Newspapers afraid to print Ryan's party affiliation

Josh Marshall reports that newspapers are reluctant to say that convicted felon George Ryan is a Republican:

As we mentioned earlier, the AP really, really didn't seem to want to mention that George Ryan, the former Illinois governor convicted of corruption today, is a Republican. The AP waited until the very end of the article to note that Ryan is from the GOP.

Time never got around to mentioning it. ... While failing to mention the party affiliation of the guy who got indicted, they did manage to have this as the second sentence of the article ...

On Monday, former Governor George Ryan, 72, became the third of the state's last six governors to be convicted of political misdeeds, and the current administration of Democrat Rod Blagojevich is also being investigated.

It's almost a tour de force of party ID bamboozlement.

Our home-town paper, the Chicago Tribune, identified him as "the Kankakee Republican" in the sixth paragraph.

It's just like Rush says: liberal press bias.