The New York Times Arrogant Self-Serving Introspection

The New York Times evaluates the mainstream media's reluctance to pursue inconvenient news.

A number of news organizations with resources far greater than The Enquirer’s, like The New York Times, say they looked into the Edwards matter and found nothing solid enough to report, while others did not look at all.

Really! The Times looked into this and found nothing? Where did you look? Were you gazing into your own navel?

[M]any news organizations — including The New York Times — weighed in only after ABC News announced on Friday that it had an interview with Mr. Edwards, in which he admitted the affair but denied paternity.

“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.”

Somehow, these so-called reporters managed not to find what they really didn't want to find. As Phil Bronstein, former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle phrased it, the MSM pursued this story as though they “picking at it with their noses held, as if looking for something valuable in a moldy dumpster.”

He's giving them too much credit. If there was something of value in that dumpster, they consciously and intentionally ignored it. If it were lying on the street in front of they, they would have stepped over it, pretending not to notice.

CNN, which first mentioned the affair on Friday, “had been working the story since it first broke in The Enquirer late last year,” said Sam Feist, the political director. “We sent people to Chapel Hill, we sent people to California.”

But, he said, “Edwards denied it, the woman denied it,” and “you have to have some sort of evidence before you put something on the air.”

Gee! Who would have thought that Edwards and Hunter might lie? Is it really that easy to fool CNN?

Paul Friedman, senior vice president of CBS News, said the network did not actively pursue the story when it broke last fall. Asked if that was because it had first appeared in The National Enquirer, he said, “Exactly.”

Aside from the self-inflicted myopic elitism of that statement, it still does not address the fact that the Enquirer, with its limited resources scooped the MSM on a story that really was of significant consequence. What if Edwards had won the nomination and this story broke in October? What it he had been elected? Wouldn't this leave the most powerful man in the world vulnerable to blackmail?

The New York Times looked into the Enquirer reports last fall, though none too aggressively, editors said.

Bill Keller, the executive editor, said in an e-mail message that Mr. Edwards’s dark-horse status and the “added hold-your-nose quality about The Enquirer” contributed to the lack of interest by The Times and the mainstream media generally.

Considering the low threshold that the New York Times held itself to before insinuating that John McCain had an affair with a lady lobbyist, perhaps it is the Times that is the more deserving of nose holding.