|
Edwards story blacked out by mainstream media
At 2:40 a.m. on July 22 National Enquirer reporters caught John Edwards, the former Democratic Party nominee for vice president, coming from the Los Angeles hotel room of the woman he had previously denied was his mistress and the mother of his child. This morning we learn from Jack Shafer at Slate that not a single U.S. daily has so far printed this news. Liberals are, of course, very delicate in the way they approach these issues. In the liberal rule book, there is nothing wrong or even newsworthy about adultery or homosexual conduct by a politician, or even by a presidential candidate or a president. Only if the individual has been “hypocritical” about his conduct is it wrong or newsworthy. But Shafer, showing deference to liberal sensibilities, argues that Edwards’s previous denials of the story, combined with the manufactured tale that an Edwards loyalist was the real father of the child, make the revelation of the truth of the affair newsworthy even by liberal standards.
As for me, I’m less interested in the liberal sin of hypocrisy than I am in the facts. The fact is that the married Edwards while he was running for president of the United States had a girl friend who was pregnant with his child and who gave birth to the child either during his candidacy or shortly after the candidacy ended. Call me naive or puritanical, but that sure sounds like news to me, and it astonishes me that no mainstream newspaper editor in this country agrees. Email entry |