When Fox commits journalism

CNN continues its slide into Republican-sanitizing irrelevance. Its politics front page looks like:

Newt Gingrich's "fiery rebuttal" of second wife Marianne's allegation that Newt wanted an open marriage floats way up high, but the allegation itself is waaay down in the inverted pyramid, and the so-called rebuttal article doesn't even link to it, despite linking to everything else.

CNN also fuzzes the soft-focus edges of Mitt Romney's biography. Romney has family in Mexico - hey, maybe those displaced blonde gringos will help Mitt with voters whose primos would have to climb over Mitt's wall.

Why are there Romneys south of the border?

Mitt Romney’s great-grandfather led the first group of Mormons to the state of Chihuahua to flee religious persecution.

 The so-called persecution they fled was American laws against bigamy! But you won't hear that from CNN.

Nope, CNN readers need Fox to fill in the details:

Romney's father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, where Mormons fled in the 1800s to escape religious persecution and U.S. laws forbidding polygamy. He and his family did not return to the United States until 1912, more than two decades after the church issued "The Manifesto" banning polygamy.

"When you read the family's history, you realize how important polygamy was to them," said Todd Compton, a Mormon and independent historian who wrote a book about the polygamous life of the church's founder, Joseph Smith. "They left America and started again as pioneers, after they had done it over and over again previously."

Of course, the AP did that reporting in 2007, and Fox only published it then, when they were anti-Romney. Report honestly on everyone? Na ga happ'n.

Even so, you'd think CNN would be embarrassed by it obvious glossing over of known facts. But no...