"So why did so much of the mainstream media so assiduously follow the tabloid lead on the Tiger Woods story?"
That's the question raised by Paul Farhi for the American Journalism Review.
Perhaps because of the way another recent sex scandal played out. In 2007, the National Enquirer reported that former Sen. John Edwards had had an affair with a videographer who worked on his presidential campaign, Rielle Hunter, and had fathered her baby. Edwards repeatedly denied the allegation, dismissing the story as "tabloid trash."
And...
What changed between the Edwards and Woods stories? NPR's Shepard suggests the first scandal incited the firestorm over the second: "The John Edwards story forced legitimate news organizations not to ignore Tiger Woods. The mainstream media used to dismiss that kind of story. Now they do so at their own peril. The floodgates are open. Anything goes."
Friday, March 5, 2010 at 07:22 PM
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There's no question that the news media got the direction of the Tiger Woods story right; Woods himself confirmed its hazy outlines a few days after the National Enquirer broke the story of his relationship with a New York event planner, Rachel Uchitel. In two brief and vaguely worded postings on his Web site, he acknowledged unspecified "transgressions" and "infidelity," thereby shattering his carefully crafted image as an upstanding family man. As some of his sponsors headed for cover, Woods took an indefinite hiatus from golf to sort out his personal life.
That, at least, is what is known for certain. But almost every other widely reported aspect of Tiger's tale rests on a wobbly foundation, unsupported by on-the-record sourcing, official documentation or direct observation--that is, the methods that journalists are supposed to employ to separate fact from speculation and substance from gossip. Much of what was reported relied instead on supposition, guesswork and innuendo, often sourced back to problematic stories like the News of the World's Lawton story or online reports of dubious provenance.
For all its lurid aspects, the Woods scandal may have constituted a watershed in American journalism: A major news story in which many "respectable" news outlets ditched traditional newsgathering methods and standards of fair play and piggybacked on aggressive but not always accurate tabloid reporting. The distinction between "mainstream" and "tabloid" may never have been so blurred as it was in the whirlwind of reporting on Woods.