A Headline That Says So Much: "In Sex Scandal, Edwards Braced for Media Onslaught That Never Came"

INCOMING!!!

Incoming...

Incoming?

Hello? Hello?

Echo?

Isn't it funny how the media's big guns go silent in such a a predictable fashion.

Of course it never came. I am tired by being told by these partisan liars that they go "wherever the story takes them."

There are some stories they love reporting and masturbate themselves silly over. Larry Craig. Mark Foley.

There are other stories they don't want to be true and will spike if they get even a weak denial from a Democrat. Would "take too much digging" they decide, and quickly move back to... Mark Sanford.

The most effective form of media bias isn't slant. It's simply not reporting a story at all. A story doesn't need to be slanted or spun if it is simply disappeared altogether.

But when the Enquirer story was published, nothing much happened. "To our relief, no serious newspaper or TV network picked up the story because they couldn't find a source to confirm it," Young writes. "Our phones and those of our friends and relatives rang constantly with calls from reporters and producers, but we ignored them all. Rielle and the campaign followed the same strategy, and since they still play by the multi-source rule, the big print and broadcast news organizations were stymied." The damage was confined to a few websites. "We began to think that perhaps our strategy had worked," Young writes.

What followed was an insane series of events in which Baron shelled out enormous amounts of money to fly Hunter and the Youngs around the country to keep them out of sight until the Iowa caucuses, and then the New Hampshire primary, and then, after the campaign fizzled but Edwards still had hopes of making it onto the Democratic presidential ticket, until Hunter had the baby.

They never dug on the Fred Baron situation, either. Conservative blogs joked about it every day -- someone, maybe Allah, maybe me, dubbed him The Greatest Friend A Guy Could Ever Have. It was obvious to anyone what was going on.

The media made a few check-the-box calls, got the denials they sought, and dropped it.

posted by Ace at 04:51 PM

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