The October 12 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight devoted a 2 1/2-minute segment to examining, as guest host and CNN correspondent Kitty Pilgrim put it, “serious questions about a massive windfall” Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (NV) “made in a Las Vegas land deal.” On October 13, The Washington Post editorialized that "[t]he best case" for Reid “is that he was sloppy about financial disclosure rules in accounting for a real estate deal on which he made a $700,000 profit. The more unattractive case is that the senator's inaccurate description of the investment was an effort to disguise his partnership with a Las Vegas lawyer who's never been charged with wrongdoing but whose name has surfaced in federal investigations involving organized crime, casinos and political bribery since the 1980s.” The editorial further noted that reports of the deal do not “cast the senator in an attractive light,” and that Reid's response to the story “indicates a casual disregard for the importance of accurate reporting of lawmakers' financial affairs.”

In an October 11 article, Associated Press writers John Solomon and Kathleen Hennessey first reported that Reid profited “on a Las Vegas land sale even though he hadn't personally owned the property for three years” and that “Reid did not disclose to Congress an earlier sale in which he transferred his land to a company created by a friend and took a financial stake in that company.” Reid responded to the reports, saying: “Everything is fully disclosed to the ethics committee and everyone else. As I said, if there is some technical change that the ethics committee wants, I'll be happy to do that.” However, for all their scrutiny and criticism of Reid, both Lou Dobbs Tonight and the Post editorial board treated with relative nonchalance reports from June that House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) made almost $2 million on the sale of land in Illinois after taking an active role in the passage of a transportation bill that included an earmark for a highway project near the property. There is no comparable allegation that Reid's transaction may have involved official action on his part.

On June 15, the Chicago Sun-Times reported:

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert pocketed almost $2 million from real estate deals adjacent to his Plano home in booming Kendall County, one of the fastest growing areas in the nation.

The transactions prompted questions Wednesday from the Sunlight Foundation, a new watchdog group, about whether Hastert, who earmarked $207 million in federal dollars for the proposed Prairie Parkway, had his profits swollen because of the highway.

In an October 6 column for The New Republic Online, American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Norman Ornstein and Center for American Progress senior fellow Scott Lilly wrote that Hastert “played an unusually active role in shepherding” the 2005 transportation bill, to which he earmarked the funds for the Prairie Parkway, “a more aggressive role than he played at any other point in his speakership.” Ornstein and Lilly also wrote:

The Hastert earmark not only provided money for Parkway construction but mandated that the construction take place on the portion of the Parkway nearest his recently purchased property. While the money contained in the highway bill was sufficient to build only about one-third of the entire 36-mile road, the speaker insured that the right third would be selected by also earmarking funds for construction of a [sic] interchange in that portion of the proposed tho[r]oughfare [sic].

Lou Dobbs Tonight, however, all but ignored the Hastert story. On the June 16 edition of Lou Dobbs, reports of Hastert's land deal were mentioned in passing during a report by correspondent Louise Schiavone:

SCHIAVONE: At the same time, the ethics battle is not over for Republicans. Eyebrows have been raised about Speaker Dennis Hastert's reported real-estate profits of $3 million on property near a new, federally funded highway project in Illinois. And prosecutors are investigating ties between House Appropriations Committee Jerry Lewis of California and a former staffer-turned-high-powered-lobbyist.

The Post editorialized on the Hastert land deal on July 5 -- almost a month after the story broke -- asking: “Was the speaker taking care of folks back home -- or was he taking care of himself?” The editorial concluded that "[e]vidence of the latter is rather thin" and added: “But if the story of Mr. Hastert's excellent investment is not, at least as it has unfolded so far, one of political scandal, it is a cautionary tale about the potential for abuse.” The editorial also noted Hastert's response, writing simply that he “den[ied] any wrongdoing.”