Hornswaggled Journalists Explain Their Edwards Blindspot

Poor Walter Shapiro chooses to throw up his hands and apologize over six years of misjudging John Edwards—Shapiro covered Edwards intensely for Salon and elsewhere, and wrote most of a book about the Edwardses. "This was not a case of the Inside-the-Beltway Syndrome in which beloved Washington figures get every conceivable break from a sometimes gullible press corps," he writes, but doesn't actually say what it then was, except to note that he wasn't in that press corp or on any bus. Well, obviously, he just didn't know. And neither did anyone else.