As first noted by the tenacious John Edwards-hounders at Deceiver.com, it seems Times readers are mighty interested in the philandering Democrat, even though many journalists said they simply shouldn't care about the scandal. As shown in the screenshot above, "John Edwards" is the most popular search term over the past week on nytimes.com. If the newspaper was crass enough to actually shape coverage around such reader-interest metrics, it might admit as miscalculation the assertion by the Times' campaign coverage editor last week that while the Edwards scandal was "fair game for journalism," it wasn't a "high priority" because "there are a lot of big issues.... and we have finite resources." After the jump, CNN congressional correspondent Jessica Yellin on why her viewers neither wanted nor needed Edwards scandal coverage:

KURTZ: Right.



Now, CNN, Jessica Yellin, worked this story. In fact, had a package all ready to go, a taped piece with The Enquirer reporter who broke the story, was part of that. But CNN held back and just about all national media organizations held back.



Why do you think that was?



JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, there are two reasons. One is because of the evidence. You have to have your own solid sourcing to go with this.



And the other is that John Edwards was at no point a top contender for the presidency. I mean, before the campaign started this got a little bit of traction. As soon as it was clear that he really wasn't going to be in the running after Iowa, there's no real public interest of need to know here.



[HOWARD] KURTZ: Wait a minute. I'm not buying that. So what?



The guy ran for president two times. He was the Democrats' vice presidential nominee four years ago. And suddenly, because he didn't win the Iowa caucuses and drops out, you're saying it doesn't matter?



YELLIN: Howie, I guarantee you, if we were in hot pursuit of the story and pushing it and putting it on the airwaves at that time, we would have gotten lambasted for ignoring a war, ignoring a tanking economy, and all these issues that matters to voters. Why are we chasing some lascivious sex scandal?



[JOAN] WALSH [of Salon]: I agree.



YELLIN: The media would have gotten lambasted.

Hopefully Yellin has at least learned a key media lesson from all this: What news consumers say they want and what they actually consume are two very different things (paging Julia Allison...).