The Dark Knight of Tabloid Journalism

Earlier this summer, there was a brief vogue for likening George W. Bush to Batman, as depicted in The Dark Knight. Whether you buy that parallel depends on your politics.

Personally, I think we've seen in the past few days that a better Batman stand-in exists: the National Enquirer. And, yes, I'm serious.

Both are willing to be despised and misunderstood by the public. Both embrace methods considered extreme and unethical by the establishment -- in Batman's case, vigilanteism; in the Enquirer's case, paying sources. Both have been known to engage in a bit of high-tech eavesdropping.

Above all, both are disdained and mistrusted by a professional corps (the Gotham P.D., journalists) that nevertheless depends on them to go to places they can't (Hong Kong, the Beverly Hilton) to keep the system functioning.

It's been a little sickening to watch the mainstream media gleefully masticating the John Edwards affair in the four days since Edwards confessed. If the story wasn't newsworthy enough to devote serious investigative resources to a week ago, why is it newsworthy enough to merit front-page, wall-to-wall treatment now? If anything, Edwards is actually a less newsworthy figure now: Having confessed, the chances that he'll ever attain a national office again are near zero.

Predictably, media bias has been blamed for the failure of the top newspapers and networks to pursue the story more aggressively -- the idea being that, had Edwards been a Republican, they would have gone after his infidelity more avidly.

To me, however, the whole episode is more an illustration of the media establishment's arrogance and laziness. Here's Paul Friedman, a senior vice president of CBS News, explaining why he didn't commit more resources to verifying the Edwards rumors: "We saw no reason to make his life or the life of his family any worse, until it became well-documented or he admitted it."

You have to love the passive voice of that "until it became well-documented." Who, exactly, do Friedman and his peers expect to do the documenting if the biggest news organizations in the country can't be bothered? Who's going to produce the evidence that's going to force a guy who's been lying for months to come clean? Of course, we already have the answer to that. Maybe someone should buy CBS News a search light with an Enquirer logo that they can mount on the roof.

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