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Edwards goes down
Takes media with him
In the end, former Sen. John Edwards' affair was about a lot more than just sex. For the journalism profession, it may come to mark a historical turning point in which traditional journalists no longer set the national news agenda. And that's coming from some of the media outlets that deliberately ignored the story.
After the National Enquirer reported in July that Edwards had met his mistress and her baby in a Los Angeles hotel in the dead of night, citizen journalists in the blogosphere once again jumped on the story while most of the traditional media initially turned up its nose.
Since last fall, when the story of Edwards' affair first broke, the traditional media had been largely content to accept Edwards' cockeyed denials at face value. Their insistence on largely ignoring the story that turned out to be the political bombshell of the year clashed with the blogosphere's determination to advance it. Even liberal Web sites like Slate and Daily Kos piled on, at one point even publishing a copy of an internal memo from the Los Angeles Times forbidding bloggers for the paper from writing about it.
"Because the only source has been the National Enquirer, we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations," Los Angeles Times blog editor Tony Pierce wrote. "So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified."
No one was asking the media to reprint the Enquirer's charges without questioning them. But surely, given the far greater resources at the disposal of the country's big media outlets, even in this time of newsroom cuts, someone could do a better job of getting to the bottom of this than the National Enquirer, or at least attempt to verify or refute the tabloid's claims.
While the McClatchy chain, in particular The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer, were among the few to write about the affair before Edwards admitted to it and deserve some credit for that, they waited over a week after the July 22 Enquirer story about Edwards' meeting at the hotel before saying a word. In their piece on the paternity of Edwards' mistress Rielle Hunter's baby, the Big O was forced to quote a blogger at the Web site MyDD.com who'd gotten there first on the birth certificate angle.
The collective roar from the Web eventually became too much for Edwards to ignore, and he ran straight into the arms of ABC reporter Bob Woodruff to confess on national television. Within hours of the announcement that Edwards would cop to the affair on Nightline, the Associated Press had put out a lengthy editorial style piece explaining why it didn't cover the story.
"A sexual affair can have just two people who know the truth," AP writer Douglass K. Daniel wrote. "Without witnesses, documents, photographs or some form of irrefutable evidence pointing to the truth, news organizations will not endanger their own integrity."
New York Times editor Bill Keller essentially said the same thing. "I'm not going to recycle a supermarket tabloid's anonymously sourced story," Keller said.
One problem. In one form or another, virtually every news outlet in the country "recycled" a version of The New York Times' anonymously sourced story on Sen. John McCain's alleged affair with a lobbyist earlier this year. That story was so weak that even the Times' anonymous sources weren't sure McCain had had an affair. But The New York Times and everyone else ran it anyway.
In an age where 200 journalists find time to trail Sen. Barack Obama on an international trip, it is simply stunning that we must now turn to the National Enquirer to read the hard-core investigative work the mainstream media once did. It means the vetting process for politicians at the presidential level is now so thin that you can casually carry on an affair as you run for president, in fact on the campaign trail, with little fear of getting caught by traditional media. It's enough to make you wonder what else in the backgrounds of this year's presidential candidates hasn't been dug into.
For Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten, the Edwards affair story marked a turning point. It was the story that finally "ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism."
New York Times columnist David Carr echoed that.
"I was taught when I was a young reporter that it's news when we say it is," Carr told CNN.com. "I think that's still true -- it's news when 'we' say it is. It's just who 'we' is has changed. Members of the public, people with modems, people with cell phones are now producers, editors. They can push and push on a story until it ends up being acknowledged by everyone."
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