Pulitzer-Material in Odd Places

When I was a young tot, I remember sitting in my mother's shopping cart and peering at the front pages of The National Enquirer and World Weekly News at the checkout line. The headlines, which ranged from actors' illicit affairs and secret battles with cancer (Enquirer) to wolfboys and proof that Abraham Lincoln was really a woman (WWN), seemed a heck of a lot more interesting than the boring stuff that we had at home in the copies of The Journal News. Despite my curiosity, my mom would tell me that those "checkout line" periodicals were trash and not worthy of our attention.

Apparently, we dismissed these periodicals a little too quickly, now that The National Enquirer is getting some major props for breaking the news and keeping the spotlight on former presidential candidate John Edwards' affair and love child while a most other major news outlets stayed away. It send a platoon of investigative reporters to prove and to dig, and eventually led to the downfall of a person who at the time had a sterling public reputation and a thriving political career. Accolades around it's robust investigative journalism have led to the Enquirer being nominated for a Pulitzer-prize. Some people in the journalism establishment are probably up in arms. But to be fair, let's look at New York Times' take on the Enquirer at the Edwards situation:

But The Enquirer stays ahead by doing what other papers won’t. It threw reporters at the Edwards story, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on expenses, conducted stakeouts, paid informants and ran pieces based entirely on anonymous sources.

Okay, the last second to last item is borderline (around the paid informants) and the last items very sketchy (pieces based entirely on anonymous sources), but isn't good journalism all about putting lots of people and resources on a story and going the extra mile to find out what really happened? It would bother me that other news outlets didn't emulate and follow their lead.

In any case, I can't imagine how Bob Woodward would have felt losing the Pulitzer to the same guy who wrote the article: "MARLA MAPLES: SEX WITH TRUMP THE BEST I'VE EVER HAD".