. USA Today reporter Rick Jervis did a bit of a profile of Nagin in the course of reporting on the convictions. It included a recounting of his time at the city's helm during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But one thing his 2:39 p.m. report predictably did not include was Nagin's Democratic Party…