Reille Hunter's Sister: Yeah, I'm Going to Need You to Go Ahead and Take That Paternity Test, Honey

Good stuff. As you may have already known from the Enquirer, Reille Hunter was head over heels in love with this douche, and figured they'd be married one day. So neither she nor her sister is cool with the insinuations she's a political groupie humping anyone with a DNC Guest Pass.

And his interview is grippingly cocksuckerish.

Old Media Dethroned (?): Tim Rutten says so. I say no.

When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.

From the start, the Edwards scandal has belonged entirely to the alternative and new media. The tabloid National Enquirer has done all the significant reporting on it -- reporting that turns out to be largely correct -- and bloggers and online commentators have refused to let the story sputter into oblivion.

Slate's Mickey Kaus has been foremost among the latter, alternately analyzing and speculating on the Enquirer's reporting and ridiculing the mainstream media for a fastidiousness that has seemed, from the start, wholly absurd. Like other commentators, he repeatedly alleged that a double standard that favored Democrats applied to the story. Like the Enquirer's reporting, the special-treatment charge is largely true, as anyone who recalls the media frenzy over conservative commentator and former Cabinet secretary William Bennett's high-stakes gambling would agree.

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It's interesting that what finally forced Edwards into telling the truth was a mainstream media organization. ABC News began investigating the Edwards affair in October, but really began to push after the Beverly Hilton allegations. When ABC confronted Edwards with its story (which confirmed "95% to 96%" of the tabloid's reporting, according to the network), he admitted his deception.

With that admission, the illusion that traditional print and broadcast news organizations can establish the limits of acceptable political journalism joined the passenger pigeon on the roster of extinct Americana.

It's not yet clear that Brian Ross forced Edwards' hand -- it could have been pressure from the Democrats to resolve this before the election (Protect Barack > Protect Elizabeth).

And Edwards, of course, says that he granted an interview to spare the Youngs and Reille Hunter further harassment by the tabloids, which seems to me to be the most likely reason of all for the story breaking. (At least according to the David "Sucker of Cock" Shuster school of journalism, which states that "very credible" sources, such as Edwards and his campaign agents, must be trusted implicitly as regards scandalous allegations about Edwards.)

But assuming that it was ABC News' pressure -- then Old Media has not really been dethroned. They kept the story out of the news, mostly, and only when one reporter with a bit of license to dig independently on stories pursued it did it actually break big. (It was Brian Ross, I believe, who first or most aggressively pursued that "Stop Sexual Predators" guy's blog-allegations against Tom Foley, too, and thereby vaulted that story into the MSM.)

Still, the public may have some questions about why the media all but refused to report on this.

The AP's whine that it's just durned hard to confirm an affair is ridiculous. As is obvious to almost everyone at this point, people connected with Reille Hunter, including she herself, were leaking to the media. They wanted to talk. Hunter's sister Melissa is an obvious suspect: She's angry as hell at John Edwards for screwing over her sister, and the original Enquirer reports cited angered friends reporting on the affair. Whether it was Melissa or not, the fact is that it seems someone was going to the media, rather than waiting for the media to come to her.

Is it plausible that the Angry Friend would only talk to the National Enquirer and no one else? Is it plausible she didn't think of any other media organizations to spill to?

No, it's not plausible. In all likelihood, there are a dozen reporters working for the MSM who got a call from the Angry Friend -- obviously in a position to know -- and were told the whole sordid story. They were fed the story from a "very credible" source, as David "Sucker of Cock" Shuster might term her, and yet still chose to neither report it nor follow up. They chose from the outset to bury the story.

And the MSM will continue covering itself with inglory. There's a huge story yet to tell, so obviously newsworthy it's not even worth debating -- and I don't mean John Edwards 99% likely paternity.

I mean The Greatest Pal a Guy Could Ever Want, Fred Baron, a kinda sleazy trial lawyer paying off his candidate's mistress without, I presume, filing FEC disclosures for his largesse (and of course without telling his good buddy Edwards).

Far be it from me to cast aspersions upon The Greatest Pal a Guy Could Ever Want, but there is almost certainly both corruption and outright illegality going on here, including, not incidentally, the fact that a fundraiser would have had complete control over John Edwards should he have become president. John Edwards would have been the leader of the US -- but only when Fred Baron decided to let him be. It reality, it would have been Fred Baron making any decision he had a personal, or financial, interest in.

This is obviously important and newsworthy. But then, I thought Edwards' affair and love-baby were pretty important and newsworthy, too. The MSM could attempt to redeem itself by pursuing the Fred Baron story, but I think they'll choose to keep the story as sleazy and sexual and personal and trivialized as humanly possible-- having embargoed the story thusfar, they will attempt to confirm their previous judgment that the story was unimportant by deliberately tanking a crucial story that would expose their judgment as hopelessly naive.

They also want to Protect Barack, of course, and it won't do to have a Democratic contender exposed as both corrupt and so compromised by his sexual urges as to be a bona fide national security risk.

Reille Hunter/John Edwards Sex Tapes! Well, not really. But a lot of Edwards' language is suggestive.

You Know Who I Want To Hear From? The Angry Friend. I want to hear her name every single MSM Sucker of Cock she gave the story gift-wrapped to.

posted by Ace at 02:36 PM

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