For years, the TeleBlog has been on John Edwards’ case.
The now-disgraced politician, a former vice presidential candidate here in the U.S., even "earned" a special WordPress category from me.
On the positive side, Edwards has many attractive qualities and helped enlighten the public on certain issues dear to me, such as poverty. I just wish the mass media would worry less about the man’s private life and more about him as a symptom of The System.
Manna for TV ratings—but a distraction from the real issues?
Campaign cash spent on a mistress is manna for MSNBC ratings and the like. Same for speculation, true or false, on an Edwards "love child." But a more important story just might be in the rather suspicious Hollywood cash Edwards received in a presidential bid while staying mum on some major copyright and consumer issues. A true populist should have been addressing them in depth.
Relevantly, Edwards sat on the Senate Judiciary committee. Now that the media have softened up him, will they kindly start examining him as a case history and maybe force him to talk about those massive Hollywood contributions? Yes, some reporters tried. But they didn’t persist.
The e-book angle: So-called consumer crusader silent while Hollywood, D.C., screws us
Meanwhile, as Chris Meadows in effect documents this morning, the damage lives on from anti-consumer copyright laws, the very stuff on which Edwards was so persistently mum. Edwards’ silence is one of many reasons why it isn’t even legal, technically at least, to break DRM for the purpose of converting from one e-book format to another. What if he and others had spoken out? A Hollywood cash connection?
Again, however, I think the media have been far too intrusive in writing up Edwards’ private life. Such issues arise in the forthcoming Solomon Scandals, where mudslingers use personal foibles to distract the media’s attention from the larger picture. That’s the way the novel was when I started it in the 1970s, decades before the Edwards scandal. Has Washington actually changed? Definitely. It’s worse. Meanwhile my sympathy to his wife even if she, too, stonewalled me when I asked about Edwards and school-hostile copyright laws. Her silence is still no justification for the media circus now going on.
For more on Edwards, see insightful thoughts from Jim Buie, who follows North Carolina politics.
