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"It's the kind of shocking, eye-popping thing that attracts everyone," Sabato said of the Foley scandal, "whereas financial scandals ought to attract more attention because they're more common."
Media's Double-Standard
Reid Land Deal Not Sexy Enough For Front Page
~ By Nathan Burchfiel
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
October 17, 2006
(CNSNews.com) - The news that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) failed to disclose a land deal that earned him $700,000 -- three years after he sold the land to a friend's company -- isn't "sexy" enough for front page news, according to one political analyst.
Since the Associated Press reported on Reid's 2004 windfall last week, the power players of printed news have focused largely on the two-week-old sex scandal surrounding former Congressman Mark Foley (R-Fla.).
The AP reported on Oct. 11 that in 2001, Reid sold a piece of land in Nevada to the Patrick Lane Limited Liability Corporation that he created with a business partner. Reid's business partner successfully convinced Nevada officials to rezone the property and sold it in 2004.
Because of his partial ownership of the company, Reid made a $700,000 profit off the sale of the land. Reid didn't report the 2001 sale or his stake in the company on his mandatory financial disclosure report.
After initially refusing to discuss the matter - Reid reportedly hung up on the AP reporter when asked about it - he has since offered to amend his financial disclosures to include the land sales and his ownership stake in the company.
Since the story broke, the Washington Post has mentioned it three times: once in story about the scandal on Oct. 12 and in an unrelated article and an editorial on Oct. 13. The New York Times has mentioned the scandal once in an article on Oct. 12.
During the same time period, the papers have mentioned Foley 37 and 28 times, respectively.
On Sept. 28, ABC News reported that Foley had inappropriate e-mail conversations with underage boys who had taken part in the congressional page program. It was later revealed that Foley also had sexually explicit instant message conversations with boys claiming to be less than 18 years old.
Since Sept. 28, the Washington Post mentioned Foley 115 times, and the New York Times mentioned him 112 times. On Oct. 16 - nearly three weeks after the Foley scandal broke - it was still front page news on the Post.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said there's more focus on the Foley scandal than on Reid because financial scandals are boring when compared with sex scandals.
"It's the kind of shocking, eye-popping thing that attracts everyone," Sabato said of the Foley scandal, "whereas financial scandals ought to attract more attention because they're more common."
Sabato told Cybercast News Service that "most people think every congressman's a pervert," an assumption that he said is "not true."
But while most congressmen have "reasonably normal" sex lives, "dozens and dozens of congressmen and senators in both parties [are] getting wealthy in public offices. I don't think it's supposed to be that way," Sabato said.
Josh Holmes, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, criticized the mainstream media for "saturating the market with a story that's nearly three weeks old while the news of Harry Reid's shady land deal is barely mentioned."
Holmes said it's "awfully tough to justify why unethical profiteering by the Minority Leader of the U.S. Senate isn't good enough to make the newspaper."
In a statement released Monday, Reid said the AP story didn't amount to a scandal. Calling it a "GOP smear campaign," Reid said the story was "highly misleading," because it "implied I made a profit selling land I no longer owned."
While Reid admitted transferring the title to the land to the limited liability corporation in 2001, he said it was a "routine legal move [that] in no way altered my actual ownership of the land."
In the statement, Reid announced that he had ordered his staff to amend earlier financial disclosure forms to include the transfer of title because he is "happy to go beyond what is needed to provide the fullest disclosure."
The land deal is the third time in 2006 that Reid has dodged major backlash over allegedly serious ethics violations.
In February, the AP reported that he accepted donations from lobbyists and clients associated with lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Reid's office called the connections "routine contacts" that "were taken to defend the interests of Nevada constituents," according to the AP.
In May, Reid came under fire for accepting free passes to a boxing event in Nevada while considering legislation that would have affected the Nevada Athletic Commission, which oversees boxing in the state.
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