Nicolle Wallace, former Communications Director for President Bush and current co-host of the View, appeared on the syndicated show Wendy on Wednesday to talk about her new gig as well as her career in Republican politics. During the interview, Wallace, who spends much of her time criticizing her fellow Republicans, endorsed the idea of Hillary Clinton running for president in 2016. The former Bush staffer declared that she was a “huge fan of the idea of a Hillary Clinton candidacy.” 

What’s the difference between a political scandal involving a Republican and one involving a Democrat? When it comes to news coverage, reporters almost always identify the political party of a Republican caught in a scandal, but when the culprit is a Democrat, the party label is usually left out of the story.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but not many. To prove the point, here’s how ABC, CBS and NBC have identified (or failed to identify) the figures in 16 political scandals — 8 Democrats, 8 Republicans — as documented by NewsBusters during the past few years:

Recently ousted New York Times editor Jill Abramson sat down with Katie Couric on Yahoo News Thursday afternoon to discuss her career at the Times, her firing, and her future plans. As expected, Couric wanted to center on the possible notion that Abramson being a female had everything to do with her firing. The former Today show co-host bent over backwards in an attempt to get the former editor to cry “sexism” as the reason for her termination from the newspaper.

“Are these qualities better tolerated in men than women,” Couric asked. “I don’t see gender as being the whole explanation, by any means, of what happened,” Abramson explained.

Eight months before the 2006 midterm election, President Bush made a “surprise” visit to Afghanistan. On the March 1, 2006 edition of the Today show, hosts Katie Couric and Matt Lauer made sure to paint Bush’s visit as a publicity stunt due to his approval rating being at an “all-time low” and the controversy surrounding a bid by a United Arab Emirates-based company to run operations at various U.S. seaports. Couric touted it as an “important symbol.” Kelly O’Donnell cited the visit with all its baggage as a “difficult stretch for the president.”

At the time, the network insisted their viewers be absolutely clear about the president’s approval rating and scandals bedeviling his administration back at home. Not only that, Today's coverage included a guest who argued that it was simply impossible to “divorce how the war is going with the perception of how President Bush is doing as president.”

Two years ago, Katie Couric delivered the commencement address at her alma mater, the University of Virginia.  NewsBusters senior editor Rich Noyes noted at the time that Couric used the occasion to complain about her many critics from her five-year stint as the anchor for the CBS Evening News.

Last Saturday, Couric gave an encore performance of her airing of grievances at a commencement address at American University’s School of Communications. Couric recycled some of her favorite lines about her time at CBS informing students that “critics complained about my clothes, my hair, my make up, my delivery, even the way I held my hands on the anchor desk.”  She followed up with a lament of sexism in the broadcast news business. "Some claimed I lacked gravitas. I decided, that’s Latin for testicles," she quipped.