CNN Identifies Arrested NJ Mayor as Democrat on 18th Paragraph

Tony Mack (pictured above), the Democratic mayor of Trenton, New Jersey, was arrested Monday by the FBI on numerous charges of bribery. If you read CNN’s story on this scandal, you wouldn’t discover that Mack is a Democrat until the very end of the story. Here are the two first paragraphs:

The mayor of New Jersey’s capital city was arrested on Monday on corruption charges for allegedly accepting bribes during an undercover sting operation, FBI and court records showed.

Trenton Mayor Tony Mack, 46, his brother, Ralphiel Mack, 39, and business associate Joseph A. “JoJo” Giorgianni, 63, faced charges in connection with an alleged kickback scheme to sell city owned land to investors for well under the assessed value.

Not until the eighteenth paragraph of the nineteen-paragraph article do we learn that the indicted mayor is a Democrat:

A Democrat who began his term in July 2010, Mack has been beleaguered by questions about public finance and accusations of cronyism.

Last May, his deputy mayor, Paul Sigmund IV, was arrested and charged with heroin possession and assaulting a police officer, which led to Sigmund’s prompt resignation.

Previous CNN reporting on political scandals involving Republicans rarely failed to mention party affiliation. Perhaps the most blatant example of CNN’s “selective” reporting on party affiliation was this article published last year when former Congressman Mark Foley commented on the Congressman Anthony Weiner scandal. CNN  noted that Foley is a Republican — a “disgraced” one, at that — but failed to mention that Weiner is a Democrat:

Disgraced former Republican Rep. Mark Foley suggested Thursday that embattled Rep. Anthony Weiner might be better served if he left Congress.

Foley resigned from Congress in 2006 after sexually explicit emails to teenage congressional pages he sent were exposed. In his first nationally televised interview since the scandal, the former Florida congressman lent advice to Weiner, who admitted engaging in inappropriate online activity with women outside his marriage after initially denying the accusations.