Enquirer earns nomination

The National Enquirer's recent nomination for the Pulitzer Prize shows the blurring line between gossip news and mainstream media coverage.The National Enquirer has been nominated for the prestigious award in both the investigative reporting category and the national news category for breaking John Edwards' extra-marital affair, and reporting he had a child with his mistress.

The National Enquirer first reported the affair in October 2007 at a time when other news outlets were not covering this story. Edwards did not admit the rumors were true until August 2008. Although headlines like "Sex crazed Taylor Swift" and "Why Hillary Clinton hates Martha Stewart's guts'"top the Enquirer's paper this week, the Pulitzer Prize committee has validated their coverage of Edwards' sex scandal as legitimate news and essentially validated the quality of the Enquirer's paper as a whole.

Instead of focusing their attention solely on whether or not the Enquirer got lucky with this story, critics should be more concerned with attacking the Pulitzer Prize's nomination of this story. In a climate where celebrity gossip and entertainment news are likely more relevant to the average person than the war on terrorism, the Pulitzer Prize committee should seek to raise the standard of journalism instead of propagating the gossip culture.

If the Enquirer wins, it will join the ranks of other groundbreaking stories including the Watergate scandal coverage and more recent winners like the Philadelphia Daily News' investigation that "exposed a rogue police narcotics squad, resulting in an FBI probe and the review of hundreds of criminal cases tainted by the scandal," according the Pulitzer Prize Web site.

Regardless of how influential this seeming scandal was in preventing Edwards' presidential nomination, extra-marital affairs should not ever be equally important as uncovering corruption within the government, and presenting them that way gives way to other gossip news and celebrity coverage.

Here at the Echo, we support the Enquirer for breaking a national story, but view the nomination poorly, because it seems like the Pulitzer Prize committee is cheapening the quality of news by giving this story so much attention.