Boxer Aide Arrested for Distributing Child Porn, Media Mostly Mum

A high-level adviser for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Cali) was charged Wednesday with receiving and distributing child pornography.

UPDATE AT END OF POST: this is the second person with ties to Boxer arrested in the past year on similar charges. 

Although Jeff Rosato was arrested and fired last Friday, this story has garnered very little attention from the mainstream press.

Do you think the media would have been equally disinterested if he worked for a Republican?

While you ponder, here are the details reported by the Associated Press Thursday:

A high-level aide to California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer has been charged in federal court with receiving and distributing child pornography.

The aide, Jeff Rosato, 32, was arrested last Friday. Boxer's office fired him that same day upon learning of the charges. [...]

"On Friday, the Justice Department informed our office of criminal charges made against a Senate employee. Sen. Boxer has zero tolerance for crimes against children, and the employee was immediately terminated," Boxer spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said in a statement Thursday. "Our office is cooperating fully with the Department of Justice in this matter."

Rosato had worked for Boxer since early 2005, beginning in her personal office as a legislative assistant and last year becoming a counsel to the Environment and Public Works Committee, which Boxer chairs. His areas of expertise included water policy, oceans and endangered species. [...]

According to an affidavit by FBI special agent Chad Gallagher supporting the criminal complaint and arrest warrant, Rosato was tracked through a now-defunct Google program called Google Hello. He allegedly exchanged hundreds of pornographic images with another user who'd been sharing child porn images and movies with an undercover detective posing as a 13-year-old boy. [...]

A preliminary review of Rosato's personal laptop computer, which was in his bedroom, found some 200 child porn images and some videos, according to the affidavit. "Many of the images and videos depict prepubescent boys engaged in sexual acts," the affidavit stated.

Disgusting and disgraceful to say the least. Yet, for the most part, this story has been ignored or buried.

From what I can tell via a LexisNexis search, only Fox News has reported this matter on television; I found no coverage by any of the broadcast networks, CNN, or MSNBC.

Think that would have been the case if the senator in question was a Republican?

As for print, it appears despite the AP's coverage, of the major newspapers, only the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post felt this story newsworthy, although neither gave it much space.

Most curious, Boxer's hometown paper the San Francisco Chronicle (she lives in Marin County just across the Golden Gate Bridge) felt this matter wasn't important enough to share with her most proximate constituents.

Liberal media bias? What liberal media bias?

*****Update: This is the second Boxer aide to be caught with child pornography in less than a year. As my colleague Richard Newcomb reported in May:

Famed left-wing radio personality Bernie Ward of San Francisco, a former priest who had one of the loudest and most consistently anti-George W. Bush voices in the entire nation, was found guilty of possessing and distributing child pornography on Friday and will serve at least five years in prison. 

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported at the time of Ward's arrest, he used to work for Boxer (h/t NBer d4man):

From 1982 to 1985 he worked for then-Rep. Barbara Boxer as her chief legislative assistant.

So, this is the second incident in twelve months of a Boxer aide being involved with child pornography. Yet, for the most part, we hear crickets from the press.