A week and a half ago, Hitsville listed the five stories that had metastasized as the major media ignored the John Edwards affair story. A few have begun to dribble out. In yesterdays NYT, for example, David Carr takes a look at the Enquirer and finds something surprising:

Like any journalism, what the Enquirer does costs money — the Edwards investigation took nine months — and that’s in short supply at the headquarters of American Media. The company’s revenue for the quarter ended June 30 was $119 million, down 2 percent. Operating income was off slightly at $26 million and over all, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization were down 6 percent.

Decent numbers, but a massive debt overhang is demanding better performance. Early next year, $400 million comes due and if those payments cannot be made, another $500 million will come due. With almost $1 billion in debt and a declining subscription-based tabloid business, the dream of taking the company public seems very distant.

While the Enquirer’s parent company may be debt-laden and the tab business may be in decline, a 20+ percent return and $2 million a week in profits is nothing to sneer at. I would have liked more details—how the decision was made to pursue the Edward story, how the paper went about it, how many people were on Edwards’ tail, and for how long—but there was an actual story there, as it turned out.

That sideshow aside, others have ventured into trying to explain why the country’s major media, almost without exception, didn’t follow up on the Enquirer’s investigation. Isn’t it strange that, after two weeks of hand wringing, many major organizations still haven’t answered the question intelligently or honestly?

While the papers should probably have been devoting some resources to the Edwards story after the original stories alleging the affair were published many months ago, the story changed significantly on July 22, the day the Enquirer reporters caught Edwards in that Beverly Hills hotel.

Even if you don’t want to report about the personal activities of Edwards, this falls under the heading of pure spectacle—Edwards barricading himself in a basement restroom, having been treed there, so to speak, by the baying Enquirer hounds—and is of intrinsic interest.

(As I noted before, this is particularly true when you consider the utter triviality of so much news coverage, much of it generated from PR initiatives from the politicians themselves. Live by the photo op with cancer-stricken wife, die by the basement bathroom assault from tabloid hyenas.)

After that point, the papers were suppressing information. (The chances that the Enquirer made up the confrontation seem pretty low.) This distinction is glided over almost uniformly by the post-mortemers, you might say conveniently so.

In the NYT story discussing the lack of coverage (which came out only after Edwards had confessed), the Wash Post’s top editor didn’t get pressed on this point:

“These kinds of allegations fly around about just about every candidate,” said Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Washington Post, which had not written about the affair until Friday. “We checked them out and we asked questions, and at no time did we have any facts to report.”

Foxnews.com had, at that point, confirmed that the confrontation in the hotel had happened, so the papers seem to have had a verifiable contention on their hands. They could interview the Enquirer reporters, and talk to people at the hotel, and then get a comment from Edwards. That the Post and every other major media organization didn’t do that shows that they had an agenda that isn’t explained by their excuses.

Downie’s not an unserious guy, but it’s kinda sad when the editor of the Washington Post displays the same sort of fact avoidance and weak rationale of, say, Dennis Ryerson, editor of the Indianapolis Star:

[Y]es, the media were slow to react to the Edwards story. Is that automatically bad?

Anybody can post anything on the Internet. A lot of good information shows up but a lot of lies, innuendoes and outright falsities surface as well.

… or Jack Lessenberry, ombudsman of the Toledo Blade:

Ron Royhab, The Blade’s vice president-executive editor, said, “Yes, we knew about these rumors, but we aren’t in the business of reporting rumors and gossip just because it shows up in a tabloid somewhere.”
[…]
I am not sure if The Blade should have done anything differently.

… or the redoubtable Connie Coyne, the Reader’s Advocate from the Salt Lake Tribune:

Every once in a while folks in the journalism business get their shorts in a knot for what can seem to be no apparent reason.
The latest knot is about whether the mainstream media (newspapers, television and radio, as opposed to blogs and tabloid publications) should have jumped in right after The National Enquirer and others printed stories about the rumors that former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was cheating on his wife (who has stage 4 cancer) while he was running for the top political job in the country.
Remember, please, that the flap is about printing rumors, not investigating rumors to track down fact.
The mainstream media outlets - for the most part - stayed clear of the Edwards rumors until after Edwards finally admitted the affair, saying he told his wife about it in 2006.
The National Enquirer, apparently hearing the rumor, rushed out to California where it exercised its stock-in-trade, checkbook journalism, to buy information from a source extremely close to the mistress (some folks guesstimate the information came from the mistress in exchange for a big fat check). 

(Links via Romenesko.) Those guesstimating folks with their shorts in a knot!

The Indiana Star’s Lessenberry and Salt Lake Tribune’s factually challenged Coyne are good examples of how newspapers use ombudsmen to cover up problems, not highlight them; you just hire someone who (in Lessenberry’s case) doesn’t think too hard or ask uncomfortable questions, or (as in Coyne’s case) who writes pugnaciously on a subject with the basic facts of which she is unfamiliar.

Any conscientious reporter faced with such dissembling would press through the obfuscation. The story wasn’t rumor and gossip: At this point, it was a full-on Marx Bros. routine, seen by more than a half-dozen people, that included a luxury hotel, a philandering pol, a dizzy mistress, a baby, a staircase, a men’s bathroom, and, finally, a deus ex machina in the form of a hotel security guard who in the movie version, I am sure, will be played by Billy Gilbert.

But again, the issue now is not whether the papers should have written about that imbroglio … it’s that they’re not even being straitforward about the facts involved while scrambling to justify to readers why they didn’t! And the mystery of what the actual rationale was for not writing about Edwards and the hotel continues, from papers like the Wash Post to TV networks like CNN.

If only they employed a media critic who would take a tough look at the issue….