US News
ANALYSIS: Bathroom bust of senator dominates US media
By Andy Goldberg
Sep 1, 2007, 2:14 GMT

Los Angeles For American parents, these are great times to keep their kids away from the news on television.

Many are confronting this question: How to explain the top news story of the late summer, a sleazy tale of homosexual cruising involving a tainted Republican senator, a men's airport bathroom and a police sting operation?

Details of Senator Larry Craig's unsavoury episode are dominating US news programmes, newspapers and websites - the latest in a long line of political sex scandals that perhaps reflect as badly on the society that focuses on them as they do on the hypocritical leaders who indulge in them.

About the only thing missing in the Larry Craig story was a video of the actual incident, in which Craig, a veteran senator representing the devoutly Republican state of Idaho, is alleged to have solicited an undercover male police officer in a Minneapolis airport bathroom.

But there was the cringe-inducing audio tape of Craig's interrogation, endlessly replayed on cable news shows with the evasive answers, unconvincing denials and incredulity of the arresting officer about the senator he had caught in his net.

'I was watching the news yesterday and my 10-year-old daughter walks in as they're playing the tape,' recalls Charlie Powell, a bank manager in San Francisco. 'She wanted to know what was going on and I had no idea what to tell her.'

Parents of slightly older children could probably help him out with evasion strategies from the good-old days of the Monica Lewinsky affair, or the more recent scandal when another high-ranking Republican politician, Congressman Mark Foley, was found to have had inappropriate contacts with the young male pages who function as errand boys in the halls of Congress.

Foley was forced to resign.

Craig plead guilty earlier in August to a charge of disorderly conduct and had a more serious peeping-tom charge dropped. He had kept the incident secret from his family and friends since June, when he was arrested.

He now claims to have been mistaken in his plea, but Republican leaders are still pressing him to resign. He was expected to do so in an announcement Saturday afternoon.

At the same time, Republican activists are complaining that the round-the-clock coverage is just another example of the media's anti- Republican bias.

After Today show host Matt Lauer prefaced former House leader Tom DeLay's Thursday morning appearance on the NBC programme by reciting a litany of recent Republican problems, the rightwing firebrand shot back.

'I hate to say this Matt, but you just showed the problem, the double standard, and you just participated in it. You listed a whole lot of scandals that involve the Republicans, but you didn't mention one Democrat? The Democrats re-elect the people with their problems. Republicans kick them out,' said DeLay.

Delay stepped down from Congress in 2006 after being indicted in a campaign-finance and influence-peddling probe.

Conservative columnist Linda Chavez said she felt Craig's political career was 'probably over,' but she also blamed the media.

'The abuse of power ... was not Senator Craig's but the media's, who pick and choose whose privacy they will violate on a partisan basis,' she said.

In fact, the media is equally avaricious in their scramble for sleazy details when Democrats are involved - like former president Bill Clinton, a Democrat, in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and when former New Jersey governor James McGreevey, a Democrat, resigned and announced he was gay, all in one fell swoop, in 2004.

Craig has admitted that he used poor judgement in pleading guilty to the charges, not consulting a lawyer and keeping the incident from his family and friends for months, until the story was broken earlier this week by a Capital Hill newspaper, Roll Call.

He blamed his poor judgement on the Idaho Statesman - his state's newspaper of record - for an eight-month investigation of previous allegations about Craig's conduct. He said the investigation had made him nervous and put him under pressure.

Craig has opposed expanding rights for homosexuals in the work force and marriage front, and even advocated a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.

The Statesman refrained from publishing a story because its sources lacked credibility or were insisting on anonymity - until the story about his guilty pleas broke Monday in Roll Call.

'We worked hard and behaved responsibly, not publishing a story until it was ready,' said managing editor Bill Manny. 'We didn't print anything until the senator pleaded guilty.'