Media Wall Protecting Silky Pony Appears Ready to Crumble

As bad as the liberal media bias is in the United States, rarely are we treated to a more pathetic display than the recent effort to hide all news about John Edwards and his love child from the public, as if we weren't aware of the story.

Well, there are signs the media wall of silence protecting Edwards is slowly beginning to crumble.

The News & Observer out of North Carolina today notes Silky has been running scared from the press.

It was only three weeks ago that John Edwards was fielding media questions on his chances of filling the Democratic Party's vice presidential slot on Barack Obama's ticket or a potential Cabinet position in an Obama administration.

On Wednesday, however, the former U.S. senator and 2004 vice presidential nominee was eager to duck the press when the questions took a tabloid turn.

About a dozen reporters and photojournalists attended a speech Edwards gave to an AARP Foundation symposium on poverty and aging in Washington. Afterward, he avoided most of the waiting reporters, at least some of whom wanted to question him about recent reports in the National Enquirer that alleged an inappropriate relationship with a former campaign videographer.

Citing unnamed sources, the Enquirer published a story in October claiming that Edwards was having an affair with a woman who filmed a series of campaign videos. The story resurfaced last week in the online version of the Enquirer, which claimed that Edwards had visited the woman and their "love child" July 21 at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Jeff Thomas in the San Jose Mercury News takes a swipe at his own dead-tree media.

So what's all this about squeaky-clean Democrat John Edwards and a sordid sex scandal? What, you haven't heard? If that's the case, then maybe you're one of the few remaining Americans who get most of their news from those dead-trees-and-ink thingies.

Members of the so-called Main Stream Media - yes, including this one - have treated the story of an alleged Edwards affair as if it were just another space alien story out of the National Enquirer. But wait! It is indeed the Enquirer that is out in front on this story, but it appears they have slightly more to go on than a UFO sighting.

They say they caught Edwards taking a back elevator to a woman's Beverly Hilton Hotel suite at 2 a.m. last week, and when the stakeout team tried to talk to him about what he was doing there, he bolted back downstairs and hid in a bathroom for 15 minutes before security intervened. The Enquirer says it has photos (and video?) of the whole encounter.

It gets even stranger. The alleged other woman (remember, Edwards is married to Elizabeth Edwards, who is suffering from incurable cancer) is the woman that the Enquirer reported last October was pregnant with Edwards' child. The Edwards campaign's response to that was that, no, the child's father is actually a close, married, aide to Edwards. That's loyalty!

Wired notes the pathetic attempts at Wikipedia to shield the public from information they've known for a week.

Some users wondered why the celebrity gossip site like TMZ.com and The New York Times' John McCain lobbyist affair stories could be relied upon, but not a tabloid like like The National Enquirer.

Even the far left McClatchy News Service wonders why Edwards is running for the hills.

That old friend of the Edwards, Ann Coulter, checks in with her typically understated commentary.

The mainstream media really seem to imagine they can prevent Americans from knowing information by refusing to mention it in newspapers or on TV.

For those few Americans without an Internet connection and to whom I have not faxed the National Enquirer stories: Evidence is accumulating that John Edwards is right -- there really are "two Americas." There's one where men cheat on their cancer-stricken wives and one where men do not cheat on their cancer-stricken wives.

To put it another way, it would appear that ambulances aren't the only things John Edwards has been chasing lately.

Over at The American Thinker, James Baker notes Lover Boy might just have himself some IRS problems.

Heh.

John Edwards allegedly has been funneling $15,000 a month in hush money/child support to his mistress Rielle Hunter. Has he paid a gift tax and avoided money laundering pitfalls? The mother of his love child reportedly received the funds through an intermediary named Andrew Young, who claims to be the child's father in behalf of his friend Edwards. Nearly everyone (but people who rely solely on the MSM for news) knows this courtesy of the National Enquirer,

AT editor Thomas Lifson raised the question of tax liabilities for these transactions, and the possibility of money laundering regulations coming into play with these transfers.

Here in New Jersey, a local columnist has had enough of the cover-up.

A lot of my fellow right-wingers say this is a classic example of liberal media bias. Imagine if Mitt Romney, who is a Republican equivalent of Edwards, had been caught in a similar situation, they say. By the next morning the story would be on the front page of every paper. By the next evening, Leno and Letterman would be competing for the best polygamy punch line.

But this story has been ceded to the internet, where Slate's Mickey Kaus asks, "Will this be the first presidential-contender-level scandal to occur completely in the undernews, without ever being reported in the cautious, respectable MSM?"

I, for one, hope not. We in the MSM had so much fun with the Gary Hart-Donna Rice scandal back in 1987, and this one looks to be just as good. In that one, you may recall, the Miami Herald staked out presidential contender Hart's townhouse and saw the lovely ex-model leaving it. The Enquirer contributed the famous photo of Rice sitting on Hart's lap on a yacht appropriately named "Monkey Business."

Perel said there are photos in this case as well, though he's not releasing them yet. Of course, there's no more proof of an affair in the Edwards case than there was in the Hart case. There are simply a lot of good questions. Edwards already squirmed out of one such query at a press conference, but his political career appears to be over unless he can talk his way out of this one.
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So it's time the major media picked up the story. It's not merely the stench of liberal bias that bothers me but the unfortunate reality that we in the MSM are giving up a good story to the internet. And if we in the major media continue to cede such stories to the internet, we won't be major much longer.

The vast majority of the media's credibility will be in ashes pretty soon if they don't come clean.

They've run out of excuses.