John Edwards Might be a Philanderer, but the Media is a Shameless Whore
After a week or so of below-the-radar furor on the blogs (Mikey Kaus, take a bow), possible future Attorney General and Vice-Presidential contender John Edwards has finally come clean over allegations that he lied about having an extramarital affair. Okay, so Edwards is a lying scumbag. We all knew that. Big deal.
The real story, I think, is that most major media outlets kept a lid on this story — despite the fact that they were well aware of it — and even going so far as to discourage people from writing about it.
Without taking this into “Team Red vs. Team Blue” territory, the media’s handling of this case should be instructive, at the very least. If the writing of bloggers like Michael Yon and Michael Totten, among others, has brought into question the accuracy of the media’s often-hysterical coverage of Iraq, then the non-coverage of the Edwards story should make consumers even warier about taking what they read in the paper or see on the nightly news at its word.
Until today, if you never read the Enquirer and never looked at blogs, just about the only inkling you might have had that this was even happening at all would’ve been a quip or two during Jay Leno’s monologue, and you probably wouldn’t have gotten the joke.
