Top Journos Criticize, Defend Edwards Affair Coverage

By: Joe Strupp Coverage of the John Edwards affair -- or the lack of it -- brought mixed reactions from major news editors as well as close observers who disagreed over whether the "mainstream media" did enough to look into allegations prior to the politician's confession last week.

"There is a fair amount of evidence that some publications did pursue this," said Andy Alexander, Washington bureau chief for Cox Newspapers. "How aggressively is hard to say." Alexander wondered if the ongoing cutbacks in some newsrooms affected efforts: "A secondary question is whether staff cuts have reduced our ability as news organizations to go after investigations that take time and money."

Some have criticized the lack of coverage, but Michael Oreskes, The Associated Press' managing editor for U.S. news, defended AP's hesitancy to run a story prior to the confession. "The AP did look into this and was looking into it when Edwards decided to make his statement," he said in an e-mail to E&P Tuesday. "The standard of proof for confirming and publishing information on this kind of private, intimate behavior is and should be very high. I have not the slightest regret for sticking to those high standards. Getting it first is great. Getting it right is essential."

Reports in the National Enquirer of Edwards' affair with campaign worker Rielle Hunter, and a still unproven allegation that he fathered her baby, date back to late 2007, when Edwards remained a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

More recently, in mid-July, the stories re-emerged with Enquirer reports that Edwards had been spotted in a Beverly Hills Hotel with Hunter and the child. For two weeks he ignored or denied the reports, until last Friday when he confessed to ABC News that he had had an extramarital relationship, but claimed he did not father the child.

The only major newspaper outlet to repeatedly report on the recent allegations prior to the confession was McClatchy, which owns the two major papers in the former senator's native North Carolina, making this a "local" story. A McClatchy reporter first asked Edwards about the Enquirer report on July 31 and wrote about his declining to answer. The chain's Charlotte (N.C.) Observer followed a day later by obtaining a copy of the baby's birth certificate and reporting it did not list a father.

John Walcott, McClatchy's Washington bureau chief, said the decision to pursue the story based on the Enquirer could be tricky for some. But he believed there was enough there to ask the questions.

"We had been trying to report on it for some time, basically treating the National Enquirer story as if it were a tip," he told E&P. "Our reaction to it is to ask whether or not it is true."

Since Edwards' confession, the story has appeared in every major news outlet, including Page One of The New York Times, which had declined to run anything before.

Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt took the paper, and other major dailies, to task on Sunday, not so much for failing to report the Enquirer charges but for waiting too long to do their own probes, stating in a column: "I think The Times ? like The Washington Post, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, major networks and wire services ? was far too squeamish about tackling the story. The Times did not want to regurgitate the Enquirer?s reporting without verifying it, which is responsible. But The Times did not try to verify it, beyond a few perfunctory efforts, which I think was wrong."

Alexander said he understands why some outlets were reluctant given the Enquirer's standing in the industry. "I think one of the hesitations that news organizations have is that they have quite different standards than the Enquirer," he said. But he added that when the initial reports surfaced last year, they should have been more closely investigated because Edwards was a candidate at the time.

"This clearly strikes me as news for a number of reasons," Alexander added. "He was a national political figure, a serious contender for the Democratic nomination. He had professed his commitment to his wife and he had tried to cover it up."

Alexander says his reporters did not look into the story because they primarily cover national issues related to their local audiences in Atlanta, Austin and other Cox-owned newspaper locations. "That is one we would leave to others," he explained.

Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, agreed that the late 2007 report carried enough impact as to spark investigations by reporters: "This was a serious story when he was running for president and I fault the major news organizations for not covering it because it was relevant to the campaign. It really mattered then.

"It showed John Edwards' recklessness in having an affair and the issue of whether he lied about it," he adds. "I fault the news organizations at the time for holding their noses and burying their heads."

Keith Woods, dean of the faculty at The Poynter Institute, defended the press for not jumping on the story just because the Enquirer reported it. He said the question for editors is how important the issue being investigated is to voters.

"If you had reason to believe that Edwards was hiding part of his past life that would somehow change the way people viewed him in the public sphere and you failed to chase that story, you failed," Woods said. "One of the measures is the importance of that thing you seek to find out."

Walcott at McClatchy said the test his bureau used included several questions: "What evidence is there? How wild is the allegation? And to what extent is this the public's business? I believe that John Edwards is still a public figure so it is worth pursuing."

The AP's Oreskes cited an AP story distributed just hours after Edwards' admitted the affair that sought to explain the news cooperative's delay in coverage.

"Efforts had failed to find someone who could reveal the facts or to uncover a document linking Edwards to 42-year-old Rielle Hunter," the story said. "No father is listed on the birth certificate, which the AP and other news organizations had obtained, and other evidence such as Edwards' political action committee paying her $100,000 for videos was only circumstantial.

"That left little for reporters. The AP had been among those reporting in October 2007 that Edwards flatly stated that the Enquirer's initial story was false -- a lie, he now admits. Still, the opening allowed news organizations to report what they otherwise stayed away from."