As of 11 a.m. today, a Nexis search for “Norman Hsu AND Clinton” returns 1,252 hits. The nation's leading news organizations provide a substantial portion of those results:

You've heard of Norman Hsu -- why not Robert Lichfield?

As of 11 a.m. today, a Nexis search for “Norman Hsu AND Clinton” returns 1,252 hits. The nation's leading news organizations provide a substantial portion of those results:

The New York Times: 26

Los Angeles Times: 20

The Washington Post: 16

USA Today: 2

Chicago Tribune: 9

The Boston Globe: 8

Associated Press: 47

Newsweek: 2

Time: 1

U.S. News & World Report: 2

CNN: 45

Fox News: 29

NBC News: 14

NPR: 14

ABC News: 6

CBS News: 5

MSNBC: 6

(The actual number of news reports by those organizations, particularly the television outlets, is certainly higher than the Nexis results indicate.)

To date, 137 different newspapers have written about Hsu and Clinton in a total of 591 articles, according to Nexis, and 132 broadcast and cable news transcripts mention Hsu and Clinton.

By contrast, a Nexis search for “Alan Fabian AND Romney” yields a total of only 21 hits. Here's how they break down for the news organizations listed above:

The New York Times: 0

Los Angeles Times: 0

The Washington Post: 1

USA Today: 1

Chicago Tribune: 0

The Boston Globe: 0

Associated Press: 0

Newsweek: 0

Time: 0

U.S. News & World Report: 0

CNN: 0

Fox News: 0

NBC News: 0

NPR: 0

ABC News: 0

CBS News: 0

MSNBC: 0

That's a whole lot of zeros. Of those 21 results, seven are reports that also mention Hsu. The Washington Post report, for example, contained 97 words about Romney and Fabian in the midst of a 1,457 word front-page article about controversial donors to presidential campaigns. Those 1,457 words included the grand total of 137 about Romney donors. No other Republican candidate was mentioned. The vast majority of the article focused on Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. So, even when Fabian has been mentioned, it has often been only in passing, as part of a report about controversial donors to Democratic campaigns.

Given the disparate media coverage of Norman Hsu and Alan Fabian, you probably know who Hsu is. But by now, you're probably wondering who Alan Fabian is. Alan Fabian was a Romney bundler until his recent indictment on 23 counts of fraud, money laundering, perjury, and obstruction of justice. At his arraignment today, Fabian pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him.

The indictment of a top Romney bundler has resulted in essentially no coverage from the same news organizations that have obsessed over the controversy surrounding a Clinton bundler. And remember, when the media first began focusing on Hsu, it was not yet known that he had any legal woes, so they don't explain the media's interest in Hsu and disinterest in Fabian.

But maybe Hsu and Fabian aren't perfectly comparable. Sure, Fabian has been indicted on 23 counts of fraud, money laundering, perjury, and obstruction of justice, while Hsu wasn't known to have been charged with a crime when the media frenzy about him began. But Hsu, for reasons that may relate to his name (The American Spectator's R. Emmett Tyrrell charmingly referred to “The Clintons' Chop Suey Connection”), was immediately seen as a sexy story. Mail fraud is just so very dull, particularly in comparison to a donor with a Chinese surname.

But there's nothing dull about allegations against Robert Lichfield, who until recently was Romney's Utah finance co-chairman and helped organize a February event that raised $300,000 for the campaign.

On June 20, The Hill reported:

In a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, 133 plaintiffs have alleged that Robert Lichfield, co-chairman of Romney's Utah finance committee owned or operated residential boarding schools for troubled teenagers where students were “subjected to physical abuse, emotional abuse and sexual abuse.”

The complaint, which plaintiffs amended and resubmitted to the court last week, alleges children attending schools operated by Lichfield suffered abuses such as unsanitary living conditions; denial of adequate food; exposure to extreme temperatures; beatings; confinement in dog cages; and sexual fondling.

A second lawsuit filed by more than 25 plaintiffs in July in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of New York alleges that Lichfield and several partners entered into a scheme to defraud them by operating an unlicensed boarding school in upstate New York. The suit does not allege physical or emotional abuse.

These are two active lawsuits against Lichfield. Several others suits have alleged child abuse on behalf of dozens of plaintiffs, but judges have thrown out the suits for procedural reasons. As a result, the merits of the allegations have not been weighed. In some suits, plaintiffs have settled their cases for undisclosed amounts of money.

News reports about Clinton and Hsu have often featured various reporters or pundits expressing incredulity that Clinton's vetting operation didn't raise red flags about Hsu or about the ability of donors connected to Hsu to make campaign contributions. But campaigns don't have access to donors' bank records, making some of that criticism unfair.

Romney's campaign, on the other hand, would only have had to spend a few moments with Nexis to discover allegations against Lichfield. Among the news reports that Romney staff could have easily found prior to the February fundraiser that Lichfield helped organize:

• An April 21, 2005, Deseret Morning News article reported on “persistent allegations of child abuse and claims of questionable business practices surrounding the World Wide Association of Speciality Schools (WWASPS) founded by Robert Lichfield.”
• An August 19, 2005, Deseret Morning News article reported that a school connected to Lichfield “has been ordered to refund more than $1 million to parents and stop misrepresenting itself.” The school had no authority to issue high school diplomas, but issued 113 anyway, and falsely claimed to have been accredited by the Northwest Association of Accredited Schools. An Associated Press article the same day also covered the order.

So: How much media coverage has there been of the troubles facing Romney's (now-former) Utah finance co-chairman?

A Nexis search for “Robert Lichfield and Romney” returns only 27 hits. None in The New York Times. One brief mention in The Washington Post. Nothing for USA Today or the Associated Press. Nothing for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC.

I can already hear the excuses for the wildly disparate coverage of controversial campaign fundraisers connected to Clinton and Romney. Foremost among them will no doubt be the old standby: Republicans just push these stories more, so it's only natural that there are more media reports about Democrats.

Nonsense.

First, journalists shouldn't be stenographers for political parties and other partisans any more than they should be stenographers for war-hungry presidents. If the indictment of a Romney bundler on 23 counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, money laundering, and fraud is newsworthy if the DNC sends out a press release, it is newsworthy if the DNC doesn't send out a press release, too.

Second, the DNC did send out a press release. In fact, of the 14 Nexis hits for “Alan Fabian AND Romney” that do not mention Hsu, eight of them are Democratic Party press releases, fact sheets, or other materials. Eight press releases, out of 14 hits. The “Democrats aren't pushing this” excuse doesn't hold up to even the most cursory scrutiny. The Democrats are pushing it. Reporters aren't covering it.

To be perfectly clear: I am not suggesting media shouldn't have reported the Norman Hsu story (though some of the coverage went overboard and seemed to be more about embarrassing the man than providing the public useful information). There does, however, appear to be a troubling disparity in the amount of coverage given controversial supporters of Republicans.

And that disparity is not new. Looking back over the last few presidential elections, there are numerous examples of wildly disparate coverage of analogous controversies. Bill Clinton's draft record received a huge amount of coverage in 1992; George W. Bush's was given little attention in 2000. A years-old investment in which the Clintons lost money was hyped as Watergate and Teapot Dome and the Kennedy assassination all rolled into one, then the media completely ignored newly revealed evidence during the 2000 campaign that suggested Bush had insider information for a stock sale in which he made about $800,000. Al Gore's lies, which weren't, were a dominant theme in campaign coverage that year, while George W. Bush's, which were, were ignored. Same for flip-flops in the 2004 campaign.

During a recent washingtonpost.com online discussion, Post reporter John Solomon was asked about his paper's failure to cover Fabian's connections to Romney. Solomon replied, in part, "[I]f you have any doubts about the Post's commitment to vet and examine leaders of both political parties, you only need to examine the front pages of the last few weeks that have included stories by myself and my colleagues exposing Karl Rove's 'asset deployment team,' the role of Dick Cheney's chief lawyer in pressing anti-terrorism policies that troubled some in government and our extensive coverage of the attorney general and Larry Craig controversies."

It is perhaps telling that none of the examples Solomon gave had anything to do with anyone running for the Republican presidential nomination.

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.