Reading about reading about National Enquirer founder Generoso "Gene" Pope Jr. in today's Wall Street Journal, it's hard not to wonder, how come MIT-educated CIA operatives don't start trashy tabloid publications anymore? And is that related to that other salient question, how come kids named "Generoso" don't seem to come through Horace Mann anymore? (The blanket answer to all this is that people just don't know how to have fun anymore, or else the progeny of Russia and China's mafiosos would have run DNA tests on Andrew Young's chewing gum by now, but that's another story.) Anyway, in a month that has seen so much news production "Made In China" so to speak we'd like to take a moment to appreciate the month's leading supplier of original domestic, vertically integrated, by us-for American newstrash, the National Enquirer, for some of the great techniques and philosophies of news gathering Gene brought to American publishing.1. Inculcate reporters in "When In Rome" philosophy of reporting:

"Rush & Molloy" today ask: "What publisher and man-about-town may have had a liaison with Rielle Hunter, the woman who had an affair with John Edwards and a relationship with his pal Jay McInerney? He's told friends they were 'in bed for a week.'" That's a liaison? We call it a hangover (or a stay-cation!), but let's not split hairs. Who is it? Nick Denton? John Peter Zenger? Is Men's Health publisher Jack Essig a man-about-town? Actually how great would it be if it was Jared Kushner! In bed with a week with the acid-damaged Donna Rice. He's probably not her type, though. Former presidential candidate Steve Forbes would be a similarly amusing choice. Maybe it's Bob Guccione, Jr? After Ann Coulter and Candace Bushnell, we know he likes insane blondes. And they've got to make Rielle look low-maintenance, right? Wait, shit, it's Felix Dennis, isn't it?

For some reason, the official John Edwards YouTube channel still includes a speech Edwards made in 2007 accepting a "Father Of The Year" award, even though it contains various comments that sound funny/awful now that the former presidential candidate has admitted to cheating on his wife. Edwards' people might have been expected to remove the video Friday, when it was discovered and linked by producers for delicate CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, a crew no doubt highly attuned to subtle irony delivered in front of a camera (though Deceiver beat them to it —Update). Of course, the Edwards camp was busy dealing with Nightline late last week, and maybe they also figured removing the speech would lend credence to charges Edwards fathered a love child, which he still denies. Plus, at six minutes long, the YouTube video is a slog most haters will never get through. So here are the best 23 seconds, courtesy CNN. Click the video icon to watch.

With the National Enquirer taking a victory lap for correctly reporting that John Edwards had an affair with campaign contractor Rielle Hunter, it's worth noting that the Democratic politician is still disputing the Enquirer's claims that he fathered a love child with Hunter. Also worth recalling, then, how the supermarket tabloid face-planted with a 2006 story claiming Sen. Ted Kennedy fathered a love child with Carolina Bilodeau-Allen while separated from his first wife. DNA tests conducted two decades prior had already established that Kennedy was not the father, contradicting the Enquirer's paid sources. Earlier this month, the tabloid was made to pay for its front-page mistake, the Smoking Gun reports:

Rielle Hunter videotapes a John Edwards interview amidst the evil mainstream media on the morning of Edwards's official announcement of his failed bid for the Democratic Party's nomination. Write your own caption for this post and we'll use the best one as its new title. Friday's winner is godospoons for "Honey, you're not John Battelle!"(Photo by Robert Scoble)

What do Rocketboom's Andrew Baron and John Edwards's fling Rielle Hunter have in common? They're both videobloggers who live off of trial lawyer Fred Baron's largesse. Financing from Fred, Andrew's dad, got Andrew's Rocketboom videoblog off the ground. Add to that his contributions to the Edwards campaign, including paying to move Hunter to a new home in Santa Barbara, away from the limelight. And most damningly, Baron Sr. may have arranged for Baron Jr. to do video work for the Edwards campaign — simultaneously boosting his favored candidate and his son's business.Andrew Baron's involvement in the Edwards campaign has drawn notice before. The younger Baron failed to disclose that he was getting paid to do campaign videos which he packaged as interviews:

Yesterday the New York Times ran a story about the John Edwards affair, detailing the circumstances behind the meeting of Edwards and Rielle Hunter in a Beverly Hills hotel that ended up getting the ex-VP candidate caught by the National Enquirer. The story includes various bits of background info on Bob McGovern, a new-age friend of Hunter who set up the meeting. Just about all of that background appears to have been taken from a post more than a week earlier on Deceiver.com-although the Times didn't credit them at all. That's stealing. Full comparison of the Times story and the blog info, below: Deceiver, July 31:

Former Hillary Clinton spokeshipster Howard Wolfson says Hillary Clinton totally would be president right now if the John Edwards scandal had gone public last year. "I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," he told ABC. And furthermore: Wolfson says the Clintons knew the story but didn't push it. "Any of the campaigns that would have tried to push that would have been burned by it." Ha. Bullshit. If they had the story, they would've planted it without getting their hands dirty. And furthermore, Edwards would've had to drop out right before Iowa, and not after. And furthermore, their Iowa ground game sucked and Obama's didn't. And frankly their campaign didn't kick into gear until they were losing and started taking shit seriously; being the frontrunner was a liability. But all that aside, playing alternative history is totally fun! So let's all pretend the Edwards revelations broke close enough to the Iowa caucus to force Edwards to drop out but not so far from them that everyone had already forgotten or stopped caring. What would our world look like now?

Robert Scoble did in fact capture some footage of John Edwards's mistress, Rielle Hunter, back in 2006 when flying with the campaign's blogger party plane. The problem: All of the tapes are property of PodTech, the videoblogger's former employer, so all he can release are the still images, like this one of Hunter seated with Edwards.The accidentally historical shot is among those circulating on the AP wire, he told Valleywag this morning: "I never in a thousand years thought I'd be witnessing a scandal. But I don't really care about the sex part of it." Except he does. Scoble says he and others on the blogger plane, like Andrew Baron of Rocketboom, are glad the affair is out in the open now — and not just so they can flog their photos: "We're all disappointed that he took such a risk with the presidency in the balance." Despite his past support of Edwards, said Scoble, "I'm really happy he wasn't nominated. If he was the nominee right now, it'd have handed the election to McCain." We're not normally fans of tech bloggers turning into political pundits, but Scoble's analysis is spot-on. (Photo by Robert Scoble)

So the Rielle Hunter clips have been available on the internet for ages now. The Edwards campaign famously "scrubbed" them but they were still to be found elsewhere. Still, now that the affair is confirmed, it's fun to go back and rewatch them for creepy hints. Like how Hunter keeps the camera focused on Edwards' blue-jean-clad crotch in the first one. All the videos are available here, but we've put together our favorite moment from the webisodes with the most relevant parody advertising clip available.

Ha ha ha so it turns out that everyone in the world knew that Rielle Hunter had a (shall we say!) inappropriate relationship with John Edwards back in 2006 (when they were fucking). As we've learned, Rielle is a starry-eyed new age nutcase with a bizarre and tawdry history. So some reporters thought it was maybe odd that this weird hippie chick was apparently hanging out with the Edwards campaign and openly flirting with the candidate. After the jump, journalists on what they knewl about Hunter back in the day.

Traditional media acted with predictable arrogance for ten months in ignoring tabloid and blog stories about John Edwards' philandering. Also utterly predictable: The self-flagellation now occurring on how the story was missed and what it means for the future of newspapers. Yes, if there's one story the public eats up more than a sex scandal complete with love child, it's yet another navel-gaze at media ethics and economics! Reporters for the Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal all shared their thoughts on the matter. But the fact that they waited, or had to wait, so long to do so hints that their bosses are missing the point.

Despite the wishes of her sister, former John Edwards bedmate Rielle Hunter doesn't want the haircut-and-pants to take a paternity test to determine whether or not he is the father of her baby. "Hunter said through her attorney that she would not take a genetic test 'now or in the future.' The attorney, Robert Gordon, called Hunter a 'private' person who is 'not running for public office' and would not comment further on the media frenzy engulfing her. 'She wishes to maintain her privacy and her daughter's privacy,' he said in the statement. 'Furthermore, Rielle will not participate in DNA testing or any other invasion of her or her daughter's privacy now or in the future.'" [Washington Post]

John Edwards' former lover Rielle Hunter may be keeping mum while the former politician drags her name through the mud, but Rielle's kid sister, Melissa, is having none of it. She doesn't buy Edwards' claims that he isn't the father of Rielle's baby. She wants the man to take a paternity test. And she wants him to shut the f- up! "I wish that those involved would refrain from bad-mouthing my sister," she says. "In the first reaction from Hunter's family, her younger sister Melissa told ABC News that Edwards should immediately follow through on his pledge to take a paternity test. 'I would challenge him to do so,' the sister said. 'Somebody must stand up and defend my sister.'"

Here is an excerpt of John Edwards on Nightline, where the Democratic politician spent most of the time trying to explain the limited nature of his bad behavior. His affair was a brief fling he quickly told his family about, driven by "a narcissism that leads you to believe you can do whatever you want, you're invincible, and there will be no consequences." He didn't have a love child with his mistress, Rielle Hunter, and didn't know anything about any hush money she may have received. He'll take a paternity test and release the results to the news media, if someone can get Hunter to participate. And, Edwards said, he only visited Hunter again recently in a Los Angeles hotel at the insistence of a mutual friend, who promised to be present, to hear a story of Hunter's "struggles." Edwards gave the careful, plausible admission of a skilled lawyer. Whether he is believed will hinge on how people react to his most vulnerable moments. Click the video icon to watch two of them. [ABC News]

Rielle Hunter, the now-acknowledged mistress of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, was paid $114,000 by his political action committee to film and produce four YouTube videos, making her the most overpaid videoblogger in the business. We called the second most overpaid videoblogger in the business, Robert Scoble of FastCompany.tv, for insights. You see, the Edwards campaign invited Scoble to blog the Edwards campaign back in 2006.

So was the $114,000 John Edwards paid for the weird and pointless campaign videos Rielle Hunter produced for the campaign the first example of her hush money? Sort of unlikely—the baby wasn't a factor yet, was it? But it's possible! If so, Silicon Alley Insider notes, this would be perhaps the first example of YouTube money laundering. The first example because what other content producer has made enough money off YouTube to launder? [Silicon Alley Insider]

Just asking... if, as Edwards says, the affair with Rielle Hunter both began and ended in 2006, when he also told his wife about it, and Hunter's child isn't his, as he insists, then why, exactly, did he go visit Rielle and her baby last month? Catching up with an old friend? Does he honestly think he'll salvage a shred of his reputation with this shit? Also is that lie more or less believable than insisting that "friends or supporters" of his are sending Ms. Hunter thousands of dollars a month without his knowledge? Also, what the hell is wrong with him? Sigh. The early indications are that no one buys his bullshit. So. What next? The press will be furious and unforgiving. The distraction of the Olympics aside, now they have Edwards lying directly to them—insisting there was no story there to anyone who inquired, and abusing their love of Elizabeth to get them to back off. Now the press will turn on him, probably using his betrayal of his beloved wife as their excuse for endless castigation. Rielle will finally get her morning show booking. The devoted liberals will throw him under the bus for betraying the party. (Though some will continue to blame the media.) Now the race is on to somehow prove the paternity of the baby or—more likely—track down those payments. The Enquirer should already be on the money trail, so let's see what happens!

The second ABC announced Brian Ross was on the case, you knew this was coming-John Edwards has admitted to having an affair with his former campaign staffer Rielle Hunter. The interview's on Nightline tonight. Edwards also claims he's not the father of Hunter's baby. And he didn't love her. So it's not cheating! Edwards claims his wife Elizabeth's cancer was in remission when he began the affair, so it's TOTALLY not cheating, at all. How did the story suddenly break on a Friday afternoon like this? Funny story. The Observer's Media Mob broke the news earlier today that Ross, ABC's celebrity investigative reporter, was preparing a report on the Enquirer's affair allegations. This usually means there's something to the story-they bring Ross out to bring legitmacy to sleazy internet tabloid stories, like the Mark Foley IM conversations that made Ross famous. This meant the story not only had legs but had the possibility to be huge. Edwards probably decided to get out ahead of it (too late, John) and acquiesce to an interview with Bob Woodruff instead of a sensationalistic Ross segment done without his cooperation. One might also imagine that prominent Democrats were pushing him to get this out of the way well before the conventions. Could be way worse than the Friday night that also happens to be the night of the Olympics Opening Ceremonies. Sigh. Guy's still slick. So John owes the nation, and Elizabeth, a big apology. DailyKos owes the internet an apology. The Los Angeles Times owes its bloggers an apology. Someone probably owes Mickey Kaus an apology. Wikipedia editors can just do whatever they want, no one cares about them. Now it just remains to be seen about this damn kid. [ABC]

After calling the reports "false" and "ridiculous," John Edwards now admits he had an affair with Rielle Hunter. [CNN]