Let’s not get all crazy loving people

By now you’ve heard some media outlet reporting that John Edwards had an affair.

If you have not, well, you’re hearing it from me. John Edwards had an affair.

(Shocking!).

Next thing you’ll tell me Olympic officials accept bribes, business executives commit fraud, and baseball players take steroids. I like to think the Associated Press just rotates through a set number of mad lib like stories about the human drama ______ (proper noun) ______ (verb) ______ (something naughty).

Lather, rinse and repeat.

Let’s take it from the top.

Refresh and reboot.

My interest in this story has nothing to do with its salaciousness, though I did think he was one of the good ones. No, I suppose my interest, why I want to talk about this at all has everything to do with why it’s even news at all.

Pre-Watergate, journalism was an exclusive field, meant for just a few to research, interview, and vet factually their stories. But Nixon’s wrongdoings opened up a generation who wanted to investigate the next great political scandal. It only started there. It had to be breaking news, where nothing was too small for public exposure. A Kennedy press core turned their back on presidential marital indiscretions, seeing them as not worthy of the paper they were written on. But a decade and change later - Watergate had changed all that, journalism itself. Technology allowed for continuous streams of news allowing for the viewer to decide for itself what was of value. And eventually we’d come to a day, where marital monogamy was not private discourse but public fodder.

Top line celebrity, political, entertainment, world and local news of today is just that, “John Edwards Admits to Affair.”

Personally I return to a Kennedy generation where it’s none of my business. The why’s, the whens, with whoms. Not my business.

What’s most interesting, however, is the byline I’ve seen repeated in countless stories: “Edwards Admits to Affair, However Says He Did Not Love Woman.”

Oh well good, that would just be insane if he was involved with someone and loved them. Let’s not get all crazy loving people. What would the world come to if people went around loving people. (Shocking!)
But possibly therein lies the problem in it all – the naughtiness, the journalistic shift, the public fodder – a lack of love. That pesky little thing called love.

I hope for the day, sometime between now and the end of my life, that love alone becomes the byline.