Washington Post executive editor-at-large, Leonard Downie, praises NATIONAL ENQUIRER coverage of the JOHN EDWARDS Scandal on NPR!
Downie who was a guest on Fresh Air hosted by Terry Gross on National Public Radio recently retired from august newspaper The Washington Post. During his tenure at the Post, Downie scored 25 Pulitzer Prizes for the Post.
"During his long career at the Post, he was also an investigative reporter, supervised much of the Watergate coverage, (Downie) was the London correspondent, national editor and managing editor. Now he’s the vice president at large," Gross introduced the guest.
Excerpted from transcript:
GROSS: So what went through your mind when the National Enquirer broke the story and did you already know about the story?
Mr. DOWNIE, JR.: We had heard rumors. The National Enquirer clearly had an informant that none of the rest of us had.
GROSS: The story was, you know, that (JOHN EDWARDS) had had an affair with another woman, and then what was questionable also was whether he – that woman had carried his baby or not.
Mr. DOWNIE, JR.: We had heard rumors about this relationship. She had worked as a videographer for his campaign, so she had been directly employed by him at one point, and this was while he was running for president, which made it more relevant than something that would have happened 28 years before. It was very current, and he had denied at once the National Enquirer stories. It was a series of stories in the National Enquirer, and he had denied them, which raised the question, of course, of whether or not he was telling the truth. And at that point, it was a question of whether or not he was going to be considered for vice president by Barack Obama, who had been assured of the nomination by the time this story had broke.
So we did feel this was relevant to – particularly to his candidacy as vice president if Obama was going to choose him. But first, we had to see if the story was true, and that was the problem. The National Enquirer had an informant that nobody else had, and everybody else associated with it had clammed up, and so we weren’t able to prove that it was true.
However, we continued our reporting, and I actually had a conversation off the record with John Edwards in which he denied everything very cleverly. And he also told me during that conversation that he was not being considered to be vice-presidential candidate, that he had told Obama that he wouldn’t accept it if he was considered and that he had not been vetted for it. And I realized that he had told me that because he wanted to make – he wanted to make clear to me that there might not be a relevancy case – he’s a good lawyer – that it might not be relevant for us to publish that story to his political future.
But we continued to work on it, and then, of course, he decided – I guess because so many of us were working on it and had not agreed with his arguments, he decided to make it public himself.
Leonard Downie‘s new novel is The Rules of the Game about the morally ambiguous conflicts between journalists, politicians and lobbyists. The show was originally broadcast January 12, 20009.
