8 years after the National Enquirer's deal with Donald Trump, the iconic tabloid is limping badly
Catch and kill
NEW YORK — 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.
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
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