Disgraced former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (D) is back in the news today with fresh federal convictions on corruption charges.
Reporting the story on its website, CNN failed to note the corrupt politician's party affiliation. The same is true of a "breaking news" email alert that it sent to subscribers (see screen grab below page break).
For its part, the Associated Press did mention that Kilpatrick is a Democrat, although it buried that fact in the penultimate paragraph of its 17-paragraph story at Bigstory.AP.org. The New York Times was slightly better, waiting eight paragraphs into its 17-paragraph story:
Elected mayor of Detroit in 2001, the youngest person, at 31, to hold that position in the city’s history, Mr. Kilpatrick was seen by many as a future star of the Democratic Party, destined to lift Detroit out of economic hardship and then rise himself through the ranks of national politics.
But his tenure as mayor was plagued by scandal, his career cut short. He was soon fighting rumors about partying, questions about the use of city money to lease a luxury vehicle for his wife, and claims that he fired police officers for investigating his sizeable staff of bodyguards.
AP explained that Kilpatrick was convicted of two dozen separate charges after prosecutors convinced a jury that:
Kilpatrick ran a "private profit machine" out of Detroit's City Hall. The government presented evidence to show he got a share of the spoils after ensuring that Bobby Ferguson's excavating company was awarded millions in work from the water department.
