By DAVID BAUDER (AP Media Writer)
NEW YORK (AP) — Catch and kill. Checkbook journalism. Secret deals. Friends helping friends.
Even by National Enquirer standards, testimony by its former publisher David Pecker at Donald Trump’s hush money trial this week has revealed an astonishing level of corruption at America’s best-known tabloid and may one day be seen as the moment it effectively died.
“It just has zero credibility,” said Lachlan Cartwright, executive editor of the Enquirer from 2014 to 2017. “Whatever sort of credibility it had was totally damaged by what happened in court this week.”
On Thursday, Pecker was back on the witness stand to tell more about the arrangement he made to boost Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2016, tear down his rivals and silence any revelations that may have damaged him.
THE ENQUIRER HELPED FUEL THE RISE OF TABLOID CULTURE
However its stories danced on the edge of credulity, the Enquirer was a cultural fixture, in large part because of genius marketing. As many Americans moved to the suburbs in the 1960s, the tabloid staked its place on racks at supermarket checkout lines, where people could see headlines about UFO abductions or medical miracles while waiting for their milk and bread to be bagged.
Celebrity news was a staple, and the Enquirer paid sources around Hollywood to learn what the stars’ publicists wouldn’t say. It may have been true. It may have had just a whiff of truth. It was rarely boring.
When the tabloid paid a mourner to secretly snap a picture of Elvis Presley in his coffin for its front cover, that week’s issue sold 6.9 million copies, according to the 2020 documentary, “Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer.”
For all the ridicule the tabloid received from “serious” journalists, Enquirer reporters hustled and broke some genuine news. A memorable picture of the married Sen. Gary Hart enjoying a tropical holiday alongside a woman he was involved with destroyed a presidential candidacy and brought politicians into the Enquirer’s celebrity world. The tab was considered for a Pulitzer Prize after revealing a sex scandal involving U.S. Sen. John Edwards in the early 2000s.
During his celebrity days in the 1990s, Trump was a fixture in its pages, and often a source for news. When Pecker bought the Enquirer in 1999, one of his first calls was from Trump, who said, “Congratulations — you 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 she had an affair with Arnold Schwarzenegger, dangling the prospect of a potential book and movie. Then it kept silent as Schwarzenegger, who denied the affair, ran for California governor. The arrangement became known as “catch and kill.”
Pecker said that in a summer 2015 meeting with Trump and lawyer Michael Cohen, he outlined how he would help the presidential candidate, a deal that included the alleged “catch and kill” arrangements with Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels.
Pecker testified that his promises to Trump weren't written down, just an agreement among friends.
During the campaign, the National Enquirer openly supported Donald Trump with headlines like “Donald Trump: The Man Behind the Legend” and “Donald Trump: Healthiest Individual Ever Elected.”
Former top Enquirer editor Steve Coz was puzzled by the pro-Trump covers when he saw them in Florida, as it was not typical for the National Enquirer.
NOT THE USUAL JOURNALISTIC METHODS
Cartwright was attracted to a job at the Enquirer by his friend's promise to break stories like the Edwards scandal, but found that material about a controversial politician was off limits. Meanwhile, Bill and Hillary Clinton were frequently targeted with negative stories, which was seen as a win for Trump and the anti-Clinton stories were popular with Enquirer readers.
Even Cartwright was surprised to hear in Pecker’s testimony about Cohen’s role in creating false stories about Trump’s Republican primary rivals. Ben Carson was called a “bungling surgeon” and Marco Rubio was linked to a “love child” and “cocaine connection.” Ted Cruz was accused of having five secret affairs and his father was alleged to have a connection with JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
At the time, Cartwright and his friends wondered about what was happening, only to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
The stories were sensational and lacked truth, but thousands of voters saw them, and when the rumors reached the mainstream media, the opponents, particularly an angry Cruz, had to address them.
Cartwright, now a correspondent for The Hollywood Reporter, calls this the origin of fake news.
The Enquirer has not made a significant impact in years. In 2019, the tabloid published texts alleging an extramarital affair by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. However, this backfired when Bezos publicly revealed that the Enquirer had threatened to publish damaging photos if the Post didn’t stop an investigation into Pecker’s company, American Media Inc. Pecker lost his job as head of the Enquirer’s parent company in 2020, and it was eventually sold. N/A N/A
N/A
During the last six months of election year 2016, the Enquirer had average weekly newsstand sales of 238,000, but this dropped to just under 56,500 in the last six months of 2023, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. Currently, the Enquirer features stories like “The Untold Story: Marko Stout’s Journey From Obscurity to Art World Phenom” on its website.
“It’s really a mere reflection of its past self,” Cartwright said. “David Pecker’s legacy will be that he completely ruined that tabloid.”
___
David Bauder covers media for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder
___
The article has been updated to fix a mistake in the name of former Trump opponent Ben Carson.
