National Enquirer editor-in-chief David Perel’s opinion piece in today’s Wall St. Journal is worth a read by everyone. It’s a marvelous romp through their Edwards and Palin scoops and sticks its tongue out at the mainstream with prose that I’d call “just this side of snarky.” It’s beautiful.

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.

The man can turn a phrase. Shocking!

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