The Rielle Story

Did you know the BBC has only mentioned Rielle Hunter once ever on its website?

I didn’t intend to post about this. It just happened I had read on some US blogs and in the papers that John Edwards was being investigated by a Federal Grand Jury over illegal payments to Ms Hunter to buy her silence over their affair and was, you know, checking the BBC website for news about it. Silly me.

Seems odd. John Edwards is quite an important person – if the 2004 election had gone the other way he’d have been Vice President of the United States of America, and he had hopes that were not by any means crazy of becoming President himself. Furthermore one would have thought that the story had a certain degree of human interest – Edwards cheating on his terminally ill wife, the love child, getting his aide to take the rap, the birth certificate with no father listed, finally getting caught by the National Enquirer when all the respectable papers wouldn’t look at the story.

“John Edwards” is a common name. A search gives loads of irrelevant results. I did try “John Edwards” and “affair” – didn’t get much. In fact I couldn’t find any other mention of the affair other than the story I linked to above, though I didn’t search through all the thousands of results. It’s almost as if the BBC didn’t want to talk about a Democrat behaving badly.

I suppose one of these days the BBC will run a second story on the matter.

There were a hundred and twenty seven stories on the BBC about a sex scandal (which didn’t involve any actual sex) concerning the Republican Mark Foley. Foley represented the 16th District of Florida in the House of Representatives.

UPDATE: Aha! I thought to do a search for “John Edwards” and “National Enquirer”. I found … three mentions in BBC blogs.