Okay, this demands some mention.
As you’ve probably already heard by now, former Gov. George Ryan of Illinois was convicted on all charges today in his long-running federal corruption case.
Ryan’s been out of office since 2003; and he’s become almost as well known for instituting a moratorium on the death penalty in his state as he is for these corruption charges. Some have even suggested that the former was a way to burnish a legacy tainted by the latter.
But in the piece out today from the AP (the source of most newspaper coverage of the story) you have to go all the way down to the bottom of the lengthy article to find out that Ryan is a Republican. And then it comes up only in reference to his declaring the moratorium.
The Times puts it in graf two; Bloomberg is graf three.
I’d say that’s about right. It’s a secondary aspect of the story, not the lede. But it’s also not a tenth order factoid, which is the billing the AP gives it.
I wouldn’t have mentioned this. But it seems like a habit with the AP. Dems get in trouble under their party ID; Republicans seem to do it all by their lonesome.
Needless to say, the data set of the latter is rather larger than the former. But that’s another matter entirely.
