I’ve gotten several emails for readers telling me that I’m a hypocrite for relying on the National Enquirer’s reporting in the John Edwards case and being skeptical about it (so far) in the Palin case. I certainly expected the comments.
This is my thinking. The Enquirer’s very first story about Edwards, last October, had pretty much nothing in it. I wrote recently that it was “thinly sourced” and at the time didn’t pay much attention to it. The Enquirer’s next story, in December, had some very suggestive details in it. I think I made some mention of it at the time, but not much. But I certainly paid attention to it. And then came the Enquirer stories that broke the story. I thought they were solidly reported.
My saying so outraged some readers. But what really made them mad was when I wrote, in my column in The Hill, that:
Critics might question the Enquirer’s involvement in all this. Perhaps, they might charge, money changed hands to make the story happen.
Maybe it did. But one reads an Enquirer story just like one reads a story in the New York Times. You look at the allegation and try to sort out how much evidence the paper is presenting.
For example, after carefully reading the Times’ front-page story alleging that Sen. John McCain had had an affair with a lobbyist, one could only ask, Where’s the evidence?
That’s not the case with the Edwards story; there’s quite a bit of detail.
I got a lot of mail from readers saying how terrible it was that I would suggest that you should read the Enquirer the same way you read the Times. So then I wrote, here in the Corner:
Other readers here in the Corner have questioned my linking to the Edwards story in the National Enquirer. I can only say I don’t think it’s absurd to read all news stories the same way. If they are making some sort of allegation, you have to look through all the characterizing and contextualizing to see what evidence the paper is presenting to support its charge. It’s a story-by-story thing, and I don’t see any reason to view a story in the Times as automatically more credible than one in the Enquirer. It all depends on the story.
And that includes bum stories. For example, the Enquirer has, in the last year or so, pushed hard on stories charging that George W. Bush is drinking again, that he and Laura Bush are going to get a divorce, and that he is going to run away with Condoleezza Rice. Now, that would be a heck of a story. But alas, there simply was nothing there, and anyone reading the stories — that would be me — could see that.
To my eye, the Edwards story is far different. Beginning with the original story in the Huffington Post, to this piece from the Enquirer last December, to the new one, it seems to me there’s a pretty convincing body of evidence. Of course, there is the problem that no other reporters that I know of, including me, have checked the Enquirer’s sourcing on those elements of the story that could be checked. So if the Enquirer is fabricating material, it could all be wrong. But that would also be true of any other news organization, and the Enquirer has been right quite a few times.
By the way, when I talked to Enquirer editor David Perel during the Edwards matter this summer, he stressed how many months the tabloid had worked on the story before it broke. It was the kind of reporting that requires a big investment in energy and time, he said. On this Palin story, I would just say that it seems unlikely the Enquirer was on it before mid-day on Friday, when McCain announced his pick. I believe the paper closes on Monday night, so I think it’s safe to say that its brief piece is not the result of a months-long investigation. What else will the Enquirer come up with? We’ll see.