Over the weekend, the older Reagan son took to Twitter, writing over the course of several messages, "My brother seems to want [to] sell out his father to sell books.... My father did not suffer from Alzheimer's in the '80s.... Ron, my brother, was an embarrassment to my father when he was alive and today he became an embarrassment to his mother."

Such angry denials in the supposed defense of his father's honor (it's apparently shameful to have Alzheimer's) garnered Michael Reagan much media attention, including an appearance on Fox's Hannity (1/17/11) where he denounced his brother, claiming "there's absolutely no evidence" that his father's Alzheimer's began while he was still president.

On CBS's Early Show (1/17/11), Michael Reagan repeated his denials. But what was most noteworthy about the CBS interview wasn't what Michael Reagan said, but what CBS journalist Erica Hill did not say.

In 1986, CBS's outgoing White House correspondent Leslie Stahl went to the White House to say goodbye to Reagan before moving on to another beat. She failed to report her dramatic observations at the time, a notable omission in itself, but recounted them in a 1999 book. As FAIR founder Jeff Cohen wrote about Stahl's belated findings at the time:

In her new book Reporting Live, former CBS White House correspondent Lesley Stahl writes that she and other reporters suspected that Reagan was "sinking into senility" years before he left office. She writes that White House aides "covered up his condition"--and journalists chose not to pursue it.

Stahl describes a particularly unsettling encounter with Reagan in the summer of 1986: her "final meeting" with the President, typically a chance to ask a few parting questions for a "going-away story." But White House press secretary Larry Speakes made her promise not to ask anything.

Although she'd covered Reagan for years, the glazed-eyed and fogged-up President "didn't seem to know who I was," writes Stahl. For several moments as she talked to him in the Oval Office, a vacant Reagan barely seemed to realize anyone else was in the room. Meanwhile, Speakes was literally shouting instructions to the president, reminding him to give Stahl White House souvenirs.

Panicking at the thought of having to report on that night's news that "the president of the United States is a doddering space cadet," Stahl was relieved that Reagan soon reemerged into alertness, recognized her and chatted coherently with her husband, a screenwriter. "I had come that close to reporting that Reagan was senile."

Stahl wasn't the only reporter to hold back. Nor were her bosses at CBS the only ones to pressure journalists to soften their coverage of Reagan, both of his policies and his person.

So CBS News failed to mention Stahl's dramatic story in 1986--and failed to mention it again in 2011.

UPDATE: Mother Jones' David Corn talks to Lesley Stahl about why she didn't report on Reagan's mental condition at the time.

The AP video of the controversy, posted on the L.A. Times website, kicks off: "Quick! Man--or woman?" The piece includes slow pans over Semenya's body, more tabloidy commentary ("She--and yes, SHE claims to be a woman"), and the offering of her voice as some sort of evidence that she's not what she claims to be. It's what you'd sadly expect to find on E! or some other tabloid show--not the AP, or the L.A. Times' website, for that matter.

CNN's Jack Cafferty's response to the news was: "Story creeps me out. It's weird. Do you think she's a man or a woman?" His colleague Campbell Brown teased the "bizarre story" and promised viewers "a whole lot more on this very strange case coming up a little bit later tonight." CNN's Anderson Cooper and Erica Hill called it "fascinating," "amazing" and "wild."

During her full story on the subject, Brown acknowledged one of the problems with the scrutiny: "I mean, this is a young woman, a young girl. It's a pretty cruel thing for this girl to have to go through emotionally, psychologically presuming it's not a scam." Yes indeed, scrutinizing someone's body and gender presentation (as well as your accomplishments) on television and calling it bizarre and creepy is pretty cruel, as well as unprofessional. Unfortunately, that sort of coverage of people with different gender presentations is not unusual--and awareness of that cruelty didn't stop Brown from feeding into it.