Well, isn't THIS interesting.

In a December post (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I reviewed ABC's online "The Faces of Political Scandal" slideshow, which featured mini-profiles of 14 politicians in recent years who have been tainted by scandal and/or crime.

At the time, I noted that:

Of the 14 politicians identified, seven are Democrats and seven are Republicans. Five of the seven GOP members are identified as such, while only two of the seven Democrats were flagged. The montage also has a couple of surprising factual errors.

Well, glory be, sometime in the past couple of months, ABC has made changes to the montage. Now each profile except for Bill Clinton's (which is excusable) identifies the politician's party. Additionally, two factual errors at the original profiles have been corrected. The year of Clinton's Lewinsky scandal which ultimately led to his acts of perjury and impeachment has been changed from 1995 to 1998, and an incorrect statement that sex-scandalized Florida Democratic Congressman Tim Mahoney had conceded to GOP opponent Tom Rooney before Election Day last year has been removed.

Here's the lineup of the "Faces of Political Scandal," and how their status changed:

A collection of "The Faces of Political Scandal," assembled by ABC News yesterday (HT to an e-mailer), once again demonstrates the media's relative reluctance to identify the membership of Democrats involved in scandal.

Of the 14 politicians identified, seven are Democrats and seven are Republicans. Five of the seven GOP members are identified as such, while only two of the seven Democrats were flagged. The montage also has a couple of surprising factual errors.

Here's the detail, slide by slide:

1. Current Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich -- Party not ID'd, while containing a quote with a Republican frame of reference ("Gov. Blagojevich has taken us to a new low," U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said. "This conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave.").

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A week ago, Rep. Tim Mahoney, the ethically compromised liberal legislator who replaced Rep. Mark Foley, admitted to adultery, but unlike Foley, is running for re-election anyway. It’s time for an update on the lack of Mahoney coverage on the networks, and the news magazines. CBS and NBC still have done zero. ABC, which broke the story on its Blotter blog of Mahoney putting a mistress on his payroll and paying her $120,000, has offered two little sentences on last Saturday’s Good Morning America. Time has nothing so far. Newsweek only mentioned it in passing in its cutesy "Dignity Index" feature...and declared that Sarah Palin was even less dignified.

ABC's sentences passed quickly from the lips of news reader Ron Claiborne:

And a married Florida congressman now admits that he had at least two affairs, but insists he broke no laws and he will not resign. Democratic Representative Tim Mahoney replaced Republican Representative Mark Foley, who resigned after a sex scandal.

As NewsBusters previously reported, the same broadcast networks that two years ago could not get enough of the Mark Foley scandal, are offering little to no coverage of Foley’s successor, Tim Mahoney, now embroiled in a sex scandal of his own. The networks on October 21 completely ignored the news that Congressman Mahoney’s wife is now filing for divorce. Fox News’ "Fox and Friends" only provided a brief news read. After co-host Brian Kilmeade read the brief, Steve Doocy editorialized "I think [the Foley] scandal got more ink, didn’t it?"

In related news, Mark Foley himself recently announced his endorsement for Barack Obama. Though Obama won over another Republican, it’s a safe assumption it will not receive the same news coverage as Colin Powell.

Update: Mark Foley issued a statement denying his support for Obama:

Two years ago, ABC’s Brian Ross broke wide open the scandal of Republican Rep. Mark Foley sending sexual Internet messages to Congressional pages. Foley resigned quickly, but that didn’t dampen the story. We reported "On the ABC, CBS, and NBC morning and evening news programs, from the story’s emergence on Friday night, September 29, through Wednesday morning, October 11, the Big Three networks have aired 152 stories." On October 11's Good Morning America, news anchor Christopher Cuomo spoke insistently: "Less than a month before the elections and the Mark Foley scandal just keeps growing." Reporter Jake Tapper added: "This is the scandal that will not go away."

But what about a scandal that will not be acknowledged? Even when a network breaks the story? On October 13, ABC reporter Brian Ross broke the news on his Blotter blog that Rep. Tim Mahoney, the Democrat who replaced Mark Foley in the House, who ran on returning morality to Congress, "agreed to a $121,000 payment to a former mistress who worked on his staff and was threatening to sue him." The FBI is now investigating. ABC has audio of him yelling at the mistress (with profanities) that she's fired. Mahoney didn’t resign. He’s running for reelection.

Number of ABC stories on the morning and evening newscasts? Zero.

Number of CBS stories? Zero.

Number of NBC stories? Zero.

Imagine that Chris Matthews was interviewing the former head of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, someone who helped engineer the election of a Republican House member after the incumbent Dem had been caught in a sex scandal.  Now imagine that same Republican was currently stuck in a sex scandal of his own, and just that afternoon a credible report emerged that he might drop out of the race.  What are the odds Matthews wouldn't have raised the new scandal with the former RCCC chairman?  About as good as Keith Olbermann suddenly endorsing McCain-Palin after tonight's debate, you say?  Agreed.

Yet when Matthews had Rahm Emanuel on his show this evening, the Hardball host failed to raise the matter of Tim Mahoney with Emanuel, the hyper-partisan Dem and former DCCC chairman.  This despite the Politico's report that Mahoney might be dropping out, he who won Mark Foley's seat after the Republican was forced out of the race in 2006 after sordid details emerged of his text messaging with male House pages.

There was one amusing moment: after defending William Ayers as a "distinguished professor," Emanuel balked at calling him a "good guy" on the grounds he didn't know him.  Right.

View video here.

On Monday, NewsBusters wondered how much coverage the sex scandal involving Rep. Tim Mahoney (D-Fl.) -- the Democrat Congressman who in 2006 won the seat previously held by the disgraced Mark Foley -- would get.

Early indications suggest that as far as the television news outlets are concerned, the answer is "not much."

In fact, though all three broadcast network evening news programs covered the Foley sex scandal when it was first revealed on September 29, 2006, not one of them felt that the man who replaced him admitting to having an affair with a former campaign staffer was at all newsworthy.

It was revealed Monday that Democrat Congressman Tim Mahoney (D-Fl.), the man who replaced Mark Foley (R-Fl.) in 2007 after the latter resigned for having sent e-mail solicitations to male pages, has been caught in his own sex scandal with a former mistress who used to work for him.

Given the extraordinary irony involved in the man who campaigned on bringing back to his district "a world that is safer, more moral" now being caught in a seedy affair of his own, one has to wonder just how much attention the Obama-loving press will give to this matter three weeks before Election Day.

This seems especially important given the many weeks of constant media focus Foley's scandal was given prior to the 2006 elections, and just how much that assisted Democrats in winning back the Congress.

As reported by ABCNews.com moments ago (emphasis added, h/t NB reader Chuck Vieth, photo courtesy ABCNews.com):

NewsBusters posters have already given Old Media deserved grief about its reluctance to pin the Democratic Party label on Eliot Spitzer, who, as of this moment, is still governor of New York (Brent Baker on evening news show coverage; Ken Shepherd on the BBC; Shepherd on the AP).

But, as blogger Ace noted last night (warning: some profanity at Ace's link), ABC has outdone the other outlets one better.

ABC's "Political Sex Scandals Redux" popup slideshow has a series of 13 slides relating to current and past politicians. If Republicans are or were involved, the network, with one rare and minor exception, consistently applies the "R" label almost immediately. With Democrats, with one very old exception, the party label isn't there.

Here are the specifics:

The Washington Post carried the usual double standard on political ethics – highlight the party affiliation of the Republican, bury the party affiliation of the Democrat – all in one edition of the paper on Saturday. In the Metro section (page B-5), the headline proclaimed: "GOP’s McKee Resigns After Home Is Searched" (for child pornography). On the front page of Style (page C-1), a story on Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s adultery and lying was headlined, "In Detroit, Not Exactly LOL LOL! His Steamy Text Messages Turn Up the Heat on Motown’s Young Mayor."

For NBC's "Today" show crew it wasn't enough to label Larry Craig's scandal as a crisis for him personally or even to call it a crisis for the Republican Party, no "Today" went even further as it declared it a "crisis" for conservatives everywhere. NBC's Matt Lauer opened the Tuesday "Today" show asking his viewers: "Can the right wing withstand yet another scandal involving one of its own?"

Lauer's colleague Ann Curry, then piled on, as she wondered if the Craig incident spelled doom for the GOP's chances in ‘08: "How does this specter of hypocrisy affect the party, especially as we're now moving into a very critical time for the Republican Party facing this presidential election year?"

Video (1:48): Real (1.32 MB) and Windows (1.11 MB), plus MP3 (827 kB).

It goes without saying that one of the defining moments in the 2006 elections was when former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida) resigned in September over electronic messages sent to male House pages.

The press firestorm was extraordinary, with all media outlets focusing huge amounts of air and print space on Foley on a daily basis as Election Day neared.

Yet, eleven months later, when it was revealed Friday afternoon that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement apparently hasn't found anything to actually charge Foley with, besides UPI and a brief mention by CNN's Wolf Blitzer, not one major press organization felt it was newsworthy.

Not one.

Florida's TCPalm reported Friday (emphasis added throughout):

The New York Times cannot make up their mind if Dennis Hastert should be despised or laughed at, apparently. Neither can they decide if he is "rumpled and weary" or if he is "healthier and more relaxed" -- they confusingly say both in the very same article. But one thing is sure, their underlying sentiment toward the former Speaker of the House seems to be one of pity. And this article was simply an opportunity to kick someone they think is down.

But Dennis Hastert is neither seeking nor requiring such special attention or emotion to be wasted upon him. Furthermore, he never has. The pity party thrown for him by the Times is a pointless jab at a man who has given his life to the community. Hastert should be celebrated, not pitied. Least of all from as cynical an organization as the New York Times.

Actor Sean Penn received an award Monday evening from the Creative Coalition, and took the opportunity to slam virtually every Republican whose name he's familiar with while calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Here are some of the more vitriolic segments of the prepared text as he accepted the first annual Christopher Reeve First Amendment Award (emphasis mine throughout):

Which is to say that, globally, the United States is number one at demanding accountability and backing up that demand with imprisonment. But, when it comes to our president, vice president, secretary of state, former secretary of defense...this insistence on accountability vanishes. All of a sudden, what's past is prologue. And we're just "forward-looking." But some people can't just look forward. Men and women stationed in Iraq at this moment, under orders of a Commander-in-Chief so sufficiently practiced in the art of deception, that he got vast numbers of American journalists and the most esteemed media outlets of this country, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and PBS to eagerly serve his agenda-building for war. And the process also induced vast numbers of artists and performers (probably even some in this room tonight) to keep quiet and facilitate the push for an invasion in Iraq.

He's certainly come a long way from "Hey bud...let's party" hasn't he? Of course, on the flipside, someone should have cautioned the seemingly stoned recipient that people on drugs should not give speeches. Alas, Spicoli...er, I mean Penn was just getting warmed up:

Why isn't Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, who first broke the "fauxtography" scandal out of Lebanon, among Time's "digital democracy" change agents?

After looking at the weak collection of candidates available to vote for as Time's Person of the Year last week (based on what they did in 2006, which wasn't much), I wrote:

Perhaps YouTube, online forums, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and online media should be the Thing of the Year: The Shadow Media. Of course, Time would be writing about its own likely eventual demise, but it would fit.

That's essentially what Time has done in its mostly (in my opinion) good decision to name "You" as Person of the Year:

..... for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

Time named as "You" everyone trying to influence the world just a bit from their keyboard. That would include, to a miniscule degree, yours truly, and, again of course, many people who are reading this post.

Oh-so-predictably, two of the three "hard-news" members of the magazine's "15 citizens of the digital democracy" are influencers from the left side; none are from the right -- sorry, libs, a milblogger is not presumptively "conservative" (direct links may not work unless you have already visited Time's web site):

The following is an op-ed of a previously posted issue.

Imagine for a moment that a sex scandal involving pages had forced a Democrat Congressman holding a safe seat to resign in disgrace weeks before crucial midterm elections, while also reflecting badly on other members of his Party in tight races across the country. A month after the votes had been tallied, and the Democrats had surrendered control of both chambers of Congress in a stunning defeat, a House ethics panel released a report on the subject containing the following information:

• The leaks to the press concerning this matter had come from the communications director for the House Republican Caucus 
• A high-ranking staff member for the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee had been informed of the misdeeds of the Democrat Congressman almost twelve months before they were revealed by the press

Now assume that this head of the NRCC had declared four weeks prior to Election Day that nobody in his office was aware of the Democrat Congressman’s sexual indiscretions before they were revealed. Would the contradictory findings of this panel be headline news the day they were reported?

The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct released its report concerning the Mark Foley page scandal on Friday, and the media banged the predictable drum about this all being a Republican cover-up. However, what was ignored or downplayed by virtually every press outlet was the revelation that the offensive e-mail messages between Foley and male pages were leaked to the media by the communications director for the House Democratic Caucus. Also absent from such reports was the possibility that high-ranking Democrat Rahm Emanuel of Illinois might have been aware of these electronic transmissions even though he told ABC News on October 8 that he hadn’t heard anything about them until the story broke (video available here, hat tip to Gateway Pundit).

One of the only media outlets that did report this was Newsweek at the blog of reporter Holly Bailey (emphasis mine throughout):

How much did Rahm Emanuel know about disgraced Rep. Mark Foley's e-mails to a former House page? In an Oct. 8 interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Emanuel, a Democratic congressman from Illinois, was asked if he or his staff knew anything about the e-mails or instant messages between Foley and former pages "before they came out." "No - Never saw them," Emanuel said. Asked if he was "aware of them," Emanuel repeated, "We never saw them. No involvement." But on page 46 of the new House Ethics Committee report on the scandal is testimony that at least one senior member of Emanuel's staff did know about them.

Bailey's blog incredibly continued:

One of the maddening things about the Mark Foley scandal is how the media can take one congressman’s creepy Internet messages about masturbating, declare it an issue in 468 congressional races, demand the head of the Speaker of the House, and then decry other people for ruining democracy with desperate negative ads that besmirch honest public servants. It’s exactly how Michael Grunwald’s Washington Post story on Friday began, with the Republican opponent to Rep. Ron Kind (who represents my dear old home town of Viroqua, Wisconsin) mocking his backing of federal sex studies. Grunwald and the Post predictably summarize, with typical spit and polish, the DNC talking points of the day, that it's the GOP that wins the prize for negativity:

As NewsBusters reported Friday, some rather steamy sex scenes are depicted in the novels of the Democrat challenger to Sen. George Allen (R-Virginia), Jim Webb. In NB’s report, the question was raised as to how the media would handle these revelations. An article posted at CNN’s website likely gives us a clue. In fact, you can tell the slant of the story just from the headline, “Webb on sex passage recital: 'It's smear after smear.’”

What followed came straight from the liberal media playbook. First, you need to give the offended Democrat an extraordinary amount of print-space to explain his or her position, and allow the “victim” to blame the attacks on the vast ring-wing conspiracy. Second, you need to discredit the offending Republican. Third, you need to give examples of other Republicans doing exactly what the Democrat is accused of doing.

With that in mind, step one was accomplished thusly:

Back on October 6, Katie Couric promised that the Mark Foley scandal “is not going away.” And just under two weeks later, on Thursday night, she did her part to keep it alive by leading the CBS Evening News with six minutes on it, starting with salacious descriptions of the teenage Mark Foley's alleged sexual activity with a Catholic priest. Couric offered a warning to viewers as she hyped the supposed importance of the priest's recollections: “A stunning development tonight in the congressional page scandal, and you may not want your young children to hear the story we're about to tell. The priest Mark Foley accused of molesting him as a child has come forward. Now retired, the priest admits that he and Foley, then barely a teenager, were naked together in a sauna, but he says, quote, 'Everybody does that.'”

Via phone, Couric talked earlier in the day to the priest in Malta. Citing a Sarasota Herald-Tribune article, Couric inquired: "According to this newspaper account, it also says that you massaged him when he was naked, and you were naked in the same room on overnight trips." Father Anthony Mercieca replied: "He'll stay with his towel on and go on the bench and I will massage his neck and his back." Couric remarked that “this was probably the weirdest interview I've ever done” -- raising the unanswered question of why she considered the 72-year-old's memories of back massages the lead story of the day -- before moving on to Gloria Borger for a full story on testimony before the ethics committee.