8 years after the National Enquirer’s deal with Donald Trump, the iconic tabloid is limping badly
NEW YORK — Catch and kill. Checkbook journalism. Secret deals. Friends help friends.
Even by National Enquirer standards, former publisher David Pecker’s testimony at Donald Trump’s hush money trial this week exposed an astonishing level of corruption at America’s best-known tabloid and may one day be seen as the moment when this actually went down.
“It just has no credibility whatsoever,” said Lachlan Cartwright, editor-in-chief of the Enquirer from 2014 to 2017. “Whatever credibility it had was completely damaged by what happened in court this week.”
On Thursday, Pecker was back on the witness stand to talk more about the arrangement he made to boost Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy, take down his rivals and silence any revelations that may have damaged him.
Although the stories danced on the edge of credulity, The Enquirer was a cultural household name, thanks in large part to brilliant marketing. When many Americans moved to the suburbs in the 1960s, the tabloid took its place on shelves at supermarket checkouts, where people could see headlines about UFO abductions or medical miracles as they waited for their milk and bread to be bagged. done.
Celebrity news was a staple, and the Enquirer paid Hollywood sources to find out what the stars’ publicists wouldn’t say. It may have been true. Maybe there was a hint of truth in it. It was rarely boring.
When the tabloid paid a mourner to secretly take a photo of Elvis Presley in his casket for the front page, that week’s issue sold 6.9 million copies, according to the 2020 documentary, “Scandalous : The Untold Story of the National Enquirer.”
Despite all the ridicule the tabloid received from “serious” journalists, Enquirer reporters rushed to report real news. A memorable photo of married Senator Gary Hart enjoying a tropical vacation with a woman he was involved with destroyed a presidential candidacy and launched politicians into the Enquirer’s celebrity world. The tab was considered for a Pulitzer Prize after a sex scandal involving U.S. Senator John Edwards came to light in the early 2000s.
During his celebrity days in the 1990s, Trump was a fixture on the pages and often a source of news. When Pecker bought the Enquirer in 1999, one of his first calls was from Trump, who said, “Congratulations — you’ve bought a great magazine,” the former executive testified this week.
As the “Scandalous” documentary illustrates, some of Pecker’s unsavory practices predated his deal with Trump. The Enquirer paid for the story of Gigi Goyette, an actress who claimed to have an affair with Arnold Schwarzenegger, dangling the prospect of a possible book and movie. Then there was silence when Schwarzenegger, who denied the affair, ran for governor of California. The scheme became known as ‘catch and kill’.
Pecker said that during a summer 2015 meeting with Trump and attorney Michael Cohen, he outlined how he would help the presidential candidate, a deal that included the alleged “catch and kill” schemes with Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels.
“They are not in writing,” Pecker testified about his promises to Trump. “It was just an arrangement between friends.”
Throughout the campaign, National Enquirer headlines made no secret of who the tabloid supported: “Donald Trump: The Man Behind the Legend,” read one. “Donald Trump: Healthiest Individual Ever Elected,” was another.
The Trump-boosting covers stunned Steve Coz, a former top Enquirer editor, when he saw them at his neighborhood supermarket in Florida. “That’s so strange to anyone who’s worked at the National Enquirer,” Coz said in the documentary.
Cartwright, lured into a job at the Enquirer by his friend Dylan Howard with the promise of breaking stories like the Edwards scandal, instead found that material about one of the most colorful, compromised politicians in recent history was off limits . Meanwhile, Bill and Hillary Clinton were often the target of unflattering stories; Pecker called that a double victory because it helped Trump and anti-Clinton stories were popular with Enquirer readers.
Even Cartwright said he was surprised to learn from Pecker’s testimony the role Cohen played in helping produce outlandishly false stories about Trump’s top Republican rivals. Ben Carlson was described as a ‘clumsy surgeon and ‘brainiac’. Marco Rubio headlines referred to a “love child” and “cocaine connection.” Ted Cruz is said to have had five secret affairs and his father is said to have a connection with JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
Cartwright remembers wondering with friends at the time what was going on, but being told “you sound like a conspiracy theorist.”
The stories were wild and there was nothing truthful about them. But thousands of voters saw them, and when the rumors reached the mainstream media, opponents — especially an angry Cruz — were forced to address them.
“This is the basis of fake news,” says Cartwright, now a correspondent for The Hollywood Reporter.
It’s been years since an Enquirer story made an impact. In 2019, the tabloid published texts claiming that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – who is also the owner of The Washington Post, a thorn in the side of then-President Trump – had an extramarital affair. But it backfired when Bezos publicly revealed that the Enquirer had threatened to publish incriminating photos if the Post continued its investigation into Pecker’s American Media Inc. wouldn’t stop. Pecker lost his job as head of the Enquirer’s parent company in 2020, and it was eventually sold. .
Celebrity news is widespread in the media these days. TMZ has largely taken up the Enquirer’s mantle with aggressive celebrity reporting and a willingness to pay for it, with greater journalistic accuracy. Political talk is also easy to find on the internet, as is disinformation.
The Enquirer averaged 238,000 newsstand sales per week during the last six months of the 2016 election year, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. During the last six months of 2023, sales averaged just under 56,500. It’s limping along: The main story on Thursday’s website was “The Untold Story: Marko Stout’s Journey From Obscurity to Art World Phenom.”
“It’s basically a shadow of its former self,” Cartwright said. “David Pecker’s legacy will be that he completely destroyed that tabloid.”
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David Bauder writes about media for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder