Filthy Bob Filner Sentenced to Three Months of House Arrest and Three Years Probation

He'll spend the next three months groping himself.

AP doesn't mention Filner's partisan affiliation until the very last paragraph:

Filner was elected San Diego’s first Democratic mayor in 20 years, promising to put neglected neighborhoods ahead of entrenched downtown business interests. Two city councilmen seeking to replace him in a special election runoff — Republican Kevin Faulconer and Democrat David Alvarez — have embraced Filner’s neighborhoods-first mantra while scarcely mentioning the former mayor by name.

That's a New York Daily News version of the AP story. To make sure NYDN didn't edit out an earlier mention of Filner's party affiliation from the original story AP filed, I checked the version of the story in Politico: It appears to be the exact same story.

Not only does AP withhold from the reader that Filner is a Democrat until the very last paragraph, they completely withhold the fact that Filner was a Congressman serving in Washington, DC, for twenty years, and that many of these incidents of harassment occurred during his Congressional service. The way AP writes the story, it is suggested that Filner was nothing but a purely local politician -- Local Crime Story, yo -- who only rose to some kind of minor prominence this past January, when he began serving as a mayor in an out-of-the-way little backwater.

As far as the slap-on-the-wrist nature of the sentencing: I don't know if this is really a slap-on-the-wrist. I'm not sure people serve hard time, or should serve hard time, for this kind of thing.

Thanks to @rdbrewer4.

posted by Ace at 02:09 PM

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