Edwards catch-up

By Jennifer J. Foster

Published: July 28, 2008

A lot has happened over the past few days in the John Edwards story-that’s-not-a-story.

First, the National Enquirer announced that two of its reporters had filed a criminal complaint against the hotel guards who spirited Edwards away from Enquiring minds at the Beverly Hilton last week. In the complaint, the reporters allege that the guards “acted unlawfully while the reporters were trying to question the former senator.”

Never mind that the questioning was being done in the bathroom. In the basement.

Enquirer reporters got all their ducks in a row for the stakeout. They made sure they registered as hotel guests to ensure that they had proper right to be on hotel property. They held off on confronting Edwards until he was leaving the hotel – enabling them to document the time he was there and the movements he made throughout the hotel while he was there.

Only then did they pounce.

The Enquirer’s initial story about the encounter said that the guards intervened after Edwards took refuge from reporters in a men’s room:

Edwards … ran into a nearby restroom. He stayed inside for about 15 minutes, refusing to answer questions from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER about what he was doing in the hotel. A group of hotel security men eventually escorted him from the men’s room, while preventing the NATIONAL ENQUIRER reporters from following him out of the hotel.

Of course, Edwards has denied all this. But the Enquirer isn’t easily denied.

Enter the criminal complaint, which Enquirer lawyers made possible through their knowledge of (and familiarity with?) an otherwise obscure section of California law:

The reporters charge that not only did one security guard threaten to break their camera but that security also violated several statutes of the California Penal Code, including false imprisonment and preventing a guest from entering land.

The ENQUIRER reporters were registered guests at the hotel, while Edwards was not.

Now, how many cameras do you think the photographers for the National Enquirer have had broken in their time? How many times do you think they and the reporters have been removed, even forcefully removed, from locations where their presence – ahem – isn’t desired?

Hostility is nothing new to National Enquirer staffers. So the criminal complaint, of course, is nothing more than a roundabout way of eliciting comment from Edwards: “Edwards now could be contacted by police to give an eyewitness account of what occurred,” the story says.

Presumably under penalty of perjury.

Wow.

There’s a certain beauty to a “get” that provides an avenue to a second “get.”

So the mainstream media began to take notice of the story, but in two entirely different ways.

Fox News was first, posting the Edwards-was-caught-at-the-Hilton story on Friday. But – tricky, tricky – it used confirmation of the event by one of the security guards involved in the skirmish as the news peg. That way, FNC was able to mention all the controversial (salacious?) stuff, but attribute it all to the Enquirer.

Meanwhile, Slate’s Mickey Kaus notes that the Los Angeles Times gagged its bloggers on the issue, forbidding them from mentioning it at all. “That will certainly calm paranoia about the Mainstream Media (MSM) suppressing the Edwards scandal,” he wrote.

Now, that’s good sarcasm.

Kaus went on to wonder whether the Times’ gag order was “part of a double-standard that favors Democrats (and disfavors Republicans like Rep. Vito Fossella and John McCain)“ or if it simply reflects “an outmoded Gatekeeper Model of journalism in which not informing readers of certain sensitive allegations is as important as informing them—as if readers are too simple-minded to weigh charges that are not proven, as if they aren’t going to find out about such controversies anyway?”

Kaus also mentions the speculation on BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine’s blog that it may be the attorney generalship, not the vice presidency, that’s at stake in this scandal.

More on what the Edwards story means for journalism in a bit.