Some highlights from the coverage:

On ABC's web site, "The Blotter," Brian Ross and company posted a story today entitled "Is John Edwards Still Lying," which includes an exclusive interview with a friend of Ms. Hunter's named (apparently) Pidgeon, who suggests that he is, in fact, still lying.

In Broadcasting & Cable, Marisa Guthrie writes that according to multiple sources "Edwards was apoplectic that ABC News broke the story on its website and began promoting it early on Friday, giving the rest of the media a chance to play catch-up and cite ABC News' report."

In Newsweek, Jonathan Darman writes about meeting Ms. Hunter on the campaign trail in 2006, having a boozy lunch with her in New York, and his sometimes strained reporter-source relationship with her thereafter.

In The New York Times, Richard Perez-Pena and Bill Carter looked at why various members of the mainstream media were so reluctant to report on the story for so long.

The Politico's Michael Calderone talks with Brian Ross about how ABC News' investigation unfolded.

Earlier today, we reported that ABC News' chief investigative reporter Brian Ross was working on a story about John Edwards' alleged affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter.

Now, you can strike "alleged" from the record.

Mr. Ross and producer Rhonda Schwartz just posted an article on ABC's "The Blotter," under the blockbuster headline, "Edwards Admits Sexual Affair; Lied as Presidential Candidate."

According to the post, Mr. Edwards made the admission in an interview with ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff, which will air tonight on Nightline. At the same time, Mr. Edwards denied to ABC that he was the father of Ms. Hunter's baby girl.

"John Edwards repeatedly lied during his Presidential campaign about an extramarital affair with a novice filmmaker, the former Senator admitted to ABC News today," reports ABC News. "In an interview for broadcast tonight on Nightline, Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 44-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her."

"Edwards also denied he was the father of Hunter's baby girl, Frances Quinn, although the one-time Democratic Presidential candidate said he has not taken a paternity test," add Mr. Ross and Ms. Schwartz. "Edwards said he knew he was not the father based on timing of the baby's birth on February 27, 2008. He said his affair ended too soon for him to have been the father."

For weeks, members of the media meta-sphere have been debating about whether the MSM should follow up on the numerous stories in The National Enquirer, alleging that Mr. Edwards has fathered an out-of-wedlock child with filmmaker Rielle Hunter.

"I think the mainstream media is right to be cautious with this story," Brent Cunningham, managing editor of The Columbia Journalism Review, recently told The Hartford Courant. "I think they're good at what [The National Enquirer] do. ... They make sure their stories are legally airtight, but I don't know if that qualifies them to be a source to follow."

Recently, a number of influential writers including Mickey Kaus of Slate and Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star have argued in favor of news organizations (and Mr. Edwards himself) addressing the story. That ABC News' top investigative team has now deemed the story worthy of reporting on may signal that the rest of the mega fauna in the American media may be at last turning their attention to the unsavory subject of the alleged child and the alleged affair.

"Sure, it's distasteful," wrote Tom Bemis is MarketWatch on Thursday, Aug. 7, in a piece arguing for the story's legitimacy as a news topic. "That's one of the reasons it's news. But The National Enquirer owns the Edwards love child story the way The Washington Post owned Watergate."

Apparently, Mr. Ross and his colleagues at ABC News—who in recent years have broken big stories on everything from covert C.I.A. prisons, to campaign-finance reform, to Congressman Mark Foley's lecherous instant messaging—now want a piece of the story.

No word yet on when Mr. Ross' investigation might land on his ABC Web site, The Blotter, or on other ABC News programs. And of course, given the ethically complicated and empirically hazy subject matter, it's possible the reporting will never make it past ABC's lawyers and standard czars or get scooped by another reporter.

The details are here.

Mr. Westin had good reason to toast Mr. Ross. Over the past few years, the network’s chief investigative correspondent has produced widely praised reports on topics ranging from secret C.I.A. prisons, campaign-finance reform, and Congressman Mark Foley’s lewd instant messaging. In the process, he has established himself as one of the preeminent enterprise journalists in TV news.

But in interviews with NYTV, several of Mr. Ross’ former competitors painted a picture of a reporter who, while capable of breaking big stories, also has a tendency to overplay smaller ones.

Jim Stewart, who recently retired as CBS News’ longtime Washington-based correspondent, expressed reservations about some of Mr. Ross’ work, in particular questioning the accuracy of some of Mr. Ross’ stories on the ABC investigative team’s Web site, The Blotter.

“Were they wrong some of the time? Yes,” said Mr. Stewart “I’d rather be right than be first.” (Mr. Stewart did not identify specific stories by Mr. Ross that failed to hold up.)

Mr. Ross has racked up myriad investigative awards during his career, including a George Polk Award for his 2005 work on the C.I.A. prisons and a shared 2007 Emmy for the Foley story. And in an interview Tuesday, he defended his record to NYTV. Mr. Ross noted that everything that appeared on The Blotter or on air was carefully vetted ahead of time by a team of ABC lawyers and standards czars. “Because of them, I sleep well at night,” he said. “Nothing is ever put out until they are satisfied with it.”

Mr. Stewart, for his part, added that he held Mr. Ross in high regard as a competitor, and said that over the years, Mr. Ross had beaten him on numerous stories. He attributed the problem in part to cable news and the rise of the Internet, which he said had ratcheted up pressure on investigative reporters to pull the trigger faster. “Brian pulls the trigger faster than most,” he said.

A former ABC News staffer, who is not currently a competitor of Mr. Ross’, told NYTV that there was pressure from ABC News execs to create page hits for The Blotter. “The pressure for Blotter reporting is intense,” said the former staffer, “to the point that Brian or his senior producer will sometimes keep information off the D.L.—internal e-mail distribution lists—so that it can be reported first on the Blotter.” Doing so, the source suggested, allowed Mr. Ross to plant his flag on certain stories before internal competitors could raise questions.

Mr. Ross acknowledged to NYTV that he was wary of putting his team’s investigative stories on internal ABC distribution lists—some of which go out to hundreds of people. But he said it wasn’t because of territoriality, but rather because of the sensitive nature of investigative reporting.

“When you put it on there, you’re essentially publishing it,” he said. “I really do stress that the investigative unit should not be putting out material in drips and drabs. When we have it, we have it. I’m different that way. … There are people who will write on there things like, ‘So and so has told me this, but it’s off the record.’ I can’t write that and have it go to 300 people.”

Still, a former producer at a competing show described Mr. Ross to NYTV as a good investigative reporter whose “exclusives” occasionally seemed to fall flat—often by the end of the segment.

“We were extremely careful whenever we saw a Brian Ross piece,” said the former producer. “He does some great work. But there were a lot of times that the pieces yelled one thing and seemed to suggest a crisis, and then he would dial it back almost entirely at the end of the piece by saying something like, ‘It’s important to know that the F.B.I. doesn’t take this threat seriously. And there’s no reason for concern.’” The former producer pointed to stories by Mr. Ross on the anthrax attacks and on Dennis Hastert’s role in the Jack Abramoff scandal, both of which received prominent play by ABC, but subsequently failed to ignite.

Similar concerns were aired in Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz’s book, Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War, published in October. A number of passages described Mr. Ross’ competitors trying to follow up on his scoops, failing to do so, and accusing him of overreaching. In one example, Mr. Kurtz described a report by Mr. Ross, which appeared during the 2006 N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, that suicide bombers might be planning an imminent attack on a U.S. sports arena. At the end of the segment, Mr. Ross noted that federal officials “do not believe any imminent threat exists.” Afterward, Mr. Kurtz wrote, a team of CBS reporters were asked to follow up on the tip, and found nothing worth reporting. Ditto at NBC, where NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams, in Mr. Kurtz’s words, “saw it as a classic scare ’em piece of the kind that Brian Ross was doing too often.”

Speaking to NYTV, Mr. Ross defended himself on this charge too. “Maybe if Brian Williams knew all that I knew, and I was able to explain it to him like I’m able to explain it to Charlie Gibson, maybe he’d make a different decision,” he said.

“[Mr. Williams] didn’t think that the Foley story was worth leading with when we broke that,” Mr. Ross continued. “Everyone has different judgments. I don’t think we all have to be the same.

“I’ve seen investigative units come and go at various operations, and the ones that don’t work are the ones that spend two years and a million dollars on some project that falls apart, that doesn’t work,” Mr. Ross added. “And the ones that get it wrong, that doesn’t work. We’re trying to be productive—and productive in an area, online, that’s important for the future of our company.”

It was Friday afternoon, and Mr. Ross, the chief investigative correspondent for ABC News, was on the phone with The Observer. He was discussing NBC’s preemptive response to his latest story—set to air that night on ABC’s 20/20—which would raise troubling questions about Dateline NBC’s hit show, To Catch a Predator.

The buzzy Predator, in which Dateline investigators, working with law enforcement officials, conduct sting operations designed to expose and arrest potential child molesters, has turned into a surprise hit among NBC’s struggling prime-time lineup. Now Ross was readying an investigative report that aimed to shine a spotlight on Dateline’s sometimes questionable methods.

For weeks, said Mr. Ross, NBC producers and executives had declined to comment for his piece. Then, last Wednesday, NBC News president Steve Capus had publicly questioned Mr. Ross’ motives in an interview with USA Today. “I chalk this up to the usual network silly competitiveness, in a territory that deserves much more of a serious handling,” Mr. Capus told the paper. “The competitive wars right now are at a very high level. That’s fueling this.”

To NYTV, Mr. Ross batted down Capus’s implication. “Implicit in that was that we’re all in a club and we shouldn’t criticize or report on each other,” said Mr. Ross. “I don’t think that’s the way you should operate. It’s like the blue wall of silence with cops.”

Mr. Ross had never watched an episode of To Catch a Predator until this summer. But he grew interested in the story when a group of fellow reporters alerted him to the tragedy surrounding a sting operation that the show, coordinating with local police, had carried out in Murphy, Texas, outside of Dallas. During filming, one of the operation’s targets had committed suicide rather than face exposure on national television. To make matters worse, the local prosecutor eventually dropped all charges against all 23 would-be pedophiles caught on camera, citing flaws in the joint NBC/police investigation.

Mr. Ross was intrigued. “People said, ‘You’ll never go after NBC.’ I said, ‘Well, we’re not going to go after NBC. But we are going to take a look at this.’”

The show, which aired Friday night, used outtake footage, never aired by NBC, to detail the intimate working relationship that Dateline forged with the local police chief’s office, and the extent to which the show’s production requirements influenced police procedures—ultimately leading to the collapse of the D.A.’s case.

Mr. Ross said he was surprised by NBC’s defensiveness, contrasting the experience with his critical reporting on CBS, during the Dan Rather “Memogate” controversy of 2004.

“I remember talking to [CBS president] Les Moonves and he said, ‘You really opened our eyes,’” said Mr. Ross. “I thought that was commendable. CBS was straightforward. They answered our questions. They dealt with us. That was not the reaction we got at NBC from Capus.”

MEMO TO CNBC EMPLOYEES THINKING about jumping ship to the Fox Business Network, set to kick off October 15: Get your Kevins straight!

That advice comes a little too late for Eric Bolling. In June, Mr. Bolling, a high-rolling commodities trader-turned-charismatic CNBC talking head, informed his cable news bosses that he was quitting as a commentator on the market-analysis show Fast Money.

Publicly, Mr. Bolling has since suggested that he wanted to spend more time with his family (don’t they all?). But CNBC executives suspected otherwise, thanks in part to an e-mail in which Mr. Bolling’s lawyer chewed over the enforceability of a non-compete clause in the pundit’s contract. Mr. Bolling, according to court documents, had intended to forward the message to Kevin Magee, a senior executive at the Fox Business Network, but instead directed it to CNBC honcho Kevin Goldman.

In July, Mr. Bolling and his lawyers sent CNBC a letter arguing that he should be released from his contract, freeing him to sign on with a competitor. In an affidavit, the multimillionaire argued that CNBC never treated him as an irreplaceable asset: “I was not highly compensated, was not provided with a wardrobe, and received no benefits or even a car service.”

CNBC, unsurprisingly, saw things differently. Billable hours ensued.

“Eric Bolling signed a contract,” CNBC’s Goldman told NYTV. “And we expect him to abide by his contractual obligations.”

You can’t blame CNBC for taking a hard line. In recent months, rumors have swirled around the cable news world about efforts by News Corp. execs to poach CNBC talent. Still, Mr. Bolling’s attorney, Steven Mintz, told us he was amazed at the lengths CNBC was going to try to keep “a talking yak-yak” from continuing his television career elsewhere. “We think they are using nuclear weapons when maybe a small hand grenade would be appropriate,” said Mr. Mintz. (Of course, the media high road is littered with the roadkill of news organizations that thought they could defend themselves against Rupert Murdoch using small-caliber weapons.)

As for Fox, it’s not exactly hiding its intentions. Last month, a top executive filed an affidavit with the court stating, “If Mr. Bolling were free to work for the Fox Business Network, we would be very interested in hiring him.”

ON MONDAY, CBS MADE IT OFFICIAL: As of next Monday, Shelley Ross will be taking over the reigns of The Early Show as senior executive producer.

Early has long been mired in third place, and Ms. Ross, who made her name in part by helping take ABC’s Good Morning America from last to almost first, appears to have been given the authority to make sweeping changes. But a 1998 memo, written by Ms. Ross while she was at ABC, suggests that she may not have driven the key personnel decision at the heart of GMA’s revival—the choice of Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer as the show’s co-anchors.

“An easy choice for anchor is Jack Ford who is very smart and very watchable,” Ross wrote. “I have liked watching him since Court TV and through the OJ trial—especially on Larry King with Cynthia McFadden. I think he can play well off a variety of co-hosts.”

She went on: “The female anchor choice is much tougher … I understand Connie Chung is under discussion for an interim solution. She is a pleasure to work with and watch on air … I still believe the best candidate is Elizabeth Vargas.” CBS executives are mum about what her arrival might mean for the show’s current anchor team, but NYTV is guessing that Jack Ford isn’t in the running.