By Tom Scocca
Sunday, May 10, 2009

Without the National Enquirer, Elizabeth Edwards never would have sat down with Oprah Winfrey to discuss her husband's infidelity and her new book about it. "It's not going to change my life in any way," Edwards said of the reports -- "tabloid" reports, as Winfrey called them -- suggesting that former vice presidential candidate John Edwards may have fathered a child out of wedlock.

As advance tidbits from the Oprah interview made their way through the media, the Enquirer was declaring from grocery store racks that Winfrey herself had "ONLY 3 YEARS TO LIVE!" Just below the screaming yellow "-VE!" of the headline, slender little white letters murmured the caveat, "Experts Predict"; inside, the paper explained that the imminent date was "based on [Winfrey's] history of yo-yo dieting" and her claims of thyroid problems, cross-calculated using estimates from two doctors who had never examined the star.

The reputable media don't traffic in that sort of tenuous speculation about people's lives. They also didn't traffic in the story of John Edwards and Rielle Hunter, until the Enquirer forced them to. This is why "tabloid journalism" is used as a put-down, and why tabloid journalism still exists: No one else does what it does, but in some situations, you need it.

When a person's image is a commodity -- as was the case with John Edwards, the millionaire of humble origins whose family life supposedly kept him grounded -- the ideas of privacy and good taste become part of the marketing effort. The tabloids, rude and prying, are able to break through such images to the truth behind them in ways the conventional media cannot.

Before it was an insult, "tabloid" was (and remains) a format: the cheaper, more portable challenger to the ponderous broadsheets of record. Now that challenge comes instead from the limitlessly cheap and portable Internet, and the once-big papers have trimmed their print editions to something not far from the disreputable tabloid size. The Senate commerce committee last week held hearings into the "future of journalism" -- will there be any room for the civic-minded, money-losing newspapers in the opinion-heavy, aggregation-minded, free-for-all of new media? If the "legacy media," as newspapers such as this one were called at that hearing, want to last longer than the Enquirer thinks Oprah will, perhaps they have something to learn from how the tabloids do business.

In the main lobby of The Washington Post hangs a list of journalistic principles expounded by the paper's late publisher Eugene Meyer. "As a disseminator of the news," states one of those principles, "the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman." It's hard to fault standards and practices that were vigorous enough to handle the Watergate story, but the rule doesn't offer much guidance about dealing with news about cads and their indecencies -- particularly when the indecencies are neither entirely private nor entirely public. Add in Meyer's admonition to tell the truth "as nearly as the truth can be ascertained," and the outlines of a loophole become even clearer: One way to stay out of the papers is to be especially squalid, and to lie about it.

"False, absolute nonsense," an Edwards spokesperson told the Enquirer at the beginning of the Edwards-affair affair in October 2007, while the candidate was still working the heartland on his way to a second-place finish, ahead of Hillary Clinton, in the Iowa caucuses. Against that blanket denial, the paper cited "a source close to the woman" and "one bombshell e-mail message" to support what it called a "shocking allegation -- if proven true."

Respectable news outlets prefer something a bit firmer than "if proven true." But as with the Oprah story, the Enquirer was showing its work -- if you didn't like the epistemology, you didn't have to believe anything just yet. Nine months later, when Enquirer reporters were chasing John Edwards up and down a Los Angeles hotel stairway in the middle of the night, the paper's anonymous sources started to seem a little more persuasive.

Non-tabloid journalists are supposed to avoid anonymous sources except in extenuating circumstances. Paying sources for information, another tabloid staple, is always unacceptable. The first rule is broken all the time; the second can be worked around, especially by TV producers looking for exclusives. But there's widespread agreement that the rules are correct in principle.

That doesn't mean that the tabloid approach is inherently unreliable. The Enquirer has argued that paid sources may even be more trustworthy than unpaid ones, because their reason for speaking to the media is open and straightforward. It was a paid source who supplied the Enquirer with a photograph of O.J. Simpson wearing his Bruno Magli shoes, the ones he'd insisted, during his murder trial, that he'd never owned.

Even journalists who resist (not unreasonably) the pay-for-play theory might admit that the distinction between anonymous sources and named ones is not as simple as respectable papers' standards make it out to be. The idea that on-the-record quotes are an indicator of truth is a charming fiction -- and a hilarious one for those of us who have ever had to cover the journalism industry itself.

Take, for example, the decline of George Steinbrenner. The supposedly ferocious New York newspapers spent months, if not years, printing quotes from the boss's publicist as though they had been relayed from the aging Yankee owner himself; when a magazine reporter named Franz Lidz, writing for Conde NastPortfolio, described finding an incoherent Steinbrenner at home in his pajamas in the middle of the day, it was seen as bad manners. But it was only after the revelation that Steinbrenner's sons began speaking publicly as, effectively, the team's new owners.

This gap between what the media know (or suspect they know) and what gets reported can be an invitation to recklessness to those who escape exposure. Bill Clinton lost control of his presidency in large part by overestimating the limits on what could be tastefully ignored. The tabloids' tally of his extramarital affairs had always far outpaced the official public record, but by the time the Enquirer began piling up details about Monica Lewinsky, the line between public and private news had moved.

Even after they're caught, people keep exploiting the media's tendency toward restraint -- confessing to the minimum misdeeds they think they can get away with. Yankees star Alex Rodriguez, confronted with a report that he'd failed a drug test back in 2003, regretfully said that he had dabbled in performance-enhancing drugs back then, but had since "proved" that he didn't "need any of that."

John Edwards has confessed to having had only a brief fling with Rielle Hunter, and only when his wife's cancer was in remission. He continues to dispute the Enquirer's claim that he fathered a child with her ("It doesn't look like my children, but I don't have any idea," Elizabeth Edwards told Oprah).

These semiconcessions work, when they work, because respectable news organizations are uncomfortable playing the role of prosecutor, or even of judge. Objective, professionalized journalism aspires to the neutrality of an empty courtroom, a space where other people can come and do all the talking. Try not to assert a fact, let alone draw a conclusion, if you can get someone else to do it for you.

The Enquirer draws its own conclusions, and isn't shy about putting them on every page. It adheres to the notion, variously attributed to Lord Northcliffe of London's Daily Mail or Reuven Frank of NBC, that the news is what someone wants suppressed. Its twin imperatives are to grab as many readers as it can and to be ready to defend itself in court. This means that the Enquirer has to be ruthlessly clear about what it is saying and why it is saying it. Compare the Edwards coverage to the muddle the New York Times made last year of its story about John McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman: Rather than alleging a sexual scandal, the Times wrote that McCain's advisers had been concerned about "the appearance of a close bond" between the two -- treating the existence of innuendo as if it were an objective fact.

The Times's loudest critics took the story as a clumsily veiled partisan attack on McCain. A top McCain adviser, Steve Schmidt, even used the tabloid epithet to describe the story, calling it "something that you would see in the National Enquirer, not in the New York Times."

Iseman sued the paper, producing a settlement and an editors' note that was even more confusing than the original story. But if anything, the story was distinguished by its desire to be nonpartisan -- so nonpartisan that it forgot to make whatever point it originally meant to make.

As investigative journalism, it was not noticeably more incompetent than the Times report last fall that Joe Biden lived in a nice house, "appears to have benefited" from being a United States senator (though he hadn't "bent any rules") and seemed to have used campaign funds for a "mulching job" when he was hosting what may or may not have been a campaign event on the grounds of his home. "I don't know if it was political," his landscaper said.

If that's a leading newspaper's notion of meaningful reporting, give me more anonymous best friends and hotel stakeouts. Or better yet, give me both methods, high and low. In between the sensational sleaze and the proper-minded gibberish, it might be possible, sometimes, to spy the truth.

tscocca@gmail.com

Tom Scocca, a former media reporter, is at work on the book "Beijing Welcomes You."