An arrest at the home of the University of Maryland is offering a master class in media malfeasance.
On Thursday, authorities nailed College Park, Maryland, Mayor Patrick Wojahn on 56 counts of possession of child pornography.
In their article about the college town mayor’s arrest, The Washington Post noted that Wojahn served as mayor since 2015 and had been a City Council member for seven years before that.
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The Post also shared that Wojahn was an “advocate for environmental and social justice issues” in his town.
In addition, in the mid-2000s, Wojahn and his husband “were plaintiffs in a lawsuit to make marriage a legal right in Maryland, which became law in 2013 ahead of the federal Supreme Court decision two years later.”
But oddly, while readers knew all this, one thing was missing from the Post’s coverage of the scandal.
Wojahn’s political party.
If you have not guessed by now, he is a Democrat. That fact was also excluded in the coverage of the local affiliates from ABC, CBS, and NBC.
“So weird how this sort of thing keeps happening when Democratic politicians get busted behaving badly,” Twitchy noted.
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Republican political strategist Greg Price noted on Twitter that while the Post masked Wojahn’s party ID, the paper had no problem outing a “Senate GOP staffer” who was busted on kiddie porn charges in 2021.
“To be clear, we’re not trying to suggest that sexual predation is politically motivated or has anything to do with political party,” Twitchy noted.
“But our media need to decide if the public deserves to know the party affiliation of a politician who’s a sexual predator. And if the answer is yes, they have to apply the rules to Democrats and Republicans equally.”
“Otherwise,” Twitchy added, “we’re just going to have to keep calling them out.”
The Bust
On February 17, 2023, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children notified the Prince George’s County Police Department (PGPD) that a social media account operating in the county possessed and distributed suspected child pornography.
The image and videos were uploaded to the social media account in January of 2023. Through various investigative techniques, PGPD investigators discovered the social media account belonged to Wojahn.
On February 28, 2023, PGPD detectives served a search warrant at Wojahn’s College Park home. Investigators recovered multiple cell phones, a storage device, a tablet, and a computer.
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After further investigation, PGPD obtained criminal charges against Wojahn, and investigators took him into custody early Thursday morning.
Wojahn is charged with 40 counts of possession of child exploitative material and 16 counts of distribution of child exploitative material. He is in the custody of the Department of Corrections.
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