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Monday, August 4, 2008
John Edwards and an alleged love child? Enquiring minds in Britain want to know …
The British media says it is in a state of shock this week over the fact that the American media has chosen to ignore the juiciest political story of the month and possibly even the year: the discovery by National Enquirer hacks of John Edwards in the corridors of a Beverly Hills hotel, where his alleged mistress and alleged love child were also staying, at half past two on the morning of Tuesday, 22 July.
Says Guy Adams, media reporter, in today’s Independent newspaper in London: “Since Edwards was, until recently, hoping to be president and will almost certainly have a prominent role in any Barack Obama administration, his marital integrity is a matter of public interest. It could yet become an election issue. Yet neither the highfalutin’ New York Times, nor the Chicago Tribune, nor even the LA Times, on whose patch the whole sordid business occurred, have yet stepped up to the plate to report it.”
Adams says that the media’s old-fashioned reticence seems quaint in this day of kiss-and-tell journalism. “But it’s also depressing: one of the reasons America’s newspapers are dying is their perceived pomposity,” he said. “Readers say they are too timid to rock the boat; right-wingers complain (with some justification) that they conspire to suppress damaging stories about Democrats. The general public thinks they have simply become boring.”
Most importantly for the newspapers themselves, Adams claims that the Edwards story could be selling truckloads of newsprint at a time when media companies are hemorrhaging customers.
