Last week, we mentioned the story of Norman Hsu, would-be Clinton campaign "Hillraiser" and fugitive from justice. The Los Angeles Times broke the story on Hsu's "wanted-man" status, and in so doing, touched off a flurry of returned or regifted campaign donations. At the time, we couldn't help but notice how easy the Times was on Hillary Clinton (easy enough that her campaign, while agreeing to donate the monies Hsu directly contributed to her campaign, will nevertheless keep the money generated by Hsu through third parties, even though it was the sketchy way Hsu seemed to wring ducats from the ducatless that engendered the initial report on his activities in the Wall Street Journal), but, as it turns out, the media may have been going even easier on another presidential contender.
In Tuesday's "Backtalk" with the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, a questioner from "Riverdale, NY" asks the question:
All those stories on NBC, CNN etc about one sleazy illegal contributor to Hillary's campaign, i.e. this Hsu fellow, but hardly a peep by your "fair and balanced" friends about the frickin' financial honcho for Romney, a Mr. [Alan B.] Fabian, being indicted for fraud! Which is the bigger story, or don't they teach proportionality in journalism school anymore?
Kurtz's initial response is to aver, "I don't know what Fabian's relationship with Romney was." Indeed, how could he? His own paper would have had to, say...reported on it! But, even in the article cited in "Backtalk" for reference (and, I suppose, to get the Post off the hook), Fabian is connected to Michael Steele and Robert Ehrlich, but no mention of Romney is made, other than to note "Fabian has also been a prolific donor to Republicans nationally."
In fact, the cited article comes from the Post's "Annapolis Notebook," which I imagine generates a ton of national attention. In a search of the Post's website, Fabian is mentioned in just two other places: a chat with the Post's John Solomon and a brief in the D section which reports on Fabian's fraud conviction with no mention of Romney at all.
Solomon's chat response, by the way, is stunningly brazen in the way it ignores the interlocutor's question entirely: Called on the carpet for not reporting on Fabian, Solomon posts a link to an article and responds by saying:
Actually, my colleague Matt Mosk and I reported on the Romney matter and included the following passage in our draft of the Monday story. "Likewise, Republican Mitt Romney faced questions about one of his Utah finance chairmen, Robert Lichfield, because of lawsuits he is facing alleging abusive treatment at boarding schools he founded to handle troubled youths." Unfortunately, it was edited out.
Wow. He's haughty. Then he offers a quote that mentions another person entirely. Then he passes on the blame to his editors! That's got to be the trifecta, right there! Count it! Swish!
By the way, if you are keeping score at home, a similar search of the Post for Norman Hsu yields 23 hits--and all but two of them connect Hsu to Clinton. So, "Riverdale, NY" is correct to note the lack of proportion the way these two fundraisers have been treated in the press, at least where the Post is concerned: the New York Times and the Boston Globe made the connection between Fabian and Romney, though neither have covered Fabian as much as Hsu, either.
Of course, the media's been notoriously light on Romney all year. In the wake of the Larry Craig fiasco, Romney was able to publicly act as if he'd never heard of the man, despite the fact that Craig was his campaign's "Senate liaison." Earlier this summer, Romney praised the health-care policies of Hezbollah, of all people, and suffered no lingering side-effects for his comments. It's hardly a stretch to imagine the apoplexy that, say, Barack Obama would have inspired, had he run to the left of Michael Moore in this fashion.
Of course, most notably, the press has lingered long over the meal served to them when Democratic candidate John Edwards got himself a pricey haircut, more or less ignoring the money Romney sets aside for his own cosmetological needs. We're not at all sure what the prevailing logic there is, but we gather that if Edwards were to have the decency to evince a studied disregard for the plight of the poor, the media would allow him to inject freshly harvested stem cells right into his crow's-feet.
Related:Media Backtalk (9/4/2007) [Washington Post]
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