On November 12, Reuters reported that Chad Castagana had been arrested in California for “mailing threatening letters containing a suspicious white powder to celebrities and U.S. politicians,” including House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (CA), Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), talk show host David Letterman, Comedy Central's Daily Show host Jon Stewart, and MSNBC's Countdown host Keith Olbermann. The day after, the weblog Sadly, No! noted that Castagana was a contributor to the conservative website FreeRepublic.com and provided a link that it said was to Castagana's biography. However, the link leads to a FreeRepublic.com page that says, “This account has been banned or suspended.” But despite the Associated Press' reporting on November 13 that Castagana faced “a two-count complaint of sending threats and ... hoaxes by mail,” only six media outlets noted Castagana's arrest: Reuters, the AP, the Los Angeles Times, Roll Call (subscription required), USA Today, and Countdown. Moreover, in reporting on Castagana's arrest, only the AP, Roll Call and Countdown noted that, as the AP reported, “FBI agent Mary Hogan said in the affidavit that Castagana 'described himself as a compulsive voter who votes Republican, and he said that he sent the letters to specific individuals because he did not like their liberal politics.' ” Neither Reuters, the Times, nor USA Today mentioned any possible motivation for Castagana's actions and none of the media reports mentioned Castagana's reported ties to FreeRepublic.com. All reports noted that the white powder was tested and found to be nonhazardous.

The scant coverage of Castagana's connection to a conservative blog in the days following his arrest stands in contrast with the extensive coverage given an incident involving a liberal blogger. Numerous media outlets reported that, at a campaign stop in Charlottesville, Virginia, University of Virginia law student Mike Stark, a blogger for Calling All Wingnuts, was tackled when he asked Sen. George F. Allen (R-VA), who lost his re-election bid to former Navy Secretary Jim Webb, whether he had spit on his first wife. A Media Matters for America review* of the three days following the incident found 14 different reports which labeled Stark a “liberal” -- including articles in the Los Angeles Times, the AP, the Chicago Tribune, and reports on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, and ABC's Good Morning America. One of the four articles printed about the incident in the Richmond Times-Dispatch cited an Allen campaign press release, which stated that “Stark has a history of violent outbursts on the Daily Kos, a left-wing Web site.”

As Media Matters has noted, liberal bloggers and websites have been frequent targets of media attacks. For example, Washington Post columnist David Broder addressed the YearlyKos convention by roundly dismissing “liberal bloggers,” claiming that “the blogs I have scanned are heavier on vituperation of President Bush and other targets than on creative thought.” Additionally, both the Daily Kos weblog and Moveon.org have been frequent targets on Fox News -- The O'Reilly Factor host Bill O'Reilly has equated giving money to MoveOn.org with donating to the Nazi Party; Roll Call executive editor Morton M. Kondracke has declared that “the MoveOn.org-Howard Dean-Daily Kos-Michael Moore left wing of the Democratic Party” is “just as nasty and mean on the left as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage”; and Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes has suggested that MoveOn.org might “want to run text” of a letter by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which, among other things, suggested U.S. officials may have been involved in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and expressed skepticism about whether the Holocaust occurred.

* A Nexis search between October 31, 2006, and November 2, 2006, of “News, All (English, Full Text) using the following terms ”Mike Stark."