U.K.: Spitzer scandal

Not one to miss out on a salacious story, The Times of London follows the coverage of Governor Eliot Spitzer's past patronage of a prostitution ring, revealed this week. Following the New York Times profile on Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the prostitute who met with Spitzer, today's article in The Times of London tells how Dupre informed the prostitution ring of her client's prominent standing before focusing on the legal ramifications of the situation.

The article avoids sensationalizing the story, for the most part. Dupre is referred to as a "call-girl" and her meeting with Spitzer as a "tryst," but the phrasing that reeks most strongly of scandal is a direct quote from Dupre herself when she learned of Spitzer's identitythat was originally reported in The New York Post. The first four paragraphs focus on the identification of Dupre as the previously unnamed prostitute. Then the article turns to Spitzer's legal concerns and the question of whether or not taxpayer money or campaign funding was misused. The article goes into the nuanced details of the law by which Spitzer might be charged because of how he paid the prostitution ring, rather than the fact that he patronized it at all. The final paragraph implicates Hillary Clinton, whom Spitzer has endorsed, as a potential recipient of backlash because of this, and it ends with a joke made at her expense on the Letterman show.

The article relies in part on reportage from The New York Times and The New York Post, but it does not report on the controversy surrounding the publication of the NYT article. Interestingly, although The Times does not overdramatize its coverage of this news item, it does use Spitzer as a news peg for a confessional anonymous article written by a man who is addicted to using prostitutes, headlined, "My desire for sex was so overwhelming that I had difficulty breathing."