Tough to Prove?

In the wake of John Edwards' acknowledgment of an extra-marital affair yesterday, the AP has run a piece explaining just 'how tough to prove' the story was and how people shouldn't beat up the media for it's total lack of anything resembling reportage on the issue.

The entire piece is a sniveling string of excuses that doesn't help anything. Blogs and the National Enquirer have been investigating this since last fall and in the end, it paid off- the mainstream media on the other hand completely looked the other way. They looked the other way when Edwards was running for President, they looked the other way afterwards. When a potential Democratic nominee was busy lying his ass off about an affair that could have been fatal to the party's chances in the fall, the media was nowhere to be found.

This crap about the National Enquirer 'not being credible' is the closest thing to an excuse I've seen, but even the NE gets a live one now and again. The media shouldn't ignore them 100% of the time. What it's symptomatic of is a media that is woefully negligent when it comes to holding politicians to account. The media's lack of spine helped drag us into the Iraq War and now we see them protecting what, despite the nastiness of it, is a credible story.

I'm not advocating a mass invasion of the Edwards family's privacy at this time- things have got to be difficult enough for them already- but at the end of the day a Presidential Candidate lied about an affair. And whether you think it should be none of our business or not, the fact that he was running for the highest office in the land, having an affair and lying about it is something we have the right to ask some very pointed questions about.