Should the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for its multi-year investigation of the John Edwards affair, scandal and cover-up? That’s a question that’s been asked lately: in some cases, at the same Mainstream Media papers which participated in the news blackout of the Enquirer’s Edwards’ coverage.

Edwards, who had been Sen. John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, was one of the front-runners at the time the Enquirer broke the second installment of the story on December 18, 2007.

The Enquirer released an abundance of easily-verifiable information at that time: Rielle Hunter, a former Edwards campaign worker, was pregnant with what the Enquirer reported was Edwards’ love child; she had been moved within five miles of the Edwards campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, NC; Hunter was living an exclusive gated community, a few houses down the street from Edwards’ former Director of Finance, Andrew Young; and, she was driving around in a BMW registered to Young.  Add all this to the fact that information about Hunter had disappeared from the Internet and other publicly-searchable databases and the MSM was handed a great story. (more…)

Why did Game Change authors, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann keep quiet on one of the 2008 campaign’s juiciest stories–only to spill the beans eighteen months later?

More importantly, why did they tell their readers about the John Edwards scandal only after it became personally profitable to do so?

Political reporters Halperin and Heilemann signed their book deal in June 2008, reportedly for a “mid- to high- six-figure sum.”co-authors of the ubiquitous political tell-all, Game Change.  Sprinkled amongst this cornucopia of unsourced gossip, rumor, whispers and innuendo are nuggets of hard news, particularly about former 2008 Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards.

Of particular interest was the following passage, from the excerpt published by Heilemann’s employer, New York :

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