On Thursday night, Fox News anchor Bret Baier filed a short item on wealthy gay California Democrat mega-donor Ed Buck being sentenced to 30 years in prison for the methamphetamine overdose deaths of two black men. ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS broadcasts haven't touched it. Buck had donated $500,000 to mostly Democratic causes since 2000.
On Thursday, Bret Baier of Fox News offered a news brief (and only a brief) on wealthy gay Democrat donor Ed Buck being sentenced to 30 years in prison for killing two male prostitutes with overdoses of methamphetamine.
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) April 16, 2022
ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS did not. pic.twitter.com/cF0pFNRsRy
This story was on the front page of the Los Angeles Times on Friday, but the networks were absent on the story, just as they were when Buck was convicted in July of 2021. You can find the story online at the network news sites. They are much more detailed that Baier's anodyne brief.
Remember the laughable notion that "our only bias is in favor of a good story" when you check out the Times story:
Ed Buck, once a fixture of West Hollywood's political scene, was sentenced Thursday to 30 years in prison for drug and sex crimes that included providing lethal doses of methamphetamine to two men.
To the outside world, Buck was a champion of causes such as fur bans and AIDS awareness, and a donor to Democratic officeholders.
But behind the walls of his Laurel Avenue apartment was a nightmare. For nearly a decade, the wealthy, white Buck lured young Black men at the lowest points in their lives -- homeless, addicted, resorting to subsistence-level sex work -- into what he called "party and play" sessions.
Amid squalor that belied his reputation as a man who had achieved great wealth at a young age, Buck plied the men with drugs and then sexually assaulted them while they were unconscious or immobile. In two cases, he injected his victims with fatal amounts of methamphetamine....
Drug abuse was at the heart of Buck's sexual behavior, according to testimony and evidence presented at his 2021 trial, which opened a window into a dark subculture of Los Angeles' gay community.
Buck moved in a world steeped in drugs and defined by power imbalances between the solicitors of sex and the often destitute men who supply it. He advertised on Adam4Adam, a gay hookup site, that he was interested in "party and play" sessions, widely known to mean using methamphetamine during sex.
A parade of men testified that Buck would offer them extra money if they "slammed," or allowed him to inject them with the drug. In what prosecutors called a "carrot-and-stick approach," he would sometimes withhold payment if they didn't smoke enough methamphetamine or let him inject them.
In his squalid apartment, which was littered with drug paraphernalia and sex toys, Buck treated the men "like lab rats in his twisted experiments," Assistant U.S. Atty. Chelsea Norell wrote in a sentencing memo.
He drugged them to the limit of their bodies' tolerance; once they were unconscious or immobile, he sexually assaulted them, choked them, slapped them. One man, injected with something that left him unable to move, managed to regain control of his body only when Buck revved a chain saw in front of him, sending adrenaline coursing.
Buck at times referred to Black men using the N-word, witnesses testified at trial. Two men died in Buck's apartment, their bodies found in near-identical circumstances.
Yeah, no saucy news hook there...
