-By Warner Todd Huston
In its November 15 print version, The Washington Post published a story about the criminal financial malfeasance of former Democrat Governor and MF Global Chief John Corzine. But, the Post seemed to have trouble properly identifying Corzine as a Democrat not to mention that it buried the story deep in the paper.
Corzine was the subject of a report this week issued by the House Financial Services’s oversight subcommittee that, while it stopped short of calling Corzine’s actions outright felonies (the committee is leaving that determination to prosecutors), the report raised deep concerns about the magical disappearance of $1.6 billion in investor’s money.
If Corzine were a Republican, who doesn’t believe that The Washington Post would have made sure that the story of the release of this report would have been front-page news? But, no, this story was buried back on page A18.
Not long ago, John Corzine was one of the Democrat’s leading up-and-coming lights. He was a successful Governor of New Jersey — well, by successful we mean he got elected — and it was even said that he might be a possible Democrat nominee for the White House himself. But then came revelations that when Corzine was head of MF Global, the company mysteriously lost 1.6 billion dollars due to his criminal financial malfeasance.
But despite his prominence in the Democrat Party, it took the Post six paragraphs to get around to even mentioning that Corzine was a Democrat.
In essence, the Washington Post gave us yet another example of the “Name That Party” parlor game. What is that? This is a game that I started — according to me — when I worked for Newsbusters back in the late 2000s. We called it “Name That Party,” a game that followed news reports about troubled or indicted politicians. How it worked was that if the story either didn’t mention the troubled pol’s party or buried it deep down in the story, it was sure to be a Democrat that was in trouble. But if it was a Republican running afoul of either morality or the law — or both — then we’d usually find that the story mentioned the perp’s party first and foremost, sometimes even in the headline. Rarely did a story about a troubled politician break this biased convention.
Apparently The Washington Post is a big fan of “Name That Party.”
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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