Topic: NewsBusters
Tim Graham takes time out from Heathering David Brooks to draw a false equivalence between sex scandals in an Oct. 17 NewsBusters post. In it, he complains that the sex scandal involving Democratic Florida Rep. Tim Mahoney has received only a fraction of the media coverage of the sex scandal of the man he replaced, Republican Mark Foley. But Graham downplays Foley's offenses and pretends both scandals are the same.
Graham states Foley's offense only as "sending sexual Internet messages to Congressional pages." He fails to acknowledge -- even though he reprints a 2006 transcript pointing it out -- that there was a larger issue of Foley's history of behavior toward the (teenage male) pages and whether House Republican leadership knew about it and did anything to stop it, which ratchets up the scandal quotient.
Mahoney, meanwhile, is caught in the arguably dime-a-dozen scandal of paying off a (female adult) mistress who threatened to go public about the affair and of apparent involvement involvement in multiple other affairs. Sleazy? Sure. But not as sleazy as cruising for teenage boys and the Repubican leadership trying to cover it up.
If you'll recall, Graham's fellow MRC employees at NewsBusters and CNSNews.com endeavored to distract their readers from the Foley scandal in 2006.
