The WebNewser Anonymous Tips e-mail box unearthed an interesting nugget in the form of The CNN Report: An Investigation of CNN for the Omission of the Democratic Party Affiliation.

The 30-page PDF file, hosted by Website Fire Susan Roesgen of CNN, aims to prove that CNN.com treats scandal-ridden politicians differently depending on party affiliation. According to its author or authors, CNN.com mentions politicians' Republican affiliations at several points during its stories, but goes out of its way to hide politicians' Democratic affiliations.

The CNN Report chose 10 politicians to focus on, splitting them evenly among Democrats and Republicans.

The five Democrats chosen were former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey and former Rep. John Edwards (N.C.).

The lucky Republicans were former Sen. Larry Craig (Idaho), former Sen. Ted Stevens (Alaska), former Rep. Mark Foley (Fla.), former Rep. Rick Renzi (Arizona) and former Rep. Bob Ney (Ohio).

The CNN Report abstract reads (unedited):

TEN politicians with a history of scandals and/or wrongdoings were selected for this study. FIVE of these politicians are REPUBLICANS. FIVE of these politicians are DEMOCRATS. Politicians were chosen depending on the depth of the scandal. Once the list of politicians was created, searches were conducted using CNN's search engine online at http://www.cnn.com. The "CNN NEWS" category was selected during these searches to limit all results that were published exclusively at the website of CNN. All articles that center around that certain politicians were pulled aside and noted. Each article was then analyzed to determine how and where POLITICAL AFFILIATION was mentioned. A total of 117 articles were analyzed on CNN.