There’s no accounting for the apparent lack of interest in the trial of John Edwards.
Monday’s opening arguments received some attention, with the major networks and the last of the big time newspapers duly in attendance, but no broadcast led with the trial and it didn’t dominate the front pages. The coverage was conspicuously low-key, with no mention of it made during the hourly radio news updates, even though the story has all of the necessary elements for a full-blown media frenzy.
It’s a trial, for one thing, and reporters love nothing better than a trial. Trials have an inherently dramatic quality, which is why so many dramatists also love them, and even the dullest reporters can usually wring a fairly riveting lead paragraph out of a day’s testimony. Trials are easy journalistic duty, too, as reporters get to sit in air-conditioned comfort on a special front row seat with everything laid out for them in the simplest language that lawyers can manage. That’s why there have been so many Trials of the Century over the past 100 years or so.
This particular trial also features illicit sex, heart-breaking betrayals, media cover-ups, a prominent public figure exposed as a craven hypocrite, and all the other spicy ingredients found in a typical soap opera. The charges of one count of conspiracy, four counts of accepting illegal campaign contributions and one count of making false statements sound rather dull, but the underlying allegation is that he conspired to accept the contributions in order to keep secret the fact that he had impregnated his mistress while campaigning with a tear-jerking stump speech about how he had stood by his cancer-stricken wife. Far less lurid tales involving zaftig ex-Playboy models, rowdy ice skating queens, and low-level White House staffers who didn’t expose Valerie Plame as a CIA agent have been hyped to a far greater extent by the now quiet news media.
Some will argue that Edwards is just a failed vice-presidential candidate, after all, but we can think of another recent failed vice-presidential candidate who had reporters searching through the garbage cans of Wasilla, Alaska, in search of anything slightly embarrassing, much less something so astoundingly sordid as what Edwards already admits to having done. Besides, had it not been for a couple of hundred voters baffled by the butterfly ballot used in one Florida county back in 2000, America would have been treated to the sorry spectacle of a sitting vice-president forced to admit that he fathered a child out of wedlock while his wife was dying of cancer, something the press would have been hard-pressed to ignore no matter how ardently they might have wished to do so.
Instead of the usual gleeful kicking at the corpse of Edwards’ reputation, though, we get more-in-pity-than-scorn pieces from the likes of The Washington Post, where the reporters lament that the trial is nothing more than “A Final Public Flogging,” and note with sad certainty that Edwards “is now left searching for some strands of redemption, or, at least, forgiveness.” Even the Post isn’t empowered to confer redemption, but they seem quite willing to dole out the forgiveness.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 