The other day, I noted that hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons had endorsed Maryland Republican Michael Steele for the U.S. Senate, and that Simmons would be attending a Steele fundraiser in Baltimore. Simmons, as I pointed out, has a substantial political action committee and is said to have helped register hundreds of thousands of voters over the years, many of them African-American, for the Democratic party. And Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who helped run Al Gore’s presidential campaign, has said that Simmons’ endorsement will boost Steele with young voters as well as black voters.
Nonetheless, Kathryn Lopez tells us (and a search of its website confirms) that the Baltimore Sun did not report on the Steele/Simmons event.
But that’s not to say that the Sun isn’t interested in providing its readers with information about Steele. In a recent piece about Steele’s first campaign ad, the Sun made a big point of the fact that the ad “was produced by a firm with close ties to the Bush administration and the Republican National Committee.”
A case can be made, I suppose, that the party affiliation of Steele’s campaign vendors has some slight relevance in a campaign in which Steele is trying to distance himself from the Republican party. But the fact that a significant player in the African-American and Democratic politics has endorsed Steele also seems relevant. Yet the Sun was determined to keep is readers ignorant of that fact.
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