I suddenly realized that the story originally aluded to was likely the Edwards story.

On another site it is being noted that if the story had been public when the Iowa vote was done that Edwards votes would have likely gone to Clinton.

No doubt Clinton’s supporters are not happy with the late disclosure.

The LA Times, which you gave a pass to in your post, has been actively suppressing the Edwards story. When it comes to Republicans though, the LA Times gleefully reported the McCain/Lobbyist alleged affair.

The Edward’s bastard child story came out last fall when Edwards was actively pursuing the Democrat nomination.

The media treated it like a hot potato.

Why would the media (print/cable/nightly news) focus on McCain’s alleged affair and not Edwards?

Hmmm. Lets think real hard about that one.

Oh yeah.. lets chalk it up to journalist contemplating ‘ethics’. Yeah, right. Not even close.

If Edwards now is a ‘private’ citizen and thus not able to be targeted by the media outing his ‘private’ peccadillos — then explain why the LA Times/NY Times/MSM reported with glee the Rush Limbaugh pill scandal — sourced directly from the National Enquirer?

Rush Limbaugh never ran for president and never held public office but was treated to front page stories about his divorce and ‘doctor shopping’. I guess you forgot about that blatant example of media bias.

Thank you for giving me credit, but in all honesty, the post you link to was not inspired by a tip about the Edwards scandal (as I think I make explicit in a subsequent post), but was about a different candidate’s scandal problem.

But as someone who used to be a journalist in Flyover Country, let me respond to some of the above commenters by saying you can’t have it both ways.

Either you want a media that does its level best to vet its facts before it reports a story, or you want unfiltered access to all the information a reporter or editor “knows.”

And you can get into your tin-foil hat and cry “MSM conspiracy” to the whole internet, but guess what, the MSM is made up of flesh and blood people who have to make decisions when they go into work every day. And just like you, sometimes they make the right ones, and sometimes not. And when not, everybody knows about it, Google never lets that misstep fade from memory, and it’s not like the pay (for a reporter) makes it all worth it.

One of the first lessons I learned as a cub reporter was that I was always going to know more about the story than I could possibly report. Sometimes, that was due to space and the cost of newsprint (back in the analog days), but more often it was a judgment call on how many sources confirmed the information and what their level of credibility was.

I would have knock-down-drag-out fights with my editor right up until deadline and the next day or the next week, removed from the heat of the story-chase, I could see the wisdom in his decisions. Because the people the MSM is writing about are flesh-and-blood too, and sometimes, like on the internet, it’s easy to lose sight of that.

I love the internet for its transparency. But I am also in awe of its power to wreck real, human lives. This is the information age, and information is powerful currency. Maybe giving some thought to how we spend that currency is a good thing.

Sorry for the long post, but it’s early here and the coffee is strong.

I wasn’t necessarily recommending you should have censored yourself because of how people reacted. But where I took issue with your original piece is that I thought you were trying to get us a little pregnant. I was uneasy about what I perceived as going only half-way.

I believe there is a less of a distinction between the position you’re in and that of the LAT’s than you want to believe. Not by a choice you made, but simply because “you know.” That’s the power of the idea. And especially, once you wrote your story. You could have chosen not to. But this just repeats my first comments.

Were you exercising sound restraint by not blurting out a rumor that you can’t know is true or false? I think so. But I’m uncomfortable with the LAT sitting on a story they believe is valid. Especially when the democratic process could be affected. I think we ought to let democracy rule. Let the chips fall where they may.

Writing my first comment, I was reminded of the last time I saw All the President’s Men. A new impression I had on this viewing was how often – and how easily – the story and the entire investigation might have been derailed. It made me extremely nervous how much teetered on decisions – being made by smart, reasonable people – that could have gone either way, based on sound, ethical thinking. With the entire story, perhaps, hanging in the balance at each of these crossroads. I get shivers thinking about the possibility.

Well, at the risk of repeating myself, the point is I don’t know. I only know that certain DC insiders think they know the LAT has a story. I don’t know that it does, or if the putative story is true. I wrote the post because it seemed to me that such unpublished rumored knowledge could well be affecting published coverage and it was worth pointing that out..

My thought to you is that if you really wanted to generate light rather than traffic, you could have – and still can – called and interviewed members of the MSM about their response and paper’s position on this story. If everyone knows, as claims your source, you should have been able to get people to talk about why they are not writing about it. (Although I am aware that journalists hate to get interviewed about their own work, part of the hypocrisy of the machine, put so be it.)

So if this is a discussion, let us know what you are hearing from the field and how folks are responding to it.

Jack Straw

Appreciate your suggestion, but it seems to me there’s a conflict in what you’re saying: “merely particpating” i.e. writing about the subject is bad, but you want me to write more, intensively, devote all my writing and reporting time to it, but somehow that wouldn’t generate publicity? I’ve followed an informal policy with the blog of writing what strikes me as interesting and may be of interest to others without calculating or being dictated to by what I think people will think. I have strong opinions I’d like people to read but I don’t think I do any posts merely for publicity. Read the blog, I think you’ll find that to be true.