I have less then no desire to talk about National Enquirers’ “story” on John Edwards and his supposed mistress (no I’m not going to link to it but some quick Googling will get you to it). I, like many, think its probably a bunch of crap and certainly hope thats the case. Having said that, I couldn’t let Jack Shafer’s article on the situation go with out comment. Shafer is one of my favorite media critics but he’s way, way off base with his thoughts on the situation.
Shafer accuses the media of hypocrisy for the way they’ve cover this “story” compared to how they covered Sen. Larry Craig’s arrest for that stuff in the airport bathroom. This is, in a word, a dumb comparison. There is no doubt about what happened with Sen. Craig (despite, I suppose, Craig’s later protestations), he was arrested and pled guilty. Compare that to Mr. Edwards, who, as Shafer notes, has denied any affair and also this tidbit Shafer incredibly glosses over:
And I should mention that an Edwards political operative, Andrew Young, claims that he is the father of Hunter’s child. (Young is married with children of his own.)
To briefly recap, on the one hand you have a current U.S. Senator who is arrested in an airport bathroom for indecent behavior and who admits his guilt (ignoring his latter pathetic arguments to the contrary). On the other hand you have a former U.S. Senator who is accused of having an affair and a “love child” with another woman yet has denied both such accusations and another man has said the child is in fact his.
Now Shafer wiggles a little bit, saying the two “aren’t directly analogous, they have a bit in common” but then later he says this:
But if Edwards had an affair and lied about it, shouldn’t he suffer scrutiny akin to that of Craig? At least three-dozen daily newspapers in the United States published the Craig news the day after the Roll Call scoop, according to Nexis, but this morning not a single U.S. daily mentioned the Enquirer piece.
Uh, what? Newspapers are supposed to report on the Enquirer’s story because what? It relies on unnamed sources (and no it is impossible to escape the irony of Shafer, of all people, pushing stories relying on anonymous sources)? There’s been a denial?
This might be the most dense sentence in the whole piece:
But if Edwards had an affair and lied about it, shouldn’t he suffer scrutiny akin to that of Craig?
The key word there Jack is “IF”. Yeah, maybe IF he had an affair he should get the same scrutiny BUT WE DON”T KNOW THAT HE HAS! THATS THE WHOLE POINT! Shafer really expects newspapers to report on this crap? I think Shafer needs to get as far away from Mickey Kaus as possible because Shafer’s usually solid judgment is totally absent in this case. Kinda sad.
PS: I told myself I wouldn’t actually talk about the substance of the Enquirer’s story (still not going to link to it) but this little bit keeps bugging me: where are the pictures? Correct me if I’m wrong but I haven’t seen any pictures of Edwards at the hotel, as alleged by the Enquirer. I have no idea if he was there or not but isn’t it a little weird that no pictures have surfaced? Especially since the Enquirer story mentions Edwards running into a photographer? Is he the worst photographer in the world and not able to snap a shot? Maybe there’s a reasonable explanation for why there’s no photos but I can’t think of one. Suspicious, no?