A few weeks ago, during the epic non-coverage of the John Edwards scandal, I wrote this:

I’ve been a media editor for many years and can tell you where the vast percentage of “media coverage” comes from. A big story breaks. Cue some upper editor, affecting sagacity and sucking on an imaginary journalistic pipe: “We should really take a look at the media coverage of this!” There was no actual story to do that a reader might find interesting, just, “Let’s take a look at the media coverage!” That’s “media writing” in the most insipid, Howard Kurtzian sense of the term.

Now, with the Edwards embarrassment behind it, big media can go back to the business as usual I described. Here’s the NYT today, with a quarter-page story, hedlined “TV Cameras Turn from G.O.P to Storm,” about how TV is covering  Hurricane Gustav rather than the Republican Convention.

ST. PAUL — The network news anchors, Katie Couric, Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, were diverted from here on Sunday, and with them went Senator John McCain’s chance to command the national stage for four nights before a huge television audience.

As it became clear on Sunday morning that Hurricane Gustav had the potential to do enormous damage to the Gulf Coast, the networks began upending their schedules for the Republican National Convention and reassigned many of their stars to a story that they believed had greater news potential.

Since there is nothing interesting to say on the subject beyond the hedline, by the end of the second paragraph, the poor reporter, Jim Rutenberg, has restated the hed’s thesis twice. In the fourth graf, he states it again:

Most of the broadcast networks had been planning to open their morning and evening newscasts on Monday from the floor of a convention hall festooned with signs promoting Mr. McCain’s message, “Country First.” But by midday, executives at the networks had for the most part decided to open their marquee programs from the Gulf Coast, a place that holds embarrassing symbolism for the Republican brand.

… and again, in graf seven:

The networks were careful to say that they still planned to devote an exceptional amount of coverage to the Republican convention, if and when it began in earnest. But, they said, depending on the impact of the storm, the convention was likely to have to share the news stage.

… and graf eight:

For news executives, there was little debate over whether to divert resources to the Gulf Coast as the storm built through Sunday morning.

… and several more times through the rest of the story.

That’s the modern way to cover the media. Over at the Washpost, Howard Kurtz has already bounced back from his humiliating role not just in the non-coverage of the Edwards debacle but his failure to write about the non-coverage. Last week he was back to his old tricks, adding yet another tonguebath of Katie Couric to his portfolio*.

Today, he leaps into action to discuss the implications of this momentous coverage switch, spelling out the mundanity of the decision with typical aplomb and at typical length:

“It’s kind of a no-brainer,” Kate O’Brian, ABC’s senior vice president, said of the decision to send [anchor Charles] Gibson to New Orleans. “Charlie goes where the big news is. . . . I don’t think it’s going to be looked at as a fairness issue when the Republicans are making the same decisions we are.”

By suspending all but minor business functions for Monday’s session, McCain’s team essentially ratified the media’s decision that the mass evacuation ordered in advance of a life-threatening hurricane is, for the moment, a more compelling story.

*The lengthy Couric piece joins others I detailed here. Note how it carefully avoids getting into Couric’s horrific ratings or dwelling on the pathetic one hour a night CBS gave the convention early in the week. Nothing wrong with a beat reporter sucking up to a source, but Couric at this point is one of the walking dead, professionally speaking. Does anyone care about what life is like for the least-watched news person of any consequence on all of television? How does Kurtz pitch the story to his editors? (”I would like to spend the day tagging along with a person whose work is entirely spurious to the event at hand.”) If he doesn’t have any oversight on stories like this, why didn’t he display the same carte blanche during the Edwards affair?

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….

It turns out he wasn’t just dodging the Edwards story in his role as the nation’s most powerful press critic. He was held back by nameless powerbrokers—the ones who take home the big bucks to decide such matters:

As the political fallout came to be openly debated in the North Carolina papers, I pursued the matter with my colleague Lois Romano and was struck by Edwards’s refusal to talk about whether he had a relationship with Rielle Hunter, his former campaign aide, or to even issue a statement. Edwards’s actions did not seem to be those of a man with nothing to hide. I came to believe that we should publish a story. But I don’t get paid to make those decisions.

But … doesn’t he get paid to write about the issues those mysterious folks decide? They’re called news editors. Media critics cover them! (”I came to believe that Jayson Blair was writing stories that simply weren’t true and that they should not have been published. But I don’t get paid to make those decisions.”)

One of the reasons I distrust Kurtz is not exactly that he’s not rigorous in his thinking … it’s that he’s not rigorous when it suits him not to be. There are two issues here: Whether the Post should have covered the Edwards story … and whether its press critic should have looked at the issue of the mainstream press noncoverage. (As I wrote several days ago, the silence of Kurtz and Tim Rutten at the LAT, not to mention the various folks at the NYT who write media criticism, notably David Carr, is a story in itself, particularly when you consider some of the trivialities often examined in the modern world of media reporting.)

In his latest “Media Notes” column, Kurtz addresses … dodges the issue. Press critics have a tough row to hoe. In theory, they should be slightly separate from the operation they work for; when they time comes they need to be able to take a step back and treat their own institutions with dispassion. (I know from experience it sometimes involved getting the cold shoulder from—or getting yelled at by—one’s bosses.) Kurtz is hopelessly compromised in any case. As a prominent figure at both the Post and CNN, via his weekly media show, Reliable Sources, it’s hard to trust his writing on any national newspaper (competitors of the Post) or the cable news channels (competitors of CNN); now we can see he can’t even do basic coverage of issues involving his employers.

With the cable channels endlessly interested in all sorts of tawdry nonstories it’s hard to believe they were living up to some moral standard by covering up the delectably rococo Edwards story. Beyond that its political ramifications were plain—that a presidential candidate had cheated on a cancer-stricken wife is a story whether he was in the campaign any more or not.

To me, only the most obvious public interest these stories have is the politician’s susceptibility to blackmail; you could argue that, say, Bill Clinton might have been somewhat protected from this because it would barely tarnish his already compromised reputation, but Edwards, particularly, since he campaigned as a family man and had made political appearances based on his wife’s illness, was certainly vulnerable.

And in both case, the cover-ups—utterly desperate and feckless—show to what extremes the politicians would go to not let the truth out. Any honest media observer would at least air these matters as a counterbalance to the timidity of the mainstream media. Kurtz didn’t.

He did, however, have time to pat himself on the back for an entirely spurious observance he made of Hunter’s videos at the beginning of the campaign, some 18 months ago:

One small irony: Early last year, I wrote a column about the behind-the-scenes video that Hunter produced for Edwards’s presidential run, a self-absorbed episode in which he said he would campaign “based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll.” After watching the smooth-talking candidate preen for the camera, I questioned whether he was engaged in “carefully choreographed candor.” I didn’t know how right I was.

And on his CNN show, in a burst of esprit de l’escalier:

Right. Well, here’s my two cents.

I mean, news organizations were clinging to a very important standard: Don’t run allegations that you can’t prove. But it became a ludicrous situation.

It was all over the North Carolina press in the past week, over the Internet, radio, FOX News. And there was the politics that we just talked about, the question about Edwards speaking at the Democratic convention. It almost became a conspiracy of silence by the media.

And Edwards, meanwhile, would not give interviews. He was not acting like a man who didn’t have something to hide.

I think at that point we should have earlier than we did told readers, told viewers what we knew and what we didn’t know.

p.s. No one on his show or in his column talked about how the affair damaged again the big media’s reputation. And Kurtz and his cohorts—including the NYT’s Carr—did not discuss the internal discussions they had in their respective newsrooms. I don’t mean they should have revealed the internal comments people made. But they should have identified the person in charge who did make the decision, and get them on the record saying why, and then gotten a quote from someone like Slate’s Mickey Kaus, who had followed the story for some time, explaining why that decision was incorrect.

p.p.s.  David Carr glancingly brings up the Ick Factor:

I think there is also a thing with John Edwards where people didn’t really want to believe that about him, didn’t want to believe the circumstances, and stayed away from it.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

John Edwards: Now it’s a story—And Howard Kurtz is on it!
The John Edwards missed-story list grows!
The John Edwards story: Down the media rabbit hole

Howard Kurtz is punished by being put on the Rielle Hunter beat. A cruel god will keep him there forever. No story on how the media ducked the story, however! And shouldn’t he take a good hard look at why he, Howard Kurtz, didn’t do a story about how media critics like him didn’t do a story about why media critics like him didn’t do a story on that failure? This brings the number of the potential stories the media avoided during the Edwards news blackout to six!

Hitsville is traveling and may or may not get to see Reliable Sources this a.m.; if Kurtz does take a look at the Edwards imbroglio, will he address this separate issue: How media critics refused to do stories about the noncoverage?

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

The John Edwards missed-story list grows!
The John Edwards story: Down the media rabbit hole

I can think now of five separate angles the mainstream news outlets are missing with the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter scandal story. In other words, by not writing about the charges originally—airing them out and letting their audience assess their validity—the media is now in the position of stamping down not one story, but five. What tangled webs we are weaving!

Once the story hits the front pages, as it inevitably will, we’re going to hear all the excuses as to why reputable news outlets couldn’t find their way to telling their readers patently interesting news about a major political figure that was widely available on the web. This arrogance will help reinforce the perceptions in the audience that the media is not always looking out for their best interests and continue the move to alternative outlets. I’m as devoted a follower of the traditional media as can be, but this willful non-disclosure makes me want to scream.

As yet, the cable channels have been somewhat shielded from this; it’s too bad there’s not a growing web-only political talk show that has been tracking this. (I can’t find any mentions of it on  bloggingheads.tv via its search box, but I don’t know how reliable the search engine is.)

Here are the stories, with the various points to hit in each included:

1) The National Enquirer’s creepy vendetta. How the tabloids work … the difference among the Enquirer, the Examiner and the Weekly World News … the Enquirer’s history of accuracy or inaccuracy … the logistics and costs of such a months-long effort … who owns it? … who calls the shots?

2) Why the mainstream press has dodged the story. The backstage timidity … the concern for Elizabeth Edwards … the Ick Factor … the inconsistency of whose adulterous affairs get written about and whose do not.

3) The silence of the lambs: Not anything you wouldn’t expect, but it’s worth noting that the the nation’s press critics and ombudsmen are quiet, too. Howie Kurtz, this is tailor made for you: Only you can investigate why you haven’t written this story! The one exception I know of is Jack Shafer in Slate, which has gone at the story several ways. But where is Tim Rutten? The Observer? Even Salon has offered only one tepid account of the Enquirer story. Which brings us to …

4) The compromised intellectual honesty of the liberal blogosphere. Kausfiles is linking to a Daily Kos regular who got his posting privileges disappeared after he started writing about the issue:

I’ve been posting at Kos for a long time. As more news about Edwards has come out, I followed up with more posts which were also the subject of a large number of comments. All of them looked at the Edwards situation from my point of view; that is, a liberal who is concerned about the implications this story may have in November.

Now I’m banned. I can’t write about ANYTHING at Kos. Can’t comment, can’t post a non-Edwards piece. Nothing.

Don’t we all agree that you get the facts out, then fight about what should be done or what it all means? Wait, we don’t?

I thought I had five different ideas. I’m missing one…

5) Oh, yeah: Did John Edwards cheat on his wife and get another woman pregnant? Edwards hasn’t substantively addressed the Enquirer’s charges.* The most recent debacle, according to both the tabloid and a corroborating story by foxnews.com, found him blockaded in a basement bathroom of the Beverly Hill luxury hotel in the early morning hours after he was caught by the Enquirer reporters allegedly paying Rielle Hunter and the infant in question a visit. Arguments about the Edwards’ privacy don’t hold water: Elizabeth already knows about it; Edwards was a presidential candidate; and the story is already out there. All the mainstream news outlets are doing by not writing about it is undermining their credibility.

In the meantime, Kausfiles is a good place to check for updates, as is Deceiver.

* In the post-Lewinsky Era, the cheating pol can no longer make a denial and then run off stage. The press needs to ask detailed questions to make sure he’s not, uh, isn’t lying like a dog. If Edwards doesn’t like that standard, he could call up Bill Clinton and complain to him about it!

There are now not one but three great stories the major media outlets are ignoring in the John Edwards scandal. Has there ever been a comparable instance of such broad alignment in the face of such extreme inevitability?

How does the media come out of this not looking ridiculous?

Will Howard Kurtz ever touch the story?

And who does John Edwards have to fuck to get some ink?

(The best place to keep up on this story is Kausfiles.)

Here are the three separate strains:

1) Did John Edwards have an affair during his presidential campaign and get a campaign contractor pregnant while his wife was battling cancer?
2) What lies behind the predatory tactics of the National Enquirer—A personal vendetta? Political payback? Or just perverse but nonetheless pure dogged journalistic iconoclasm?
3) Why did the mainstream press—by which I mean the nation’s leading newspapers and the political cable channels—all come to the same decision not to run with this story?

Not a conspiracy—but it is a devastating illustration of a similar mindset. Now, there are a million stories the media doesn’t cover and of course it’s not required to publish anything. But it is fair to implicate it in this instance, for two reasons:

a)    We’ve seen the gassily trivial and grimily prurient matters that generate such verbiage on print and on the talk shows. Hard to see how not even one of those three strains reach that bar. The first is a dramatic tale of high-stakes political gamesmanship. The second is a feature story of no little meat. And isn’t the third an intriguing sociological mystery?
b)    I’ve been a media editor for many years and can tell you where the vast percentage of “media coverage” comes from. A big story breaks. Cue some upper editor, affecting sagacity and sucking on an imaginary journalistic pipe: “We should really take a look at the media coverage of this!” There was no actual story to do that a reader might find interesting, just, “Let’s take a look at the media coverage!” That’s “media writing” in the most insipid, Howard Kurtzian sense of the term. In this context, when a guy who a lot of folks thought might be president is nailed with a love child, has an physical confrontation with a team of tabloid reporters that ends up with him barricaded in a basement bathroom of a Beverly Hills luxury hotel, and the media doesn’t report it, that it does not warrant coverage in the mainstream media suggests a breakdown in journalistic sensibility at some high levels.

What’s behind that breakdown? A puzzlement! Ideas:

1) The Ick Factor. It’s an unappetizing story. If it’s true, there’s a cancer-stricken wife publicly humiliated; what may be an unsettlingly elaborate cover-up on Edwards’ part; a child (whose name has already been published) who may grow up in a distastefully public environment ….

2) They’re chicken. Timidity and parochialism and prudishness reign in the modern newsroom. It may seem like the cable channels go for outrageousness, but of course, they have their established tropes—hurricanes, political gaffes, dead blondes—and don’t like getting out of them. And inside, there are some loud voices saying…

3) “It’s unproven.” This is a bit of risible sophistry—that’s a condition that would vaporize most cable discussions, for one. Those who use this argument are either playing on ignorance about the Enquirer or haven’t read the actual stories. A recurring tactic of the cable yaposphere in the Karl Rove-Fox News era is bland denial in the face of the obvious. There’s a famous Onion story about Barry Bonds—“Barry Bonds Took Steroids, Reports Everyone Who Has Ever Watched Baseball.” (Bonds’ status as a steroid user remains unproven as well.) The details in the Enquirer story are laid out clearly enough that they could be fodder for, if nothing else, a debunking story. “But,” someone will say…

4) “… it’s a private matter.” These same outlets delve deeply into people’s private lives every day, never more so than when the people in question have products to sell, generally books detailing past bad behavior. (The modern news media excels at assuring us celebrities are no longer doing things they, the media, didn’t tell us the celebs were doing at the time.) This one, too, has an odd feel to it. How is it private? Edwards was running for president. If the story is true, he was subjecting himself to blackmail, risking the election for the party (if it came out between the convention and the election), possibly even creating a political or constitutional crisis (if he was elected and had to resign before he took office). And then there’s the character issue. The problem with Bill Clinton is that he wasn’t carrying on a discrete affair with an ambassador’s wife. He was boffing an intern in the Oval Office. In both cases, the reckless private behavior created political (which is to say public) risks of some import. Clinton’s arguably cost Gore the election.

5) The one other argument against publishing the two ancillary stories is that they de facto involve publishing the first. This is an intellectually coherent point, but it suffers from the sin of lack of perspective. You don’t withhold news and damage your reputation by adhering to the nth degree to what are supposed to be general rules, particularly when those rules are hypocritical and inconsistent in the first place. And this argument reveals the impotence of the pre-internets media mindset; are they really not smart enough to co-opt the competition? What does this debacle do but expose their timidity?

In the meantime, the story is getting worse. The Enquirer is now reporting the details of what it says is a “hush money” payoff scheme of $15,000 a month to Hunter, through a wealthy friends of Edwards’. And the McClatchy newspapers have seen the child’s birth certificate, and have published her name. The report says there was no father listed on the certificate, though Hunter has publicly said the father is Andrew Young, a former campaign finance manager for Edwards’ presidential campaign.

Update: I just thought of a fourth angle! Why have the mainstream media critics gone silent? Why doesn’t Howard Kurtz do a story about why Howard Kurtz hasn’t looked into why the mainstream media hasn’t covered the story?

… but it is odd that this story is not major news.

The first Enquirer story raised odd questions about the behavior of Edwards and some of his staff. He was eventually asked at a news conference if he was having an affair. He vehemently denied it, a few mainstream news outlets reported the denial, and that was that.

Fair enough, but he’s still mentioned as a vice presidential possibility. But now, this new story has been up on Drudge since yesterday afternoon but isn’t turning up on Google News at any mainstream daily. This is the most outre part of it; the slightly odd punctuation and boldface are the Enquirer’s:

Edwards went out of the hotel briefly with Rielle, they were observed by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER and then went back to her room, where he stayed until attempting to sneak out of the hotel unseen at 2:40 a.m. (PST). But when he emerged alone from an elevator into the hotel basement he was greeted by several reporters from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

Senior NATIONAL ENQUIRER Reporter Alexander Hitchen asked Edwards why he was visiting Rielle and whether he was ready to confirm that he was the father of  her baby.

Shocked to see a reporter, and without saying anything, Edwards ran up the stairs leading from the hotel basement to the lobby. But, spotting a photographer, he doubled back into the basement. As he emerged from the stairwell, reporter Butterfield questioned him about his hookup with Rielle.

Edwards did not answer and then ran  into a nearby restroom.

I bring it up because this may be an example of the Ick Factor in action.

The Ick Factor, you will recall, is Hitsville’s formulation that, despite all the talk about the tabloid world we live in, some people, Roman Polanski, R. Kelly and, possibly, John Edwards among them, manage to operate in the face of overwhelming evidence of deplorable behavior, simply because the press doesn’t have the stomach to report the facts of their cases.