‘The media establishment’s rogue uncle’

By Jennifer J. Foster

Published: September 22, 2008

We spent a good bit of time here exploring John Edwards’ I’m-saying-it’s-tabloid-trash-but-it’s-really-the-truth scandal involving Rielle Hunter, so I thought you might enjoy reading this Newsweek article about the National Enquirer, the tabloid that brought you all the news that the mainstream/traditional media didn’t see fit to print.

Jonathan Mahler writes:

Think of the Enquirer as the media establishment’s rogue uncle who likes to throw back a few at family reunions and then regale relatives with tacky, delicious stories of debatable veracity. He isn’t entirely assimilated into polite company, but then you can’t stop listening to him, either. The tabloid’s arrival in our nation’s newsrooms is eagerly greeted with a combination of admiration, disgust and envy. Journalistic hand-wringing (should we have had that story?) and soul-searching (is it even news?) invariably follow. “Most journalists approach the Enquirer with radioactive tongs,“ says Howard Kurtz, longtime media critic for The Washington Post. “But they know full well that the paper has a track record of nailing big stories about politicians and sex — even while using methods that we don’t approve of.“

It’s gotten tougher to ignore the rogue uncle of late. “Despite our initial reticence, journalists ended up doing the Edwards affair story and the Jesse Jackson love-child story and others,“ Kurtz says. “The fact is that we all live in a tabloid world now, and sometimes public people do stupid things.“

Yes, they do, and so does the mainstream media—stupid things like willfully ignoring major news, i.e. the Edwards-Hunter story.