One point I’m not clear on is whether the Enquirer is entirely eligible for the prize — there are questions about whether the tabloid is technically a magazine or a newspaper, and whether reporting that was done in 2007 and 2008 is eligible for a 2009 contest.

Leaving that aside, though, there’s a part of me that really hopes the Enquirer gets the Pulitzer — or at least a finalist nod. I was in Iowa and New Hampshire more or less constantly in the run-up to those early election contests, and the degree to which the Enquirer was out alone on this story cannot be overstated. The subject of John Edwards’s extramarital appetites was a widely assumed/acknowledged/gossiped-about piece of information among campaign staffers and reporters, and yet no one but this tabloid was doing anything with it. When the first big Enquirer story on Edwards and Rielle Hunter came out, the widely traded joke was that they’d gotten the story wrong — but only in the sense that Hunter was the only woman Edwards wasn’t sleeping with. The rest of the media were too obsessed with covering the election as a horse race that even when the Enquirer got the goods on this widely held assumption — that the haircut from North Carolina had a zipper problem — it never broke into the mainstream coverage. Even the blogs ignored it. The Enquirer was standing alone on this, and that deserves some kind of recognition.