Sunday Times runs Edwards-Mistress-Love Child story, rips off blogosphere

A story has been percolating in the background of this campaign season since December, when the National Enquirer released details of a scandalous affair involving John Edwards, his alleged mistress and their love child.


While the mainstream media was curiously silent on the well-sourced story, the most recent episode in the affair appears to be wending its way into the mainstream, albeit slowly.

Fox News appears to have confirmed the Enquirer's recent report that Edwards visited mistress Rielle Hunter and their love child in a Los Angeles hotel.

Although the mainstream media blockade of the story has barely started to crack, reputable papers abroad have caught on.

Scratch John Edwards off the list of potential vice-presidential candidates. The former White House contender, who had been hoping to get the nod from Barack Obama, is in the midst of a full-blown sex scandal.

Every supermarket shopper knows that the preternaturally youthful former senator for North Carolina may have fathered a love child with a film-maker while Elizabeth, his saintly wife, is dying of cancer. There are sensational new details on the National Enquirer website, although most of the media have done their best to ignore them.

The tabloid magazine cornered Edwards, 55, leaving a Los Angeles hotel where Rielle Hunter, his alleged mistress, and her baby were staying, at 2.40am last Tuesday. He ran down a hallway and dived into the men’s bathroom. A hotel security guard confirmed the encounter. “His face just went totally white,” the guard said... The story has been bubbling away for months, but so far there has been not a word about it in the mainstream newspapers, even though Edwards was John Kerry’s running mate in 2004 and has been tipped for a prominent job in an Obama administration... Edwards volunteered recently: “I’m prepared to consider seriously anything, anything [Obama] asks me to do for our country.”

He can stop waiting by the telephone.

In this particular story, the Times of London actually "borrowed" material from the blogosphere without attribution.

DBKP, the blog that has been on the story from the start, posted an exclusive interview with National Enquirer Editor-in-Chief David Perel on July 23.

Quotes from that interview were pulled directly from DBKP by the Times with nary a word of attribution.

When this story first broke in December I wrote that the blogosphere renders the mainstream media less relevant by the day.

Through its questionable behavior, the Times has done nothing to counter my assertion.