According to Andrew Young’s tell-all book about John Edwards, the Edwards campaign was awaiting an onslaught of media inquiries after the National Enquirer reported shortly before the Iowa caucuses in 2008 that Edwards had had an affair and that his paramour was pregnant. But the onslaught never came:

At the time, Edwards thought he had outsmarted the watchdogs of the press, frustrating their best attempts to uncover the story. But it later turned out that many journalists just didn’t want to report the news and hadn’t tried very hard to uncover the facts.

It certainly never came from Edwards’ hometown paper, The News & Observer. Did its political reporters give Edwards a pass or were they really as clueless as they seem in retrospect?