It’s only 36 hours until Deborah Jeane Palfrey makes her national television debut on ABC’s 20/20, and we’re once again torn between hope and disappointment. You’ll remember our yawns at the leak identifying Harlan “Shock and Awe” Ullman as a former client of Palfrey’s escort service, Pamela Martin and Associates. The alleged madam then kicked up her media blitz by releasing a page of phone records and promising that her high profile customer list included “a Bush administration economist, the head of a conservative think tank, a prominent CEO, several lobbyists and a handful of military officials.” It looked like we had a full-blown sex scandal on our hands. This morning, though, the guys over at Yeas & Nays are calling the story “a bust”. Why?

Brian Ross’s exclusive interview with Ullman and Palfrey has been relegated to 7 minutes at the end of the show. One “unnamed source” at ABC said, “This isn’t going to blow the lid off Washington. If they had any big fish, we’d know it by now. There’s no way this lives up to the hype.” Besides that, the network is apparently getting squeamish about how to handle the 10,000-strong client list, since both Palfrey and Ullman say there was no sex involved in any escort services and it’s hard to prove otherwise. Though it’s easy for us to infer that a massage is code for sex, ABC News can’t afford to take that logical step. Jeffrey Schneider, executive vice president at ABC News told the Examiner:

We are proceeding very thoughtfully and very carefully, as we do on any work that we do. Obviously, there are sensitivities here and we are very mindful of that. If a name is going to be included in our report, it would have to rise to a certain level of newsworthiness.

On the other hand, it’s May sweeps, and ABC has to compete with other “newsish” pieces like NBC’s “To Catch a Predator”.

So is it possible to salvage this story from the “less than 15 minutes of fame” pile? We’d like to think so. Palfrey has yet to be tried in either civil or criminal court, and with her penchant for making absurd announcements both in front of cameras and on her “legal defense fund” web site we doubt she’ll let her fade away. Meanwhile, another man is getting lawyers involved to keep his name out of the ABC report. Though ABC, which is owned by family-friendly media giant Disney, may not release the client names, in Washington it’s likely the list could become an open secret. Either way, it doesn’t seem likely Palfrey, or the nation’s interest in public officials private lives, will disappear anytime soon.