You would think that in a tough economy with 9.1 percent of the population unemployed and most people seeing continued decreases in the value of their homes the revelation of a political leader experiencing a massive rise in her net worth would be newsworthy.
Apparently not, for the following report about former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) stunning one year financial windfall published by the Hill at 12:46 PM Wednesday received almost no interest from so-called "news" outlets from coast to coast:
Pelosi was worth at least $35.2 million in the 2010 calendar year, according to a financial disclosure report released Wednesday. She reported a minimum of $43.4 million in assets and about $8.2 milion in liabilities.
For 2009, Pelosi reported a minimum net worth of $21.7 million.
In this kind of economy with so many people struggling to make ends meet, such a story should have garnered a great deal of attention.
Yet, despite this being prominently featured at the top of the Drudge Report shortly after the Hill published it, America's media collectively yawned.
On television, the only report on this subject according to LexisNexis was done by Fox News's Sean Hannity Wednesday evening with guest Michelle Malkin.
The on air news divisions of ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and PBS completely ignored this stunning revelation Wednesday.
I could also identify not one wire service report on the subject although the Associated Press did publish the following:
New House Speaker John Boehner doesn't have as many millions as his predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, but like many new committee chairmen and other leaders, he has holdings in companies that have major financial stakes in the actions of Congress.
For Boehner, that includes a portfolio of stocks in oil companies, financial firms, communication companies and pharmaceuticals. Holdings among other lawmakers include farmland, real estate and investments in high tech companies.
When the Pelosis' assets were revealed, the AP chose not to divulge how much they had increased by:
Former Speaker Pelosi, D-Calif., now the House's minority leader, also makes the perennial lists of Congress's richest. Much of her family's wealth is listed to her husband, Paul, including a commercial property in San Francisco valued between $5 million and $25 million. She reports as assets joint ownership with her husband of a home and vineyard in St. Helena, Calif., valued at between $5 million and $25 million. She's also a limited partner in residential real estate in Sacramento in the $5 million-$25 million range.
Her husband reported capital gains of $1 million to $5 million last year from a sale of stock in Apple Inc.
As for print media, they too were curiously disinterested in Pelosi's windfall. Most of the major papers skipped this news with the Washington Post doing the same thing as AP.
Despite divulging what Pelosi's assets were at the end of 2010, the Post chose not to inform readers how much of an increase this represented from 2009:
As she wound down her final days as House speaker, the estate of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her husband in the Napa Valley bore financial fruit for the couple, literally. The estate, worth at least $5 million, provided the Pelosis at least $5,000 worth of grape sales from the vineyard, according to financial disclosure forms for 2010.
Now House minority leader, Pelosi and her husband, Paul, a San Francisco real-estate magnate and financial investor, are worth a minimum of $42 million with holdings spread across property investments in northern California and a litany of Fortune 500 companies, particularly regionally-based high-tech companies such as Yahoo! and EBay.
I guess the Post didn't feel it was important to inform readers this represented a staggering 62 percent increase in one year.
From what I can tell, other than Fox, Drudge, the Hill, conservative talk radio hosts and bloggers, the only major news outlet that found Pelosi's windfall important was Politico:
A broad look at congressional disclosures shows that lawmakers enjoyed major gains in the stock market, which posted sharp increases last year. Others enjoyed a bump in the value of their real estate holdings, especially on the two coasts, where housing prices generally were more stable than in other regions. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), for example, saw her minimum net worth soar from $21 million to more than $35 million.
As for the rest of the media, it appears that a Democrat Speaker of the House seeing her net worth increase by 62 percent in one year as the rest of the nation struggled to make ends meet is just not newsworthy.
Somehow I doubt that would have been the case if she had an "R" next to her name.
Readers are advised that Fox News and MSNBC don't provide transcripts for all their broadcasts making it possible that other reports were done on this issue.
