All the Scandalous News That's Fit to Print
Politicians lie. The National Enquirer pays for information. The mainstream media is falling out of touch with America.
We hold these truths to be self evident.
And yet when all three of these variables collided in the perfect nexus of the John Edwards cheating affair, the resulting public shock and outcry was so great you would have thought Obama had chosen Britney as his running mate.
After the Enquirer's reports that Edwards had an extramarital affair were finally confirmed by his TV mea culpa, the gnashing of teeth from mainstream journalists was so loud you could barely hear the sobs of everyone who posts for the Daily Kos.
Journalists' reactions ranged from Elitist Defiant ("we were still right not to cover the story because it came from the National Enquirer") to self-flagellation ("we should pursue tips from anywhere") Overall, mainstream journalists engaged in more superficial self-examination than a young Alexander Portnoy (although with far less entertainment value).
Certainly, Edwards, like Portnoy, let his zipper become the center of his universe proving (again) that while truth is stranger than fiction our leading politicians have less depth than most fictional characters. But Edwards did more than torpedo his political career and image; he unwittingly unzipped a new era of how the press will cover scandal and where Americans obtain news.
The National Enquirer has been the brand name for scandal for decades, but ever since Al Gore invented the internet (sorry, I can never resist that one) it has been inevitable that the delivery of information would become faster than you can say, "I did not have sex with that woman."
While daily newspapers have struggled to join the digital age and race to put content online, they are still approaching the revolution with antediluvian views that a story isn't news until they say its news. Nothing illustrates this more than the Edwards' scandal.
For months the blogosphere was filled with rumors about Edwards and Rielle Hunter. The low hum of innuendo and suspicion exploded into a roar when the Enquirer published its account of the affair in December, 2007, naming Hunter and printing photographs of her six months pregnant. The Enquirer's report was carried in print and supplemented online.
Slate's Mickey Kaus was relentless in his pursuit of answers, and The Huffington Post -- one of the first to raise questions about Edwards -- stayed with the story even after Edwards gave his now infamous "It's lies, tabloid trash" caught-on-video denial. Daily papers and the TV networks were silent.
So Edwards, the presidential candidate and quintessential family man, continued his campaign and indeed there were two Americas; one where the self-designated mainstream media ignored a scandal that already had been documented in the Enquirer's published account, and the other America where new media asked questions relentlessly about why Rielle Hunter's never-seen "webisodes" for the Edwards campaign and why she was being taken care of by his close friend and hidden in a gated community while six months pregnant.
It wasn't until seven months later when the Enquirer caught Edwards visiting Hunter at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and sneaking out at 2:40 a.m. that mainstream media started to awake. And even then, The Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times and other top newspapers devoted little or no resources to the story. Mickey Kaus begged me to release the photographs of Edwards at the hotel, assuring me the mainstream media would then rush to cover the story. I disagreed and the Enquirer held back most of the photos, waiting for Edwards to deny he was there before showing the images.
Days passed with no TV broadcasts or daily newspaper articles about the scandal, but the blogosphere was blazing with hundreds of reports about Edwards' late-night visit with his mistress and baby and for the first time, the average person was aware of a story that had received no "mainstream media" attention but was thriving on the Web. That simple fact is the true watershed moment of the Edwards affair; it is the bright line demarcating the point when mainstream media's relevancy developed irreparable (and most likely fatal) cracks, when an army of bloggers overran the stodgy elitist guard with the same type of scandal that once turned newspapers and their immortalized Yellow Kids correspondents into daily habits.
When Edwards finally admitted the affair in a faux sincere TV interview, some members of the mainstream media publicly assessed their decisions to not cover the scandal. Forced to acknowledge being beaten by the Enquirer, they referenced the publication specifically, and the blogosphere obliquely, with great asperity.
A newspaper in Indiana wrote: "The story of (Edwards') tryst was reported only by the National Enquirer, a tabloid that gives supermarkets a bad name."
The Los Angeles Times justified its lack of coverage (and ban of bloggers writing about it!) with this quote from one of its editors: "The National Enquirer is a supermarket tabloid that is accurate some of the time and inaccurate some of the time."
Canada's Globe and Mail, raising the level of discourse, claimed it was "icky" that the Enquirer had broken the story. (How do we respond to that? We're rubber, you're glue...)
Meanwhile the New York Times was rebuked by its own ombudsman who strongly concluded the paper blew it by not putting enough effort into reporting the story. Yet, Bill Keller, the Paper of Record's editor, was defiant and still approached the situation with a great sense of ennui, defending his inaction by saying the "hold-your-nose quality about The Enquirer" contributed to the lack of interest by The Times. Others simply relied on standard Elvis-UFO-Aliens-Bigfoot jokes to dismiss the Enquirer's success in light of their failure.
The voice of reason in these matters usually belongs to the Washington Post's media critic Howard Kurtz. His comments encompassed both the Enquirer and the blogosphere as he wrote: "The fact that big newspapers, magazines and networks have standards -- that is, they refuse to print every stray rumor just because it's "out there" -- is one of their strengths. But in the latter stages of this case, it made them look clueless."
Sorry Howard, but those standards are now being determined in cyberspace and any attempt to disparage the populist medium increasingly sounds like a death rattle echoing throughout the pared-down newsrooms of corporate journalism. And while the watershed moment of the shifting balance of media power will prove to be one of the most important byproducts of the Edwards affair it is not my favorite moment.
That distinction is centered on an event from just a few days ago, an event with no connection to Edwards. When two Georgia men claimed to have found Bigfoot and held a press conference to display the remains, the event was ignored by the Enquirer. Bill Keller's New York Times ran a straight-faced account, complete with photograph, in the A section.
All the news that's fit to print? Clueless indeed.
David Perel is the Editor in Chief of the National Enquirer.
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Edwards is such a narcissist it would have been a story if it were discovered he was NOT having an affair. Something about that guy always struck me as phony. Two different groups owe the National Enquirer a tremendous debt of gratitude in that they might well have prevented John Edwards from being chosen as Obama's vice-presidential candidate.
The first group is the country as a whole.
The second group is the Obama campaign.
Exactly, and then we would have Mcain for four years.
This guy, Bill Keller, the NY Times' ombudsman, comes across as a pretty lazy guy in comparison to his predecessors, who weren't perfect but were much more thorough and critical when the need arose. He's also no great shakes as a writer.
The NYTimes ombudsman is Clark Hoyt. Keller is the editor. Professionals in the business consider him to be a very solid newsman, and an improvement over his predecessors.
The MSM taking the NE with great skepticism?
Gee, I can't possibly think of even one reason why they might do that....
Our every fall is small but our calls enthrall the walls in theirs halls.
Bigfoot/Chupacabra '08.
He holds no office and thus has no news value.
What about Oswald?
This story will never go away until all the questions are answered fully by Mr. Edward's. Trouble is more and more questions come out everyday and it's about his public role as a nominee and if any campaign funds were misused. There has been very large amounts of money changing hands - it's a real story.
The National Enquirer made the so called "main stream" media look like the hacks they are.
If they would look up every once in a while from kissing Obama's, and every other Democrats butt, they might get some credibility.
The mainstream media didn't want to soil their hands with Edwards' affair because he always afforded them a great deal of access and they like his politics. It is that simple.
We here in the US are at a converging point, where our government is collapsing upon the weight of special interests and where our media owned by these special interests no longer prioritizes the 'watching' of the government and its officials as job No. 1. We have basically leaped into the new age of 'managed' opinions, a unique mix of psychology and marketing; where these news organizations along with their sponsors spend their days figuring out how to make us watch them and purchase the products they 'hack' rather than focusing on delivering important, timely and relevant news.
In a word, the corporate media has choosen a business model which favors its bottomline, which has little to do with the quality of news information to the everyday citizens, they have in effect decided that we are too busy for the depth of stories, so they summarize them and then feed us with missing white women and/or children, bigfoot stories and the rest of the garbage of the day to fill-in what they must believe is our dreary and unfullfilled existences.
Meanwhile corporate and government malfeasance is ignored or given little weight against the 'entertainment' quality of their programming.
It may have been watershed moment.
That doesn't mean it was good for journalism.
The Enquirer and the blogs, especailly HuffPo and Kaus, were way ahead of the msm on this.
With one glaring exception: DAILY KOS BANNED the blogger there (Lee Stranahan) who was trying to warn the party about this imminent train wreck..
Kos is just as clueless as the msm, if not more so.
No, the New York Times should not have reported the story just because it appeared in a supermarket tabloid. But that was not a reason to ignore the story, either. They should have applied some resources to prove or discredit the allegations.
Look at it this way, a public figure could leak a true story to a supermarket tabloid as a ploy, figuring that the so-called mainstream media would then automatically ignore it.
Many of us that knew that the Edwards affair was true were amused at how the media totally ignored it while spending so much time on the other trumped up scandals on some of the other candidates.
Incidentally, cancer or not I don't hold Elizabeth Edwards blameless in this whole mess. She now claims that she knew of the affair (of course that could be a lie as well!) and yet as her husband was lying she still told the American people what a great guy he was and how he was the best choice to be the next President. You could argue that her lie was less excusable than his. He might have been lying to protect his ill wife, but who was she lying to protect? Her husband the philanderer? (Of course, I think he was lying mostly to protect his own credibility which, of course, is now totally gone. The only folks who believe Hunter's kid isn't his are the same folks who don't think OJ murdered his wife.)
The NYT ignored Bush's lies about Iraq, too.
The Drudge Report got the Lewinsky story and the Enquirer got the Edwards story. So, I guess that makes them the gold standard of modern journalism. What other stories were so crucial???
Yes, David, you're absolutely right. The National Enquirer should be the new gold standard in journalism. Listen up New York Times, Los Angles Times and Washington Post; start using the National Enquirer as your new model of operation. Got it?
By the way, I can show you the REAL Big Foot; he lives in my closet. And space aliens really do kidnap people and give them an anal probe. And Jesus appeared to me on a piece of toast this morning. And... and... excuse me, I have to adjust my tin foil hat, (the CIA is listening to my brain waves again).
I admit I didn't believe.
But don't get all self-righteous. Most people have good reaso to question your publication.
I mean this week it's john Edwards, next week it's 'Alien has a baby with Roseanne' - so gimme a break.
Just because you get something right every once in a while doesn't make you credible.
Like Faux News.
I was always shocked how so little of the "affair" talk blew back toward McCain... who was actually STILL MARRIED when he was courting his current wife. In fact... he was married to her before he actually divorced his first wife.
Also... why isn't anyone replaying those commericals about McCain which Bush/Rove ran in 2000? Seems like it would be relevant to know. Sure, it might not be true, but isn't that REALLY for the voters to decide for themselves?
If nothing else, it would get the racists to stay home instead of voting for McCain. Sounds like a win-win to me.
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