Flying well below the national radar this week, thanks to the Eliot Spitzer follies, has been the foibles of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who uttered the dreaded n-word on live television the other day and is increasingly appearing as if he'll never see the end of his term.
What's been disturbing about the scant coverage of Kilpatrick that we see is the media's refusal to identify the fact he's a Democrat.
As Rich Noyes at NewsBusters detailed Thursday, 100% of the time the electronic media identifies Republicans when they're in trouble (rightly so, I might add), but has an obvious double standard when it comes to noting the fact certain politicians in hot water are Democrats.
Again today, the New York Times has a lengthy item about how Kilpatrick is under intense scrutiny in Detroit and under pressure to resign.
But nowhere is this 21-paragraph story is the word Democrat mentioned.
DETROIT — The swift resignation of New York’s governor, Eliot Spitzer, just days after he was linked to a high-priced prostitution ring has put new pressure on the embattled mayor of this city, Kwame M. Kilpatrick, with critics calling for him to step down quickly as well.Read the rest.
“Lying under oath, I think most people would think that’s more serious a crime than hiring a prostitute,” the Michigan attorney general, Mike Cox, said on Thursday. “Eliot Spitzer, whether you like him or not, did put the State of New York above his own interests. But the mayor thinks he’s bigger than the City of Detroit.”
Mr. Kilpatrick has vowed repeatedly over the last several weeks he will not quit despite publication of text messages showing that he and his former chief of staff lied under oath when they denied having an extramarital affair, as well as accusations that the city agreed to settle a lawsuit for $8.4 million primarily to hide the affair.
A Kilpatrick spokesman, James Canning, said the Spitzer scandal should not play into anyone’s opinion of the mayor.
“You cannot compare these two situations,” Mr. Canning said on Thursday. “Mayor
The media long ago lost any argument that it's objective in its coverage. Lately, however, they've become a running gag, daily supplying ammunition to use against themselves.
I'm not asking they skew as far right as they do left. Let's just have a semblance of balance. Is it so difficult that for any story involving any politician, we simply see their party affiliation identified upon the first mention of their name?
Is that really too much to ask? It's not as if his middle name is Hussein and we're forbidden from mentioning it.
It's simple. Is he a Republican or a Democrat?
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