First off, if the corporate media wasn't so subservient to power, some of these stories would have been revealed a long time before they eventually were. Did you know FDR was in a wheelchair! Shocking! 21st CE Republicans who campaigned on platforms of Family Values and American-style Talibanism are actually hypocrites! Mon Dieu! and so on. On the other hand, Drudge and his sludge-mates spreading rumors about Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton is no template to follow, for readers or writers. There should be some accountability on the part of both media and blogosphere.
Abby Goodnough writes:
Oh, Everyone Knows That (Except You):
The “open secret” lives in a netherworld, until one day it doesn’t. What road does it travel into daylight? In this era of blogosphere gossip, viral e-mail and infinite YouTube video archives, the open secret — unacknowledged by its keeper, theoretically hush-hush but widely suspected or known — arguably should be a thing of the past in public life.
But the case of Larry E. Craig, the Idaho senator arrested when an undercover police officer said he made overtures to him for sex, suggests otherwise. Though rumors had long swirled around the conservative Republican senator, the mainstream news media pointedly overlooked them until last week, when Roll Call broke the news of his arrest in June.
Most notably, The Idaho Statesman investigated reports about Mr. Craig for months after a gay blogger published a claim last fall that the senator had had sex with men, but decided against running uncorroborated accusations that Mr. Craig denied and continues to deny. As much traffic as the speculation generated on blogs before Mr. Craig’s arrest, it gained currency — that is, it became a “story” suitable for national publication and broadcast — only when it was backed by an arrest report.
