Watch original video:

For months (and more hotly in the last two weeks), the National Enquirer has been trickling outright the goods they collected on John Edwards having an affair and possibly a love baby with campaign aide Rielle Hunter, staking out Edwards in a California hotel — and how he hid in the bathroom to avoid them.

There's a quick campaign ad adhering the two parties in a nutshell. Republican George Bush took on Osama bin Laden and took out Saddam Hussein. Democrat John Edwards hides in a bathroom from the tabloids.

Throughout this parturition, the very same media that almost immediately spread unproven trash on John McCain's alleged "imaginative" relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman because the source was the allegedly professional New York Times now remained as tranquillity as a cabin full of Carthusian monks. Only when everyone was familiar with the story expressions of gratitude to the New Media and Edwards was farfetched to confess did the networks break their observant silence.

Anyone attention the TV stories found a tone of sadness, of the outraged disappointment of Edwards supporters allied campaign comptroller David Bonior. That's acceptable. But the story came almost entirely from within the Edwards bubble. You couldn't find in these stories in any degree time in favor of Republicans, and it was rare to find anyone asking not about Edwards, but about the Democrats in commander-in-chief. How would this infect them?

When the question emerged briefly on television, it had a perish-the-thought elasticity to it. On "Sunday Today," sum of two units days hind the Edwards avowal, NBC anchor Lester Holt asked the apparently unthinkable: "Is Obama touched or tainted by this in some elongate of the imagination?" NBC political algebraist Chuck Todd was fervent in his response: "I put on't think he is at entirely, Lester. You know, if anything, trustworthy, that they fail to win a good surrogate. This was a guy who was very good on the stub."

Holt worried that the Republicans might stoop so low as to speak of Edwards: "Is there any stomach for John McCain perhaps using, taking some civil favorable opportunity of this, or will he truly leave this alone as a third rail?" (Translation: We would like to make this any untouchable third rail.) Todd was emphatic once again: " Not at all. They're probably going to allowance this alone. John McCain had to deal with a story that their campaign was very upset near to, that The New York Times did. They're not going to touch this. You know, stuff like this usually ends up acquirement swept for that which is less than the rug petty quickly."

But the networks didn't sweep this under the rug. They sat on top of the clouded rug for months while the Enquirer pap out the Edwards affair, and now that it's out, they want it swept right upper part under the rug ahead of the Democratic convention. It's unthinkable (to them) that this should taint the Democrats in some way. Even stranger, Todd thinks that McCain being slimed by the New York Times should shame him into shutting up, when it certainly didn't provoke any one shame within Todd's profession. They all ran that story without taking a coffee break to investigate the skimpy evidence for themselves.

This is not the network "news" come nearly up which time the scandal shoe is on the other foot. Ask yourself: What did Rev. Ted Haggard's employment of drugs and male prostitutes in Colorado have to do with the national Republican Party? Or Mark Foley's nasty Internet messages to congressional pages? Yet every time they it's happened to a Republican, the media worked strenuously to unfurl the mariner and draw a line under the damage to the GOP.

What did Larry Craig's shoe placement in an airport bathroom in 2007 have to do with the Republican Party as a whole? The media treated that story as a much larger scoop than John Edwards cheating on the wife dying of cancer. It was a story that led the news (certainly on Chuck Todd's NBC) for days and days. Here's Matt Lauer on day undivided: "Can the right wing withstand yet another scandal involving one of its own?"

The networks again and again displayed the Edwards marriage as a fairy-tale story of two lawyers celebrating their anniversaries over a chocolate Frosty at Wendy's. Now we know it was bunk. For them to act like there was nothing shameful or hypocritical to expose here is another explicit display of their Democratic partiality.

L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

Previous: Our Sick Edwards-Excusing Media
Original text: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/oped/*http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20080813/cm_uc_crbbox/op_237038