Otterblog

We are still getting emails about the John Edwards story. The refrains are: We should have run something sooner. Who cares about this? Why was there no followup story in Sunday or Monday about it.

Between chores and projects, I spent a good deal of time thinking about this during the weekend. What we should have done differently. Could have done differently. Quick answer. I don’t know. One journalist friend of mine spent a week in California trying to confirm the meeting that the Enquirer wrote about. He was unable to. It seems to me that the press gets criticized on the one hand for having no standards and on the other for having too high standards. From what I can gather, the Enquirer got half the story right, that Edwards had an affair. But the child isn’t his. Of course, there’s a chance he’s lying about that. My guess is that the paternity will eventually come out one way or another. At some point, the child is going to drop his pacifier and somebody will pick it up and do a DNA test on it…

On the same day that Edwards fessed up, a not-so-tidy war erupted in Georgia, between the former Soviet Republic and Russia over a dissident province. Tanks rolling from Russia are not the sort of footage you liked to see. The last time I saw them was in Afghanistan, and that was a disaster on too many levels to repeat. Edwards was our big story. The Russia-Georgia war ran across the bottom of Pg1. In another part of the country, perhaps the Russian tanks got a higher spot in the paper. Not here. A former N.C. senator’s confession of an affair during his run for the president is big news, regardless of how the story finally made it into print. That said, the Russia-Georgia story has legs. And it isn’t going away.

It is a measure of John Edwards’ considerable fall from grace and place that the story faded so quickly. The spigot of coverage was open wide on Friday. Saturday, it was reduced to a stream of sidebars. Sunday, it became a trickle. The last gasps are reports from Newsweek and the LA Times about their reporters’ bizarre encounters with Rielle Hunter years ago. As I said a week or so back, the mainstream media—despite what conservative commentators may think—has never been in love with John Edwards. With his candidacy dead and the fact that he was never under serious consideration for a VP slot, they were more than happy to give up their first inclination to bury him and to just do something even crueler: ignore him and move on.

Update: Here is a nice discussion that includes Rick Thames, the editor of The Charlotte Observer, discussing his paper’s coverage of the Edwards story.