Gina Smith: Newsbreaker

By Jennifer J. Foster

Last week I told you about Matt Pressman’s list of the Top 9 Reasons to Hate the Media.

Today, I give you an example of some excellent journalism.

Gina Smith is an enterprising reporter from The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C. It seems that Smith followed a hunch—and an anonymous tip—and headed to the Atlanta airport in time to meet a flight arriving from Buenos Aires at 6:15 a.m. on June 24.

As she stood there in the arrivals area, waiting for disembarking passengers to come up the escalator into the baggage claim and car rental areas, self-doubt and skepticism flooded her mind.

And then South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford rose into view.

As he stepped off the escalator, Smith’s reporter instincts took over, even as she stood in shock that he was actually there: She shot his picture, approached him and began asking questions.

I hope you’ll read her column about what happened next, before the widely covered news conference in which he admitted that he hadn’t been on the Appalachian Trail, after all.

This is the takeaway from Smith’s column: “Later that day, Sanford admitted to a room full of journalists that he had had an extramarital affair with a woman from Argentina. I always will wonder if the story would have broken if I had failed to catch him in the airport.“

There’s no way to know for sure. But this much is certain: If he hadn’t stepped off the escalator into a curious Gina Smith, her ready camera and her probing questions, Sanford’s Wednesday probably would have been a lot more pleasant.

And one more thing: You might have heard Jenny Sanford’s statements that her husband had actually asked permission to visit his mistress. Put that together with her statements from the previous week in which she told the press that she didn’t know where her husband was. Now, what do you suppose are the chances that the anonymous tipster who encouraged Smith to check out flights arriving from Buenos Aires was ... Jenny Sanford?

I hope it was.

See also:

You simple must read this post from RCP’s Sean Trende. The reasons to love it are many, and it starts with the headline: “Moron Sanford.“

Trende explains in the first line that he meant to write, “More on Sanford.“

Now that’s funny.

Trende offers three serious, thoughtful observations about the Sanford scandal. And then, when discussing Sanford’s e-mails to his Argentinean lover, Trende closes with this: “And apparently ellipses are the only form of punctuation in Argentina.“

Well done.

The transcript of Sanford’s June 24 news conference, which will long remain one of the most bizarre, rambling, uncomfortable things I have ever seen.