This week, former New York Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver was sentenced to six and a half years in prison on corruption charges. For those unfamiliar with the Silver, he was a Democratic Party kingmaker in New York for many years, serving as speaker for 20 — from Mario Cuomo to Andrew Cuomo — before being automatically expelled over a felony conviction. Silver, in fact, had gotten unanimous support from Democrats for his eleventh term as speaker in 2015, even as a federal probe was ongoing. It’s long been an open secret that Silver was crooked. Then again, New York politics is a den of corruption, and one party has been running the state more or less forever. Yet, despite all of this, not once does the Associated Press piece about Silver that ran in major outlets across the country use the word “Democrat” or the phrase “Democratic Party.”
I only bring this up because on the same day I read another Associated Press piece about another corrupt House speaker. Larry Householder of Ohio was arrested this week on federal bribery probe that sounds very much like the Silver case. His partisan affiliation, though, was mentioned more than once. This kind of coverage disparity isn’t a huge deal — if the partisan affiliation isn’t cited, we can simply assume the person is a Democrat — but it happens often enough that it’s difficult to believe it’s merely happenstance.