It’s now official: the National Enquirer is looking into GOP Senator John McCain’s pick for the Veepship, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. And although that might cause some to roll their eyebrows, it can’t help political careers. Just ask Presidents Gary Hart and John Edwards.
The tabloid contends that Palin broke news of her teenage daughter’s pregnancy after they informed her that they knew about it and were going to report it.
Anyone who follows the tabloids (my guilty pleasure is that I have read the Enquirer and Globe for years and had a good friend of mine who was a colleague on the San Diego Union some years ago who had worked for the Enquirer) knows that once it focuses on a target that it deems newsworthy and who can spark brisk checkout stand sales, it keeps investigating.
The danger for the McCain campaign is that if something new surfaces in the Enquirer, it could then be shoved into the mainstream media.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.