Detroit's former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted Monday on multiple serious charges, including racketeering, fraud, and extortion. But Times reporter Mary Chapman buried Kilpatrick's Democratic party affiliation in paragraph 19 of her 21-paragraph report.
Even then, the Times never even directly labeled Kilpatrick a Democrat:
The convictions culminate a long fall for Mr. Kilpatrick, who had been elected mayor at 31, the youngest person to hold that position. He had been viewed by many as a future star in the Democratic Party. But his tenure, from 2002 to 2008, was marked by scandal and queries into possible misuse of city finances. In 2008, text messages were discovered by The Detroit Free Press that revealed an affair with his chief of staff. Mr. Kilpatrick resigned after being charged with perjury and obstruction of jusice.
It's not that the paper is immune to labeling local politicians. A related front-page story on Detroit's long-standing dire financial woes mentioned Kilpatrick in passing, without a party label, but found labels for the current Detroit mayor (Democrat) and the governor of the state (Republican):
By late 2011, a sense of crisis descended on Detroit. In November, Mayor Bing, a Democrat, addressed the city on live television, warning that Detroit would run out of money without concessions from unions, layoffs and privatization. A month later, Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, called for a review of Detroit’s finances, a first step in cases where the state is preparing to send an emergency financial manager.
The Times has ignored Kilpatrick's Democratic party identification before – yet tends to readily identify Republicans caught up in scandals.
