I got this note this morning from a reader of my Hill column on John Edwards and the National Enquirer:

I usually don’t read the columns in the Hill, but I decided to check out yours today. This will be the first and last time I ever read your column. Your statement, “[b]ut one reads an Enquirer story just like one reads a story in The New York Times” is so ridiculous it is comical. You gave one example of the New York Times reporting poorly, granted a good one, but honestly, comparing the Enquirer and Times is absurd. If you actually feel the veracity of the Enquirer and Times is equal, you shouldn’t be allowed to have your own column.

The reader was responding to this part of the column:

Critics might question the Enquirer’s involvement in all this. Perhaps, they might charge, money changed hands to make the story happen.
Maybe it did. But one reads an Enquirer story just like one reads a story in the New York Times. You look at the allegation and try to sort out how much evidence the paper is presenting.
For example, after carefully reading the Times’ front-page story alleging that Sen. John McCain had had an affair with a lobbyist, one could only ask, Where’s the evidence?
That’s not the case with the Edwards story; there’s quite a bit of detail.

Other readers here in the Corner have questioned my linking to the Edwards story in the National Enquirer. I can only say I don’t think it’s absurd to read all news stories the same way. If they are making some sort of allegation, you have to look through all the characterizing and contextualizing to see what evidence the paper is presenting to support its charge. It’s a story-by-story thing, and I don’t see any reason to view a story in the Times as automatically more credible than one in the Enquirer. It all depends on the story.

And that includes bum stories. For example, the Enquirer has, in the last year or so, pushed hard on stories charging that George W. Bush is drinking again, that he and Laura Bush are going to get a divorce, and that he is going to run away with Condoleezza Rice. Now, that would be a heck of a story. But alas, there simply was nothing there, and anyone reading the stories — that would be me — could see that.

To my eye, the Edwards story is far different. Beginning with the original story in the Huffington Post, to this piece from the Enquirer last December, to the new one, it seems to me there’s a pretty convincing body of evidence. Of course, there is the problem that no other reporters that I know of, including me, have checked the Enquirer’s sourcing on those elements of the story that could be checked. So if the Enquirer is fabricating material, it could all be wrong. But that would also be true of any other news organization, and the Enquirer has been right quite a few times.