The mayor of Birmingham is charged with 60 counts of bribery, conspiracy and filing false tax returns, but only one wire service ran his party affiliation (Dem, natch). The AP later included the Dem tag but only when it found a way to include a moral-equivalence slam on President Bush:
So the revised Law of Scandalous Party Identification should read: “The central figure in a political scandal may be identified as a Democrat when such identification is used to repeat unsubstantiated accusations of partisan prosecutorial malice on the part of Republicans, especially President Bush.” AP needs to get that one into the 2009 stylebook.
