NewsBusters detects the pungent scent of media bias and hypocrisy in the differing ways in which Gerry Studds, who passed away last Friday, and Mark Foley have been treated. Studds, you will recall, was the Massachussetts congressman who was caught having a sexual affair with a 17 year-old male page back in the 1970s. Foley was the Florida congressman who was recently found to be conducting a lewd instant message correspondence with a 17 year-old male page. Studds was then, and is now, treated with respect and deference by the media and congressional Democrats like John Kerry (see here). Foley is treated with contempt and contumely. Why the difference between how they are treated? Evidently it's that Studds was a Democrat and Foley was a Republican.
Foley's "lapse in judgment" was not his decision to carry on an improper dialogue with a 17 year old boy, it was, presumably, his decision to run for office as a Republican. If he had been a Democrat we would doubtless be inundated by the media with articles deploring how the poor man, a devoted public servant, had been hounded out of office by the prudes and homophobes in the Religious Right and the Republican leadership.
