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Media dilemma over Enquirer’s ‘Sarah Palin affair’ allegation

The American media has been quick to caricature John McCain's running mate Sarah Palin as a gun-toting, anti-abortionist, creationist redneck, and pounced on the news that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter Bristol was pregnant. But how will the US media big guns handle the latest, more serious allegation - that Sarah Palin had an affair with her husband's business partner? The situation is particularly delicate since the allegation has been made by the notorious supermarket tabloid, the National Enquirer.



Senior McCain adviser Steve Schmidt said yesterday, "The allegations contained on the cover of the National Enquirer insinuating that Governor Palin had an extramarital affair are categorically false. It is a vicious lie... The American people will reject it."

Two months ago, he might have been able to make that assumption with confidence. He might also have been able to count on the mainstream media treating the National Enquirer with its habitual disdain. That was what happened when the Enquirer reported that the former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards had had an affair with a videographer, Rielle Hunter. Newspapers and TV channels ignored the story, happy to concur that the tabloid report was fabricated nonsense.

But the Enquirer kept pushing, eventually running Edwards to ground with his former mistress in a hotel rendezvous in Los Angeles. Edwards was forced to admit an extramarital affair and was disinvited from the recent Demoratic convention.

The main argument against the Enquirer's tactics down the years has been its use of unnamed, paid sources. But it was exactly these methods that led to the Edwards scoop. With John McCain's team issuing threats of legal action over the Palin affair allegation, the rest of the US media now face a conundrum: do they follow up a potential scandal and risk a lawsuit, or ignore a possibly explosive story 'broken' by a publication that has recently gained credibility?

The Enquirer, for its part, appears to be enjoying trying on its newly purchased cloak of respectability. In response to Schmidt's denials, the tabloid said: "Following our John Edwards exclusives, our political reporting has obviously proven to be more detail-oriented than the McCain campaign's vetting process. Despite the McCain camp's attempts to control press coverage they find unfavorable, the Enquirer will continue to pursue news on both sides of the political spectrum." Watch this space.

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/

FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 4, 2008