UNITED STATES
Washington Post
To get the Josh Duggar story, InTouch utilized solid investigative journalism
By Paul Farhi June 7
Until Caitlyn Jenner displaced it in the tabloid firmament last week, the hottest story in America’s booming celebrity-gossip industry was the revelations about Josh Duggar. The eldest kid on the popular “19 Kids and Counting” reality TV series, Duggar, now 27, was identified in a 2005 police report as the alleged molester of five young girls, including four of his sisters, when he was a teenager.
Unlike the highly orchestrated Jenner story, the revelations about Duggar came from actual journalistic digging. And it came from a somewhat unlikely source: InTouch Weekly , a magazine and Web site not known as a giant of investigative journalism, even within the Kardashian-centric universe it inhabits.
InTouch’s last big splash, so to speak, was in January, when it photoshopped Jenner’s head onto a female model’s body to suggest what he might look like as a woman. At the time, Jenner’s intentions were rumored but unconfirmed, and InTouch’s cover was widely denounced as trashy and insensitive.
Yet InTouch has led coverage of the sordid Duggar story with what looks like solid reporting. Although rumors about Duggar’s past have appeared periodically on the Internet for years, the magazine nailed it by disclosing the police investigation and incident report. It subsequently revealed that Duggar’s father, Jim Bob, waited a year before reporting the allegations to authorities.
Not long after InTouch dropped its first bombshell, Josh Duggar resigned from his job at the Family Research Council, a conservative-advocacy group based in Washington. His parents later acknowledged the veracity of the allegations, and Josh Duggar has apologized for “my wrongdoing.” Meanwhile, TLC, the cable network owned by Discovery Communications of Silver Spring, Md., has put “19 Kids and Counting” in limbo, its return to the air uncertain.
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