Media bias and John Edwards' (alleged) mistress

The National Enquirer says it confronted former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards in a Los Angeles hotel the other night when he was supposedly carrying out a rendezvous with his alleged mistress and the mother of his love child. According to the newspaper's account, when its reporters ambushed him, he ran up the back stairs and hid in the men's room until security rousted him out. It was quite a story. So why haven't the mainstream media reported any of it?

Jack Shafer of Slate thinks there's hypocrisy here -- that the MSM was eager to report on Larry Craig's bathroom arrest, but won't touch the Edwards story. I'd like to agree with Shafer, whose take suits my own views about media bias, but it's more complicated than that.

We talked about this issue in yesterday's editorial board meeting at the Dallas Morning News. The Enquirer is actually a more solid investigative outfit than many people think. After the O.J. mess, it got some real credibility among some reporters for the serious, if grimy, investigative work it did. You might not like what the Enquirer reported or the way it reported it, but often it's scoops were reliable.

Did the Enquirer really catch John Edwards cheating on his wife? If I had to bet money on it, I'd say yes. But if I were the editor of a newspaper, I wouldn't go with the story, at least not at this point. Why? Because it comes from the Enquirer, for one thing -- though that wouldn't be sufficient to kill it in my mind, given how much more solid the Enquirer has become. The main reason is because even though the Enquirer reporters say they had this dramatic confrontation with Edwards in the Beverly Hilton, there are no photographs of the moment. You'd think that if you were a tabloid reporter planning to catch Edwards more or less in flagrante delicto, you'd have a photographer hiding out to capture the deer-in-headlights moment.

They didn't, apparently. How come?

In the Larry Craig case, there was no photograph, but there was a police record to rely on. In the Edwards case, there's only the word of tabloid reporters. Again, I suspect Team Enquirer is telling the truth here. But with a story as hot as this one, you need more than that to publish it in your newspaper or report it on your newscast, and validate it with mainstream credibility.

UPDATE: A reader sends along this interview with the Enquirer's editor, who says that there was a photographer there, and 10 eyewitnesses. Let's see some photos. The Enquirer editor also blames the MSM for not being curious about the story all along.