Channel 8’s airport Gov-hunting triggers questions

Allow us to arrange the introductions:

Journalism, meet Voyeurism.

Buddies already? Must be, given how seamlessly they mingled when Channel 8 met Jim Gibbons.

"Governor, you told us just 10 minutes ago that Kathy Karrasch was not on this flight. Do you want to change your statement? ... So you just happened to be in Washington, D.C., with her and happened to be leaving in the same car as her? ... But you also said she wasn't on this flight with you, sir. You lied to me when I asked you unequivocally whether she was on the flight with you."

That's Channel 8's Jonathan Humbert -- in a sensational gotcha-Gov! scoop -- confronting an agitated Gibbons at the Reno airport recently, returning from a Washington, D.C., governors' conference and caught lying about the presence of traveling companion Kathy Karrasch, the alleged woman-not-his-wife.

Compelling and repelling. Tough to look away while maybe wishing we had.

Pulling a walk-and-stalk through the terminal beside an annoyed Gibbons, Humbert peppered him with questions, then posted a camera outside a restroom that harbored a hiding Karrasch. Then he nailed both outside as they prepared to duck into the same vehicle, where the Gov succumbed to un-Gov-like language, dropping a profanity on Humbert.

Despite angles that could justify The Great Chase -- his ugly divorce from wife Dawn, infidelity allegations, doubts over his character and re-electability, sending tons of text messages to Karrasch on a state cell phone (later reimbursing the state) -- this still triggered ambivalence in this viewer.

A tacky airport ambush over a sex scandal, rather than state business, feels mainstream now. Ivory-tower ethicists can debate a privacy-shmivacy attitude toward public figures into eternity, but we're through the tabloid looking glass when the National Enquirer -- tracking extramarital baby-maker John Edwards through a Los Angeles hotel to trigger his downfall -- competes for a Pulitzer Prize.

Under that boundary-blurring paradigm, Humbert's Gov-hunting felt both uncomfortably wrong and perfectly right. That's our convoluted media queasiness as once-polar opposite news styles increasingly intersect and overlap.

Disappointing, though, is that at a station that has arguably been our most substantive and least sensationalized, it felt like viewers should have a hand on the shower faucet to scrub off the stench. Few stories summon some sympathy for Jim Gibbons lately. This one did.

One Humbert comment was cringe-inducing: "Sir, we are barely less than 12 hours from a special session that is going to decide almost a billion dollars in cuts and here you are with a woman who's not your wife?" (As opposed to legislators having sex with their spouses, deeming them morally fit, therefore more able to make fiscal decisions the next morning?)

Another was flat-out absurd: "Now the governor must focus on the special session and put distractions behind him." (Say, the one wholly created by a reporter at the airport the night before?)

Yes, they got him.

Liar, liar, governor's pants on fire.

Yet mainstream media is also playing with a lit match.

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@review journal.com or 702-383-0256.