Should the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for its multi-year investigation of the John Edwards affair, scandal and cover-up? That’s a question that’s been asked lately: in some cases, at the same Mainstream Media papers which participated in the news blackout of the Enquirer‘s Edwards’ coverage.

Edwards, who had been Sen. John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, was one of the front-runners at the time the Enquirer broke the second installment of the story on December 18, 2007.

The Enquirer released an abundance of easily-verifiable information at that time: Rielle Hunter, a former Edwards campaign worker, was pregnant with what the Enquirer reported was Edwards’ love child; she had been moved within five miles of the Edwards campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, NC; Hunter was living an exclusive gated community, a few houses down the street from Edwards’ former Director of Finance, Andrew Young; and, she was driving around in a BMW registered to Young. Add all this to the fact that information about Hunter had disappeared from the Internet and other publicly-searchable databases and the MSM was handed a great story.

Although the Enquirer‘s report contained unnamed sources who fingered Edwards as the father, there were certainly enough hard facts to make most people curious–unless you were a MSM reporter. Still, the Enquirer kept working the story in the face of a complete and utter cone of silence imposed by Big Media.

Although a few mid-size newspaper columnists wrote about Edwards after the Enquirer‘s reporters cornered him leaving Hunter’s Beverly Hilton room in Los Angeles on July 22, 2008, Big Media’s silence was finally broken on August 8, 2008, when Edwards “confessed” to the nation on ABC’s Nightline. A media frenzy ensued, with many of the pieces attempting to explain why the MSM kept its remaining readers/viewers in the dark.

The MSM even discussing the Pulitzer for the Enquirer is somewhat surprising. Is this the mainstream press’ sway of doing penance for totally ignoring the story and helping cover it up until Edwards was no longer a factor?

We posed that question to David Perel, who is the former editor in chief of the National Enquirer and directed its coverage of the John Edwards affair. Perel, now the head of RadarOnline, thought for a moment, then said, “I think it might be their way of saying, ‘That was a great little story.'”

First, Newsweek named the Enquirer‘s John Edwards story on two of its Decade’s Top Ten Lists, both in Sex Scandals and Startling Scoops.

Then, Politics Daily‘s Emily Miller wrote, in Does the National Enquirer Deserve a Pulitzer for Breaking the John Edwards Scandal?:

The National Enquirer is a supermarket tabloid, but the time has come for the media elite to admit that it has an excellent investigative reporting team, which broke the biggest political scandal of 2009, the John Edwards affair.

While its own editor concedes that the paper would never be given a Pulitzer Prize — the jury is dominated by the newspaper establishment — I believe the time has come for us to recognize the Enquirer‘s political investigative reporting.

Howard Kurtz even discussed the Pulitzer/Enquirer question in the Washington Post — a paper which refused to report a word of the scandal when Edwards was a presidential candidate or being considered for a high-level post in the Obama administration.

Not all of the Pulitzer talk is positive; New York’s Adam K. Raymond dismissed the idea:

One problem with The Enquirer‘s dream of winning a Pulitzer, as Howard Kurtz notices, is that most of its significant reporting on the story happened in 2007 and 2008 and this year’s Pulitzers will honor work done in 2009. Another problem is that it’s the National Enquirer.

We’ll put aside for a moment the fact that Joseph Pulitzer built the New York World into the nation’s largest newspaper by using a recipe that emphasized some very Enquirer-like components: scandal, human interest and sensationalism.

Addressing Raymond’s first point: the Enquirer continued its investigation into 2009–and is still pursuing elements of the Edwards story today. There was much Edwards’ news reported in 2009; particularly, the Enquirer released documents proving that Edwards was the father of Rielle Hunter’s daughter, something that Edwards himself finally confirmed just last week.

Perel had the following reaction on whether he thought the story was over in 2008:

Over? Oh no, it’s not over. There’s still a grand jury out there. Although I’m not at the Enquirer anymore, they’re not done yet.

In fact, it may turn out to be that the most lasting of the Enquirer‘s contributions to the story–other than uncovering, committing resources and pursuing the story in the first place–was that the Enquirer was the first publication that started asking questions about Edwards’s possibly financing his mistress with campaign funds. Those just happen to be items being considered by a North Carolina grand jury.

As to Raymond’s second point of “…it’s the National Enquirer,” that very question was posed to David Perel a few days ago.

The results speak for themselves. We worked the story hard. We devoted considerable resources to it. A very good team was assembled for the Edwards investigation; Barry Levine, in New York, directed the team and we stayed on it for a long, long time.

Perel was reminded that he made the statement in July 2008 that “Our detractors don’t read the magazine. The ones who read it know we get it right.”

When asked if he still feels that way, he replied, “Yes. The people who criticize us the most don’t read us.”

What’s ironic about Raymond’s remark, “It’s the National Enquirer“, was that it was made in New York magazine. New York is the home of Game Change co-author John Heilemann, who is a contributing editor. Heilemann was one of the people who could have covered the Edwards scandal as it was occurring–but didn’t.

In Game Change, Heilemann and Mark Halperin wrote:

Out of view, the Edwards campaign was in damage-control mode, going into overdrive to dissuade the mainstream media from picking up the story, denouncing it as tabloid trash. Their efforts at containing the fallout were remarkably successful. The Enquirer‘s exposé gained zero traction in the traditional press and almost none in the blogosphere.

Heilemann contributed to that “zero traction in the traditional press” he later so profitably wrote about: nothing could be found where Heilemann had written on the scandal when Americans were looking for news of the affair in 2008 in New York’s archives. Meanwhile, the blogosphere, led by Mickey Kaus, was all over it.

Why did the National Enquirer chase the story when the rest of his media brethren stayed mum? Perel’s thoughts:

When we confronted him (Edwards) with what we had, he went public, and told lies; blatant, brazen lies to the American public. And he was running for president.

We knew what we had and we knew he was lying. He was willing to say anything to cover this up. At that point, we thought ‘he’s dangerous.’

After that, we couldn’t let go of the story.

As for the Pulitzer and the National Enquirer‘s chances of receiving it–ahead of a Mainstream Media that ignored ACORN, Van Jones, Climategate, as well as the Edwards scandal and cover-up?

Here’s a tip for the Enquirer‘s MSM competitors: if you don’t investigate and report a story, you can’t get a Pulitzer for it.

Note: For a more comprehensive version of this article, see What Does the National Enquirer Have to Do to Deserve a Pulitzer Prize?