Irony of the day: Chief of the National Enquirer lectures the mainstream media

and David Perel scores some good points:

So should the personal foibles of candidates and their immediate family be off limits in the campaign? The id of the tabloid media drives it to cover scandal in any form. The mainstream media would like to believe it has evolved from the era of William Randolph Hearst -- he of the infamous proclamation, "you furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." Yet, when a Republican VP nominee showed up with a pregnant teenage daughter, the mainstream media's superego disappeared faster than Dan Quayle at a spelling bee.

The people who eventually hold the highest office in this country face unfathomable challenges. In electing them we grasp for any clues to their judgment and character, signals as to how they will react, and the verisimilitude of what they will tell the American people. An affair, regardless of political affiliation, is a breach of private trust; lying about it to the American public signals a dangerous willingness to deceive when caught in tough situations.

While John Edwards and Sarah Palin have served as lightning rods for the debatable issue of how personal controversy affects public worthiness for leadership, the mainstream media vacillates between ignoring and rushing into these types of stories. New media, with its raucous pursuit of every salacious rumor, feels no such restraint. Inchoate ideas and suppositions find purchase on blogs from both sides of the political spectrum.

Inevitably the mainstream media, suffering from the corporate pressures of diminishing profits, will yield to new media and its populism. The two-newspaper city, once a staple of every metropolis, is already as rare as a grammatically correct sentence from George Bush.

So with apologies to John Edwards, Sarah Palin and untold other Democrats and Republicans, the tabloid media gladly accepts its role of covering the scandals, relying on the American public to decide if that information is relevant to job performance.