The N&O, the Enquirer and Edwards

For some readers, one of the biggest stories last week was one that didn't get much play in The News & Observer.

Why, readers asked me over the course of the week, hasn't The N&O given us more information on John Edwards' alleged mistress and "love child?" "Please report the story," wrote Peggy Maurer. "It is newsworthy and the people of North Carolina, especially those who do not have access to the Internet or other national newspapers, have a right to know what our senator is up to these days."

By Friday, The N&O had responded with two articles. The question is: Should the paper be covering a story that, heretofore, has been tabloid fare?

The story originated in The National Enquirer, which in October reported that Edwards fathered a child with a woman who had provided video services to his presidential campaign. On July 22, The Enquirer posted an item on its Web site saying its reporters had observed Edwards visiting the woman in the early morning hours in her room at a Beverly Hills hotel. The story was picked up by Fox News on July 25, and by early last week it was all over the blogosphere.

The N&O did not publish anything until Thursday, when it ran a short item in the Under the Dome column about an Edwards appearance in Washington on Wednesday. After the speech, Edwards ducked a throng of reporters waiting to ask him about the Enquirer story, exiting via a rear entrance of the hotel. Intercepted by a McClatchy news reporter, Edwards refused to answer her questions.

On Friday, The N&O published a story by McClatchy reporters from The N&O and The Charlotte Observer saying there was no father listed on the baby's birth certificate.

The N&O approached the story cautiously. On Wednesday, John Drescher, executive editor, told me that N&O reporters were investigating the allegations but that the paper would not publish a story about the tabloid report. "I don't view the National Enquirer as a credible source of news," he said.

But the story did end up in the paper Thursday when The N&O wrote about the encounter between Edwards and the press in Washington. Why? "We got our first opportunity to ask Edwards about it," Drescher said. "We hadn't been able to get to him before. We gave him an opportunity to address the allegations in the report, and he declined the opportunity." The spectacle of Edwards going to extreme lengths to dodge the media made the story more interesting, he said.

The Edwards story -- or, maybe, nonstory -- is a good illustration of the dilemma the "mainstream media" increasingly face operating in a no-holds-barred, 24-7, instant-news environment. Newspapers and other media that once were news gatekeepers -- applying traditional standards of fact-finding and verification -- are finding themselves guarding the gate to a news corral that has been stampeded by bloggers, cable "news," talk radio and, in this case, tabloids.

In the Edwards case, much of The N&O's audience knew about the story from the other media and assumed that The N&O was withholding it out of favoritism to Edwards. (One response to that: The N&O on Thursday published a front-page story about Edwards' ending his college scholarship program for low-income high school students in Greene County.)

Several points need to be made. First, the story appeared on the Web site of a tabloid that, as Drescher pointed out, is not a credible information source. The Enquirer claimed to have photos of the Los Angeles encounter, but it didn't post them on the Web site, and it has yet to run a story in the print edition (I admit it -- I went to the supermarket twice looking for a National Enquirer).