Being first with a story isn't necessarily anything to be proud of: if you're recycling rumour with insufficient evidence, it's no endorsement of your journalism if your wild allegations subsequently happen to prove true. Some serious caveats are in order, of course. "The National Enquirer is a supermarket tabloid," wrote the Washington politics blogger Emily Miller, who led a grassroots campaign to lobby the Pulitzer committee, "but the time has come for the media elite to admit that it has an excellent investigative reporting team, which broke the biggest political scandal of 2009." But though the Enquirer had reported the affair in October 2007, adding news of the love child in December and fleshing out the story over the following months, it was August 2008 before the name "Rielle Hunter" appeared in the New York Times, by which time the Edwards campaign was over. Unlike many tales of private sexual misdemeanour, the story was of undeniable political importance, even without the hush-money allegations: if Edwards had won the nomination, but then the truth had leaked out during the general election, the media's silence might effectively have determined the presidency. Looking back at how the Edwards story unfolded, it's hard not to conclude that the most important media organisations in the US – the New York Times, the Washington Post and the main TV networks – were asleep at the wheel. But that the idea could even be contemplated marks a watershed in the relationship between politicians, the mainstream American media, and the once-shadowy underworld of gossip, chequebook journalism and unsubstantiated rumour. It should be clarified, at this point, that the National Enquirer almost certainly won't actually win any Pulitzer prizes when they're announced next month. "That persistence, that old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting that we exhibited on this story, at the end of the day, is what the Pulitzer committee recognised," he told ABC. The magazine's executive editor, Barry Levine, who just a few days previously had been telling Pulitzer committee-members that they needed "to get their heads out of the sand", was jubilant. Even the Enquirer seemed a little shocked by the news, running a story on its website (alongside "Swayze Widow Secret Sorrow" and "Susan Boyle Meltdown") that used the word "historic" three times in a few hundred words. Whether it's true or not is largely beside the point.Īnd so it might have come as a surprise last week to learn that the Pulitzer committee, bestowers of the world's most celebrated journalism awards, had stroked their chins, weighed the arguments, and concluded that the Enquirer will be eligible to be considered for their investigative reporting and national news reporting awards. You might learn, this week in the National Enquirer, for example, that Whitney Houston is "DYING!" - "SHE COLLAPSES after cocaine and booze binges" - but even if you buy it, you don't necessarily believe it. The magazines you pick up at the supermarket checkout, alongside the chewing gum and the loyalty-card application forms, signify by their lurid colours, all-capitals headlines and cheap paper that they're not to be taken seriously. But most Americans would have agreed with Edwards's implicit logic: you can't trust what you read in the National Enquirer. He was lying, of course: we know now that the Edwards campaign had been a tangled web of coverups, secret hotel trysts, explosions of rage and furtive phone calls an aide falsely claimed to be the father of the child, and there were rumours of campaign money being used to pay hush money to Hunter.
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