Rendell's remark about Napolitano not as bad as what she's done

Wonder why, in a survey reported by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, only 28 percent said they "believed all or most" of what they see on CNN?

CNN's Campbell Brown took three minutes of prime evening news time the other night to berate Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell for remarks, unwittingly made next to a live microphone, that in Brown's view were sexist.

Speaking in what he thought was a private conversation, Rendell called the selection of Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano to head the Department of Homeland Security perfect "because for that job, you have to have no life. Janet has no family. Perfect. She can devote 19, 20 hours a day to it."

Brown ticked down her list of outrages. Would Rendell have said this if she were a man? How many women don't get hired because they have families? Do single women get disproportionately stuck with the more "burdensome shifts"? etc., etc.

Unless you're looking for something, it's pretty hard to see anything derogatory or malicious in Rendell's remarks, and, as his press secretary noted, he could have just as easily been talking about a man.

If Brown was actually interested in facts, she could have reported that Napolitano described herself, in a story in the Arizona Republic a couple years ago, as "just a straight, single workaholic."

Ms. Brown's journalism, of course, is really an agenda looking for a news hook.

She concluded her three-minute lecture, putting fellow liberal Rendell on notice that "Your comments perpetuate stereotypes."

Now if we think back to the fall of 1991, we, and Campbell Brown, might recall some real character assassination and exploitation of stereotypes, in which Janet Napolitano played a lead role. That was when she was Anita Hill's attorney in the campaign to slander Clarence Thomas with sexual harassment allegations and derail his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Central to this campaign was a strategy to build off and exploit the worst stereotypes of black men as sexual predators.

The irregularities that made the circus possible are a national embarrassment. It is doubtful that it would even have seen the light of day had Anita Hill's supposedly confidential statement not been illegally leaked from someone on the Senate Judiciary Committee to the press.