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in terms of the realm of popular culture...
rather than in the realm of journalism.
I think this is a bad time, not just for the press...
but it's a bad time for the truth.
- ♪ I just want to start ♪ - ♪ I just want to start ♪
- ♪ A flame in your heart ♪ - ♪ A flame in your heart ♪
♪ I don't want to set The world on fire ♪
♪ I just want to start ♪
♪ A flame in your heart ♪
♪ In my heart, I have but one desire ♪
♪ And that one is you No other will do ♪
♪ Ba, da, da ♪
♪ I've lost all ambition ♪
♪ For worldly acclaim ♪
♪ I just want to be The one you love ♪
♪ And with your admission That you'd feel the same ♪
♪ I'll have reached the goal I'm dreaming of, believe me ♪
- ♪ In my heart ♪ - ♪ In my heart ♪
- ♪ I have but one desire ♪ - ♪ I have but one desire ♪
- ♪ That one is you ♪ - ♪ That one is you ♪
- ♪ No other will do ♪ - ♪ No other will do ♪
Lantana, Florida, population 7,126,
according to the last census,
an undistinguished South Florida town on U.S. One
about ten miles south of Palm Beach, Florida,
an unlikely place, you'd think, to be the home
of one of America's most successful
publishing enterprises,
and yet Lantana, Florida,
is the home of the National Enquirer.
Generoso Pope Jr., a transplanted New Yorker,
Godfather of this magazine, journal, newspaper.
Calder: Gene Pope was a force of nature.
Virga: He knew what he wanted to do, and it was that paper,
and he wanted to sell the most papers
of anybody in the world.
Regan: Generoso Pope very cleverly identified
a way to communicate with mass-market America.
How he communicated it was studied by others,
adopted by others,
which set the stage for what was to come.
Wallace: And you know as well as I do
that there are allegations
that Mafia money has been behind the Enquirer
- since the beginning. - Right. I've heard.
I've read that.
Calder: Generoso Pope Jr. was the son of Generoso Pope.
Gene Pope was born into privilege.
His father owned Il Progresso,
an Italian-language paper in New York.
Because of that,
he was a huge political figure in America.
Gene was a child prodigy in many ways.
I mean, at 16, he was helping to runIl Progresso.
His father became
one of the most powerful guys in New York.
He pretty much controlled the Italian vote.
Along the way, he became a made guy in the Mafia.
When his father died, Gene was the heir apparent
to taking over the newspaper his father owned.
Pope III: Il Progresso was not the kind of newspaper
he wanted to do.
He wanted to form a newspaper in his own image
just like his father had done it.
Calder: He wanted to buy theNew York Enquirer,
which was a crappy little pape, mainly racing and sports,
but he needed 75,000 to buy it.
Believe it or not, Gene Pope's real Godfather
was the Godfather, Frank Costello,
who was a big guy in the mob obviously.
Pope III: That's where he got the money,
and it was an interest-free loan. Why?
Because he was like family.
It's a very Italian thing.
And that was the start of the Enquirer.
Sternig: He immediately put the word National on it.
He envisioned publishing
mounds and mounds and mounds of National Enquirers.
He was looking for something to sell more copies.
♪ You're fine ♪
♪ I want you to be mine, oh ♪
Calder: One day, he was driving on one of the New York highways,
and there was an accident ahea, and everybody slowed down.
They're all rubbernecking,
and they're looking at the side of the road.
Pope III: And he looked at the crowd, and he saw
all these people staring at a really gory scene.
♪ I think you're swell ♪
♪ Come close ♪
♪ Hold... ♪
Calder: He went, "My God, nobody's doing pictures
of that."
He suddenly realized,
"This is what I have to do. I got to make a gore rag."
So what he did is that he went to the police department.
He basically got first dibs
on the photography of these horrible accidents,
and that's how it started.
I got to tell you, when I first saw it,
sometimes it was hard to pick up.
♪ Come close ♪
♪ Hold me tight ♪
♪ Send me ♪
♪ Tonight and every night ♪
♪ You're slick ♪
But circulation went up dramatically.
It took off, but it was a little uncomfortable.
He realized that gore was only gonna take him so far.
(stammers) Circulation peaked at one million,
but he dreamed actually of 20 million,
which, of course, was insane.
(girl giggles)
Calder: By the mid-'60s,
many, many people were moving to the suburbs,
so they weren't stopping at newsstands,
and the idea was,
"We've got to get it in front of more people."
Well, where are the people?
narrator: There is madness in the marketplace.
Just listen to this.
- (cash register dings) - We zeroed in on supermarkets
as the one area where I suppose
some member of every family unt in the United States
comes once a week at least.
Calder: He wanted to be racks at the front end
of every checkout counter in the United States.
People told him, "Great idea, but you can't do this.
A gore paper, how could that get into supermarkets?"
People would throw up
just at a time when they were about to buy milk, you know?
It was totally impossible.
So we drastically
in one fell swoop eliminated all the gore.
From the moment he started,
he never stopped playing with it,
trying to change the format to find the winning formula.
Wallace: In came headlines like these.
Calder: Celebrity news.
Regan: Gossip items.
- Wright: Dogs. Pets. - Virga: Diets.
- Regan: Medical-oddity stories. - Virga: Psychic stories.
I happened to discover that Jimmy Carter
had once seen a UFO.
Wright: Gee-whiz stories.
We did one on making cars out of lobsters.
We had some guy called up
wanting to know where he could buy one.
Calder: Our headlines, our pictures, our front page,
and all of them had to be a triggering mechanim
to get people's attention first,
and if they liked what they saw, they bought it.
Regan: Generoso Pope really understood the psycholoy
of the average American person.
He used to call the reader of the National Enquirer
Missy Smith in Kansas City.
Wright: She was the standard by which every story
in the National Enquirer was judged.
man: The basic American woman.
Regan: She was somebody who had family values,
who loves stories, loves celebrities
and wanted to know essentially that celebrities suffered, too.
Coz: Mrs. Smith goes to the beauty parlor,
talks to her girlfriends.
They're all chatting about celebrities.
Dolly Parton is depressed,
or Elizabeth Taylor got fat again
and can't find love.
She would go, 'Ugh," and have to read all about it.
We were Missy Smith in Kansas City.
I guess I'm a little nosy.
We were Missy Smith in Yonkers.
They can't print something in there that's not true.
We were Missy Smith everywhere.
I just enjoy the headlines.
She was our boss. She could make or break us.
(gunshots fired)
Coz: Missy Smith has had a long week at work.
She gets herNational Enquirer. She goes home.
She has a bath. She has a glass of wine,
and she sits down and enjoys herself.
I feel a great sadness...
that I will not be here in this office
working on your behalf to achieve those hopes
in the next two and a half years.
Wright: TheEnquirer was a nice window
to look through, a pleasant place to go
after the harsher news in the real world.
(crowd clamoring)
male reporter: Guns, ammunition, explosives
and at least one pipe bomb.
- (explosion) - (siren wailing)
Brenna: I don't think Pope wanted the outside world
to spill over into theEnquirer.
Our philosophy, I guess you'd call it,
is basically that, in all the other media,
the people are getting all the bad news today.
They're getting swamped with it, inundated with it,
and I think they've just about had it.
I think they're searching for something
that's gonna tell them there's a good side to life.
Everything isn't bad.
Haley: Pope was a conservative man.
Was he a Republican or Democrat?
I never knew. I could never tell.
Uh, he was a Democrat.
I never knew him to be anything but that.
Brenna: But he wasn't somebody
who was interested in getting elected
or having a hand in Washington.
Uh, that wasn't his bag.
Because he came from a rich Italian family,
which was Mafia-related.
The only connection to politics they had
was they owned the politicians.
Calder: We were into country and flag.
Most of our readers were proud to be American.
Coz: We did not attack the U.S. government
because our readers believed in the U.S. government.
I mean, we weren't the conscience of the world.
We were interested in stories that would sell paper.
Auletta: The National Enquirer was a place where,
you know, facts were not important.
Uh, what was important was eyeballs.
Bernstein: The universe that is described
in edition after edition
of the National Enquireris a...
nonexistent universe in terms of reality.
It's always been fake-ish.
In other words, there was a nub of truth
to most of the stories that printed.
We would sensationalize that germ of truth
to make it very palatable
and very desirable to the reader.
We used to call that exploding the nub.
Things were exploded.
You'd just take a story,
and you make it more interesting.
You don't change the facts. You just sensationalize it.
That's what tabloids do.
Wright: Generoso Pope decided that he wanted to move
theEnquirerout of New York.
And in 1971, we moved to Florida.
He wanted to be on the ocean,
and once he was here, he never left.
He had the wherewithal to go anywhere in the world he wanted.
He preferred to sit in Lantana and let the world come to him.
Brenna: Walking into the Enquirer offie
at that time was through a beautiful, tropical garden.
(telephone ringing)
Brenna: And you walk in to this gigantic newsroom,
which is buzzing...
- (telephone ringing) - (typewriter keys clacking)
...editors who are bent over their desks
and calling all over the world.
Is this overseas from Melbourne, Australia?
Well, we have some questions on that UFO story.
Brenna: Everybody's typing.
Everybody's furiously on the phone.
It was a... like a journalistic beehive.
(telephone ringing)
Controlled chaos. (laughing) It really was.
Virga: Rotary phones and ashtrays.
Brenna: Cigarettes and cigars everywhere.
God knows why we didn't all have lung cancer,
but it was a place
that got your adrenaline going.
- (typewriter keys clacking) - (telephone ringing)
It was such a great vibe. It was so exciting.
It was so crazy, and you just thought,
"Maybe I want to be a part of this."
(typewriter keys clacking)
- (telephones ringing) - (typewriter bell dings)
(indistinct chattering)
Wallace: The city room has a decidedly
Fleet Street accent.
I have but a moment to reach Henry Green.
And why... why do... why do you liken Hoover
to a European dictator?
Okay, John. This is story 207.
Wallace: Pope likes London journalists
schooled in scandal and the various successes
of the British penny press.
Sternig: Oh, those papers had the most saucy stories,
and they didn't spare any details at all.
They went for the jugular,
and he said, "I got to have me those guys.
That's who I want on my paper."
British reporters were a lot more aggressive,
a lot more capable of doing unorthodox things.
Wallace: Number one under Gene Pope is Iain Calder.
Calder: By age 25, I'd worked on three papers,
including the biggest paper in Scotland.
That's where I really learned this craft.
Brenna: Iain Calder had worked on the GlasgowRecord
and was used to chasing fire engines
and doing a lot of, kind of, scurrilous stuff.
People were slashing rival reporters' tires,
cutting people out on the doorstep.
Calder came from that background.
Every story you went out on, you were under pressure
to get something better than the guy next to you.
Wright: It was cutthroat competition.
You had to have cunning, charm when it was needed.
You had to talk people into being in a paper
they didn't want to be in. We didn't take no for an answe.
We're guys who were raised on checkbook journalism,
underhand tactics, but we were not scumbags.
We were pretty good journalists.
And we, of course, are checking to see
whether you have any information on the situation.
man: All the information I have at this time
- is the following. - Okay.
We would run circles around most American reporters.
They just didn't have it.
Some of them did. Some of them developed it
but only under our tutelage.
I was looking for, like, U.K. type reporters,
and the only reason I needed them
was I couldn't find great reporters in America.
We were in an uphill battle to try to get them
to come and work for the Enquirer.
The reputation of the Enquirer was terrible.
I honestly thought,
"Would it be easier to tell people I was in prison
or a mental hospital for a couple years?"
When I first joined the paper, it was kind of a joke, really.
We thought they were kind of tacky.
Coz: I went to Harvard to become a writer,
and as my mother said, "No way.
You can't go from Harvard to the National Enquirer."
George: The prospect of writing for a national audience
was pretty thrilling,
I mean, even though it was the National Enquirer.
But the reality was different.
These people are promising to triple my salary
and send me around the world.
I need to be...
a little bit reckless.
Coz: Generoso Pope
owned theNational Enquirer lock, stock, and barrel.
He had a fortune, so he didn't care
what expenses racked up chasing down stories.
If you could get his curiosity going,
then you're gonna be doing it and using his money.
Wright: You didn't have to ask to hire a plane or a boat
or a house or anything else. You just did it.
George: The owner would hand them bags of money,
and they were on a private jet to Paris.
- Brenna: Maui. - George: Monaco.
Wright: Puerto Vallarta.
Vilcabamba.
We're staying in a luxury hote, got the penthouse.
Haley: What about a temple of snakes in India?
(snake hissing)
"Can you get out today to Hong Kong?"
Balfour: The world was our oyster.
That was the marvelous thing about the Enquirer.
Brenna: The range of stuff was terrific.
It was more than any newspaper or magazine
that I had worked for ever offered.
Within the first two years, I was making
as much as Ben Bradlee was at The Washington Post,
and I thought, "Man, that guy's underpaid."
(telephone ringing)
One thing about the atmosphere
in the newsroom at the National Enquirer
is you would have frivolity
and that sense of energy going on,
but when Generoso Pope walked through that newsroom,
everyone picked up a phone
and started talking like they were doing an interview.
There was a tension whenever he entered the room.
It was best if you didn't engae with him until he knew you.
Couple of times he barked at me, I nearly jumped out of my skin.
You suddenly realized
that you're dealing with somebody
who's 100 percent ruthless.
Wright: He was a terrifying figure.
You didn't talk to Mr. Pope, and he didn't talk to you.
After I'd been there about six months,
I was walking down the corridor,
and he was walking towards me. He looked down at me and said,
"Hi, David." I thought, "Oh, Jesus. He knows my name.
This is very bad." (laughs)
We were instructed not to look him in the eye.
He never once looked me in the eye
the entire time I worked for him.
He would look at his desk or look at the floor.
Calder: Gene Pope was ambitious and driven,
and when he wanted something,
he was like an express train going 100 miles an hour,
and if people, that he hired,
weren't taking him there, they were gone.
There was no job security at the National Enquirer.
Regan: He would pit every editor against each other,
and we would vie for the number-one spot.
It was brutal. It was brutal.
If you were somebody that got results
and you got page ones and big stories,
well, you might be good for a week.
Everybody lived in terror of Friday
because, on Friday, it was usually a bloodbath.
Virga: At the end of the week, we'd lock up the paper,
and people would all gravitate out
to go have a drink.
Pope got tired of everybody leaving,
so he decided to bring in
this huge catered event every Friday night.
(indistinct chattering)
- Brenna: Turkeys, full hams. - Shrimp.
Virga: And a full ice-cream-sundae ba.
Brenna: And all the booze you could possibly drink.
Coz: Beer, wine, everything.
Brenna: Of course, all of us would all get very drunk.
Virga: Pope would sit in the middle of the newsroom
smoking his cigarettes.
But somebody would be fired before that dinner was over.
It was the Friday night massacre and this was ruthless.
Coz: Security would just come to a reporter's desk,
escort them out of the building,
and hand them a paycheck on the way out.
You never knew who was going to survive Friday.
Brenna: Goodbye, Florida living.
Goodbye, big paychecks.
Goodbye, amazing expense accounts.
It all went out the window in a flash.
It was all about the story.
Get the story and don't come back
until you have it.
The National Enquirer at its zenith was a spy network.
You couldn't go into hospital
without somebody calling theEnquirer,
because they were all getting paid.
Calder: We might have stories from your sister,
your brother, your boyfriend.
It was important to know the hair stylist.
Some of them were bitter, angry, jealous.
Envy was a very key factor.
In Hollywood, it was amazing how many people were prepared
to sell out the stars they worked for.
Calder: Someone in your PR office,
someone in your lawyer's office, someone in your agent's office.
Regan: And the agents double-dipped all the time.
That's, like, standard operating procedure.
Brenna: The average snitch with just a silly little tip
would be getting 300 bucks.
If the tip made the cover, it was more like 5,000,
six thousand, ten thousand. We're talking about big bucks.
Haberman: I mean, you... you were not supposed to pay
for news. Um, you know, when I was at the New York Post,
um, you would pay for photos, um,
but that's very, very different. A lot of outlets do that.
Um, you do not pay for information.
Coz: The mainstream media went after us
saying we paid sources. We said, "Yes, we do."
Listen. If they've got the information,
they should be paid for it.
Regan: When I started at theNational Enquirer
as a reporter,
I didn't know very much about the world,
and one of the great heartaches of my experience there
was to see
that if you were famous, if you were rich,
if you were a celebrity,
that people in your orbit
would undoubtedly one day betray you for money,
and the thing that shocked me
was that it was always the people close to you
who would betray you the most.
male reporter:
woman:
male reporter: Okay.
woman:
Sternig: I had a story about Bob Hope,
and it was about all of his philandering
and some of his mistresses and all this, so I...
I wrote it up. I submitted it. Mr. Pope got it,
and he said to me,
"Barbara,
I don't think America wants to know this about Bob Hope,"
and he killed the story. Mr. Pope killed the story.
There had to be some advantage
that they would get out of killing a story.
"There's a scandal? There's a negative story?
Oh, in exchange, we'll do Bob Hope at home.
We'll make a deal with you
to do nice stories, and you'll cooperate with us,
and we'll take beautiful pictures,
and all that other stuff will go away,"
and then you'd have an ongoing relationship with them.
It's like getting them on the hook,
and then they have to keep giving you
these positive stories. It's protection money,
and that's how the Mafia works.
Calder: We were the only people that celebrities had to fear
if they did something wrong.
They had to worry about the Enquirerknowing
'cause we knew...
I wouldn't say everything, but we knew a heck of a lot.
male reporter:
woman:
male reporter:
woman:
male reporter: All right. We'll... (phone disconnects)
man: And there were several people with him,
and we don't have the information yet as to who..
Balfour: Some of the things that we did to get a story,
uh, blurred the lines of legality, I would say.
I mean, I've done dirty tricks. Oh, my Lord.
Brenna: Phones were bugged
by private detectives employed by theEnquirer.
People's mail was sometimes being read,
taken out of letter boxes and opened and resealed and...
and what have you.
Haley: Was there things that were done
that were questionable,
outright illegal?
- Maybe. - (audience cheering)
I've loved him for nine years!
(music playing)
Sternig: Elvis was everything to anEnquirerreader.
- (music playing) - (audience cheering)
Balfour: Elvis Presley could make or break
a whole tabloid. It could make or break
a whole tabloid reporter's career.
male news reporter: Elvis Presley, the longtime kig
of rock 'n' roll, is dead.
An autopsy report released tonight...
(speaking French)
Tomorrow, Elvis Presley will be buried
after a private funeral.
I was in the office in 1977 when Elvis died.
The news broke about five o'clock
in the afternoon, and by 5:45,
there were six of us on a Learjet
heading for Memphis.
There was one extra bag on the plane,
and that bag contained fifty thousand dollars in cash.
male reporter 1: By 5:00 p.m.,
the crowd numbered more than 70,000.
male reporter 2: For many, it was all just too much.
Friends tried to comfort fans who'd waited 20 hours
to pay their last respects.
All I feel is just hurt. I hurt all over.
Brenna: When we got to Memphis, we took over the entire floor
of a Holiday Inn,
booked up every room in the hotel.
We had fax machines going and photocopying machines.
Yeah, we turned the hotel into a newspaper office.
And they put out the word
that if anybody has got anything, we'll pay them.
And that cash rapidly started to be distributed
to various sources in Memphis.
We bought up almost everybody.
male reporter 3: The huge crowds have become steadily bigger
throughout the day.
The families say they want the funeral to be quiet,
to be dignified, and to be a family affair.
Brenna: Pope had a very strange mentality.
He wanted to know all the ins and outs of people's deaths.
male reporter 4: Before the funeral,
Elvis Presley's body, dressed in a white dinner jacket,
lay in a copper coffin for people to see
though not photograph.
male reporter 5: Cameras were not permitted.
The perfect Enquirerphoto, nobody else had it.
It had to be a one-of-a-kind.
It had to tell a story unto itself,
and it had to be something that everybody wanted to see.
The right photo could bring
the phenomenal amount of money depending on how right it was,
so what's the ultimate picture that you're gonna get of Elvis?
Elvis in the coffin.
Wright: That was an operation that was highly secret,
went on for days and days and days.
male reporter 6: It was a white cortege,
a white hearse, and ten white Cadillacs.
Elvis loved Cadillacs. He had a dozen himself.
Coz: So all the relatives were in line
at his casket to bid him farewell.
We dressed up a portly, older British gentleman
as a priest, and he was in line.
He got to the casket. And underneath his robe,
he had a little miniature camera.
But he couldn't get high enough to get the picture,
so we didn't have that.
One of our photographers
saw Elvis' cousin going to a local bar.
And he followed him in, and as the guy's standing ther,
he says to him, "How'd you like to make a lot of money?"
Guy says, "Oh, I'd love to, mate."
He said, "If I gave you a camera,
could you get a picture of Elvis in his coffin?"
- "Sure." - (camera shutter clicks)
Wright: Unfortunately, it didn't work
the first couple of times,
and he had to make excuses to go back and pay his respects
over and over again.
The first picture is a picture of the guy taking the picture.
He had turned it 'round the wrong way.
Okay. Second one... picture of the chandelier.
I go, "Oh, my God."
The third one was just brilliant.
It was the perfect page-one picture.
We sold 6.9 million copies that week.
People were stealing copies. This was so huge.
♪ Let's go ♪
- ♪ Ballroom blitz ♪ - ♪ Blitz, blitz, blitz... ♪
Sternig: Mary Jane buys the paper. She gives it to mom.
Mom gives it to niece. Niece gives it to her husband.
There were 25 million readers a week.
Wright: TheEnquirer had so much mail
that they had their own ZIP code, 33464.
Calder: Thousands and thousands of letters a day.
We were bigger thanTimemagazine.
We were bigger thanNewsweek.
We sold more copies than anyone else.
This is your favorite magazine, the National Enquirer.
Carson: Here we go again.
narrator: Iain Calder on dirt.
At the National Enquirer, we uncover more dirt than anyone
except possibly this Hoover cleaner
with attached tools and hose.
It may even get more dirt than we do.
(music playing)
Calder: When we had a major front page
and it sold really well,
I maybe had ten minutes of euphoria.
Then I would remember I had to find a great front page
that was gonna sell four and a half, five million copies.
So every single week, it just went on,
and on, and on like that.
male reporter 1: When his body was found last week,
police said John Belushi at the age of only 33
had died of natural causes and that there was no foul pla.
When somebody dies, it's like,
"Okay. Let's bad-mouth them as much as possible.
Let's put it in the Enquirer."
John Belushi dying was a big story,
but we always wanted to do the story behind the story.
That's what sold papers.
So, uh, I picked two really great reporters.
Uh, Tony Brenna and I, who was my partner in that.
I think Haley was a very competent journalist,
even by Enquirerstandards.
I was in Lantana in March when he died
at the Chateau Marmont.
We wanted to know what happened that night,
and there was this mystery woman whose name wasn't released.
They called her Cathy Silverbags
because she sold drugs out of a silver purse.
male reporter 2: Cathy Evelyn Smith
listed her profession as backup singer.
Police questioned but then released her.
male reporter 3: So Smith, a 35-year-old
rock-'n'-roll groupie, went home to Toronto.
We then went up to Canada to find Cathy Smith.
We spent about ten days in a hotel room.
And the story came in, and I say,
"You know, this woman is saying that she killed John Belushi.
She's not saying it." I said, "I want that headline."
I said, "Go back and get her to say,
'I killed John Belushi,' on tape."
So we spent the next week partying with her.
We ran up an enormous hotel bill
and had a great time and became her best friends.
And she didn't want to say it.
Haley: Tony had a tape reporter going.
I had one going. She would say,
"Yeah. I... We were responsible for his death, but I...
- We can't say that." - I said, "Oh, c'mon, Catherine.
Let's get this over with.
You killed the guy, under any circumstance.
You shot him up with heroin
and cocaine, and he died,"
and she said, "Well, if you want me to say that,
- I killed him." - Turn off the tape.
Brenna: And click.
You know, Brenna turns his tape off.
I leave mine running.
So I ended up taping her...
confessing to the murder.
Calder: So anyway, they got her to say it.
We ran this front-page story, "I killed John Belushi."
Haley: It's the murder confession.
It's all the details.
She was John Belushi's...
Florence Nightingale with a needle.
Well, it's not something Cathy Smith is going to say.
It's not something most people are gonna say,
but you say, you know,
"You were sort of like a Florence Nightingale
with a needle. That's what you're saying."
She says, "Yeah. That's right."
She's being fed a quote.
That's how it works.
Brenna: We knew that what she was saying
was gonna be self-incriminating,
and that she would probably be arrested for it, and she was.
So the prosecutor's office went nuts.
male reporter 4: In anEnquirerarticle,
written by Brenna and Haley,
Smith appears to confess to injecting Belushi
with a fatal dose of heroin and cocaine.
Brenna: And for the next six months,
I was in front of a grand jury.
Haley: I mean, this was the first time
thatNational Enquirerreporter
had to show up by subpoena to a grand-jury
murder investigation on a major celebrity.
It was stressful.
Uh, actually, my marriage fell apart.
Tony's fell apart first,
I followed pretty much right behind him.
I felt that we had crossed the line on that story.
We had, uh,
gone too far in becoming her friend,
and I felt we had sold her out, and I felt that particularly so
when she actually went to prison.
John Belushi's story
would be one of the occasions that got to be...
ethically challenging.
- (crowd cheering) - (whistling)
Sternig: Becoming a famous celebrity
is a trade-off.
You want the public to admire you.
That's not free. That's not free.
You have to give, in return, some access to your life.
What you give up is anonymity.
I had a contact in Las Vegas
who tipped me off that Cosby was keeping a girl.
And she was a showgirl.
He bought a house for her,
and he would go up to Vegas and visit her.
So I ordered a stakeout, a photographer we had in Vegas,
and he caught Cosby going into the house,
coming out of the house with the girl,
kissing her at the door, all of this.
And I had a couple other contacts of mine
who were able to confirm this story.
I wrote it up, gave it into my editor.
Mr. Pope saw the story, and he said,
"She's got to go and call Cosby."
This was the time that he was America's dad.
He hadThe Cosby Show on television.
I'd been on the set many times.
I interviewed all the other people on there,
and I thought, "Oh, my God. If I have to call Cosby up now."
They said, "You got to call him,"
so I called him,
and he, of course, said, uh,
"What's the name of your executive editor?"
And I told him, and he said,
"What number can I reach him?"
I gave him the number.
He said, "Thank you very much," and he hung up.
He proceeded to call Iain Calder,
who cut a deal with Cosby to kill my story
in exchange for a couple of sit-down interviews
with any reporter
except Barbara Sternig. (chuckles)
And that was kind of the end of my relationship
with The Cosby Show.
Shipp: For a long time, we killed stories
about Bill Cosby. I got some stories.
Little starlets who were on his show,
they would call in, you know, "He did this. He did that."
I would go to my editor, and I would put a lead in
about the story and it gets approved
or not approved. I never heard about it again.
It was never seen again.
You ask about it, and we'll say, "We'll get back to you,"
but you learned, at least for me early on,
I was brand-new. I'm still trying to prove myself...
You didn't push it.
Calder: I was making trades
that would make our readers happier,
but I had to make that decision myself.
What's the better stories?
We were keen on any story that would sell papers.
There's a sort of nasty little characteristic
that people have.
They... they... they get a little jealous of success.
They want to see somebody taken down a peg or two.
Brenna: It's like in ancient Rome, oka?
They cheer them when they are famous,
and they cheer them when they're doing well,
but when things go wrong, they give them the thumbs-down
and say, "Good riddance. To hell with them."
(crowd applauding)
I intend to seek the presidency of the United States in 1988.
(crowd cheering and applauding)
The Enquirer,for a long time, didn't touch politics
because Generoso Pope didn't think politicians sold.
But politics became another form of celebrity,
and that's where the Enquirer got into it.
Coz: You can't underestimate the significance of Gary Hart
to theNational Enquirer.
Calder: We weren't interested in doing stories
about potential presidential candidates
and politicians, per se,
unless there was some, really, other story.
Auletta: Gary Hart was young.
He was good-looking. He was from out west,
had friends like Warren Beatty
and a lot of other Hollywood stars,
and the thought was that he was gonna win
the Democratic nomination.
He was a meteor.
Haley: The Miami Herald came out with their story,
a romance between these two people.
Why is The Miami Heraldengagin in Enquirertype shit, you know?
And I thought, "Well, why don't we try to see
if we can get a piece of this whole action
and this Gary Hart thing theHeraldhas got?"
All I can say is, a picture is worth a thousand words.
male reporter 1:
male reporter 2:
male reporter 3:
He basically challenged the press.
He said, "If you think I have a girlfriend, go for it."
Come on. That's the perfect setup
for being on aEnquirer front-page story is,
good-looking, sexy, lying politician.
male reporter 4:
Did I do anything immoral? I absolutely did not.
Calder: He went on television. He said, "It's not true.
It's absolutely not true. We know it's not true,"
and he had his wife by his side who stood by him.
And when Gary says, "Nothing happened,"
nothing happened.
Virga: I mean, everybody knew he'd had a thing with this gir,
but nobody had the proof.
(helicopter whirring)
Coz: We discovered through one of his neighbors
that he had gone down to take a boat ride out of Miami,
and he had a girl with him.
We swept through that wharf for five days
trying to find somebody with knowledge of it.
Haley: We had contact with a freelancr
who knew this photograph existed,
and we came to an arrangement.
It's 87,000 dollars,
and we owned worldwide rights to that photo forever.
Virga: I couldn't have created a better picture.
I couldn't have sent a photographer out
with instructions and had him come back
with something better than that.
Coz: That changed the face of American politics.
Gary Hart had an excellent chance
of becoming president,
and that just destroyed his political chances.
I don't really want to comment on that.
Calder: Dukakis took his place.
- Read my lips. - (crowd cheering)
No new taxes.
Calder: No chance against George Bush,
so George Bush became president...
(fanfare playing)
...and his son became president later.
We changed the course of histoy with that.
Now, did we do well or not? I...
That's not my problem. My problem is, we got the story.
Auletta: The Gary Hart story busted down the privacy wall,
just smithereens, just knocked it down and said,
"We're gonna know everything about everyone,"
because it sold more papers.
Rosenthal: I think it's important to journalists..
as to how they go after the story,
as to what they see themselves. Are they news gatherers?
Are they private eyes? Are they voyeurs?
Sternig: Mr. Pope died in 1988.
Then there was a limbo period
where things were just kind of very tense...
and everybody was thrown into a state
of complete uncertainty. "What's gonna happen?
Will the paper keep going?"
Certainly, it was not going to go on the way
Mr. Pope ran it,
because Mr. Pope owned a 100 percent of the newspaper,
and he got what he wanted the way he wanted it.
Brenna: He had built a world in which he was God,
and it was a small world
populated by adoring figures and people
who would do anything at his command.
Pope II: Basically, we're giving the public a little hope,
a little hope that life isn't all
as bad as it's portrayed.
We like to tell people that their problems
are solvable. There are solutions.
Uh, things aren't quite as bad as they might seem.
We lost our identity...
after Pope died. We forgot who we were.
We had so many changes of ownership and leadership,
every one of them wanting to change something.
TheEnquirerhad a perfect formula,
and in my opinion, they should've been left alone.
Is it entertainment, or is it information?
Hubbard: I think it's both, and I think a good newspaper
is a combination of entertainment
and information.
One of my concerns is that it dilutes
the news-gathering process broadly
and that in the long run, it affects me because...
my publisher or Jack's publisher says,
"Oh, look at this stuff. It's hot. It really sells.
Don't you think you ought to be moving a little more away
from this boring Sino-Soviet Summit stuff?"
Hewitt: You're forgetting something.
There's nobody in this room who doesn't deal in tragedy.
Nobody in this room...
How do you think America found out
about Jessica Hahn
- and Jimmy Swaggart? - Donahue: But that's not trash.
That's... that's a great story!
Why don't we just acknowledge that's what it is.
(audience laughing and applauding)
Coz: The very first time Donald Trump
made a large presence
on the cover of the National Enquirer
was the Marla Maples years.
We got a picture of Donald on the ski slopes
with Marla Maples and his wife, Ivana,
all in the same frame.
Titillated America.
Regan: It was the heartache and the betrayal,
and he's cheating, and they're on ski slopes,
and he's bringing the mistress,
and the mistress is in the hotel room over here,
and the wife is in the hotel room over there.
It's a great story, right? Everybody loves it.
Bernstein: This Marla Maples- Donald Trump story
was occurring at the same time that Nelson Mandela
was being released
from his years in the South African gulag.
- (crowd cheering) - Bernstein: An event
of tremendous importance to the world.
This was the purest example of the movement
from tabloids into the mainstream press.
And it also tells us something about Donald Trump
and his rise through the sensationalist press.
- (woman speaking indistinctly) - Trump: I don't know.
Lambiet: The biggest tipster ever in the business
was Donald Trump.
He would call the tabloids in New York
to drop gossip items about himself.
Trump:
woman:
Trump:
woman: Right. Okay.
He's had pseudonyms where'd he call and pretend
that he was a spokesperson.
- woman: - Trump:
woman:
Trump:
He really wanted to be a star.
woman:
Trump:
- woman: - Trump:
- Do you have a second? - woman:
We recognized that Donald Trump had value
to the National Enquirer
because he could sell newspapers.
Brenna: He's a very, very good snake-oil salesman,
and he fit very well with the Enquirer.
Coz: Our readers liked him, so we put
a gentleman in charge of him,
and the gentleman's name was Larry Haley,
and Larry's job was basically
to keep track of Donald's love life.
I was offered the use of his plane
from West Palm Beach to New York and back
on the weekends,
comps at all the hotels, you name it.
Never took one of them.
Only thing I ever took from him was a can of Diet Coke
at a party at Mar-a-Lago.
I think that I probably was being looked at
like a public-relations operation...
for him, you know, just by manipulating
our interest in his celebrity.
And it was the constant, 6:00 a.m. phone calls.
You know, I started feeling very quickly
that I'm working for this guy,
but I'm not being paid by this guy,
and I had to remind him I don't work for him.
Trump married Marla,
and the two Enquirerreporters were VIP invitees
- at the wedding. - (crowd cheering)
- (indistinct chattering) - I'm happy and excited,
and it's the wedding of the century. (laughs)
- It'll be good. - woman 1: Thank you, Robin.
Simpson: Everybody in the country
believes that maybe their relationship could work
if this relationship will work, you know,
with all the things that they've gone through,
and I think this will work.
- woman 1: Okay. - I give it four months.
(woman laughing)
- man: Howard! - (camera shutter clicking)
- (man indistinct chatter) - woman 2: Donald!
(indistinct chattering)
(camera shutter clicking)
Haley: I was there that night.
I was confronted by Marla Maples,
and she was telling me that she had gone after Donald
and got him, and she was Mrs. Trump.
I said, "Well, I can't argue with any of that,"
but, you know, basically, she disliked me greatly,
because of a lot of the stuff we revealed about her.
But Trump never got upset. Even when they were married,
as long as it wasn't about him, he was okay.
He would throw Marla under the bus in a second
to not have a bad publicity himself
- and did more than once. - (indistinct chattering)
female reporter: The Donald-Marla affair
had everything money, power,
a blonde bombshell, combined with catchy headlines
and family feud.
woman: Are you two back together?
Well, we are right now, aren't we, hon?
- (laughs) - Um... um...
Haley: He was a guy we wanted stories from.
At the same time, he was studying
how we took things, put them into headlines,
and sold them to this common-man audience.
He wanted to use us as a microphone
to a different group of people.
Coz: The American public starts to become emotionally attached
and wants to see what's happening next
with this particular celebrity, and he had crossed that line.
People now wanted to know about Donald Trump.
Bernstein: We've always had in this county
a kind of seamy underside of the news business.
Tabloids. You know, there's nothing new about it.
- man 1: Exactly. - Bernstein: And our agenda
at newspapers and magazines
is increasingly these guys' agenda.
Dunleavy: But we all have the same boss.
It's the public, and if we continue
this Columbia School of Journalism rhetoric,
this rag rhetoric which says,
"People should... shouldn't be reporting that.
They shouldn't be jamming this down people's throats."
- My God, let the public decide. - man 2: It's also very...
- Let the public decide! - Walker: You're looking down
your nose at the public.
The public has a right to know what it wants to know.
Now, now, your point's well-taken, but...
We don't all have to be porn publishers.
All right. But why...
No, I don't think that it's porn to publish a story
- about Tonya Harding - (all clamoring)
or Michael Jackson.
Whoever wants to put that out there
to sell papers, what's wrong with it?
Because if the lowest common denominator
is gonna drive the journalistic market,
- we're in big trouble. - Connie Chung...
Rose: Let him finish. I'll come back to you, Mike.
Bernstein: But let me finish. Something has tipped.
Coz: People come out and criticize us.
They call us lowlifes of journalism,
give us obnoxious anecdotal names.
We didn't care, and I still don't care.
We were very good at what we did.
Wallace: Steve Coz has been with theNational Enquirer
for 13 years now.
A little more than a month ago,
he was promoted to executive editor.
Virga: When Steve took over as editor in 1995,
it was just new blood willing to listen to new ideas.
Steve Coz brought
the National Enquirerout of the Stone Age.
And he brought a lot of credibility to the paper.
He didn't look like a scruffy, old guy
with a cigar hanging out of his mouth.
He was Ivy League, dresses in his little polo shirts.
He looks polished.
You could have gone to Timemagazine
and seen somebody who looked just like Steve Coz.
Haley: You know, he went to Harvard,
but he wasn't that button-down.
He reminded me of, like,
a guy who'd been a part-time bartender
in Nantucket.
(chuckles) Old-timers from the U.K.,
uh, yes, I think we all grinned a bit.
We said, "My God, we're working for a schoolboy now", you know?
Shipp: TheEnquirer, for the most part,
was all white people. They had no minorities.
They were these old Brits and old white guys
who didn't see women or minorities of any importance.
We had to go in and fight our way.
He encouraged diversity.
He encouraged out-of-the-box thinking.
He was a person who knew
that growth depended on... coming of age.
I was brought in to help visualize
what black readership would like to see.
It opened up the playing field of who we could go after.
It's not the just the same people all the time.
- crowd: (cheering) Oh, yeah! - Shipp: And Oprah Winfrey
made the difference.
She went across all color lines.
Women bought the Enquirermore than anybody,
and women loved Oprah.
Oprah was on the cover, gosh, at least once or twice a month.
Oprah sold a lot of papers.
Whitney Houston sold a lot of papers,
not because of her talent but because of her drug use.
She became front page.
Somebody like Michael Jackson broke all stereotypes,
- all color lines, everything. - (crowd cheering)
Shipp: Everybody loved Michael.
But we started hearing a lot of stories.
We have family members that called,
close family members that called
and told us what was going on with him.
So we were able to bring in, stories that nobody else had.
Haberman: I think theEnquirer has become an emblem
and a symbol for some people
of a certain type of journalism in this country.
I think it is important to note the National Enquirer
has also gotten some stories really right.
- (phone beeps) - operator:
Brown:
operator:
Brown:
The newspapers used to say, "Yeah. You get exclusives,
but if we were up against you, face-to-face,
mano a mano,we would beat the hell out of you."
Well, okay. O.J. Simpson was the test.
On 911 tapes just released last night,
O.J. Simpson could be heard screaming about a 1993 article
in the National Enquirer.
Simpson:
female reporter: Enquirer editors say,
they have been following abuse allegations
against the former football superstar since 1989.
Los Angeles police have been talking
to former pro football star O.J. Simpson today
after the death of his ex-wife
and a 26-year-old man early this morning.
Coz: When the Simpson murders occurred,
we knew this was a seminal moment,
uh, for the National Enquirer.
We already had huge networks in place
in the celebrity community,
and this occurred in the middle of one of our networks,
so, we immediately put every last resource into it.
While the Los Angeles Times has four reporters working
on the O.J. Simpson story,
the National Enquirer has a team of more than 20.
Coz: We were at the crime scene
before the coroner arrived there.
We brought in freelancers. We went
to every single photographer we knew in L.A.
and told them that we would pay them
any amount of money
for any photographs they thought were relevant.
George: We spent easily over a million dollars in soure
and photographic money.
The Enquirer'stentacles were amazing in those days.
From Florida all the way to L.A.,
we were all involved in that story.
male reporter: Homicide detectives expanded
the restricted area around Nicole Simpson's
townhouse today.
Nicole's father, Louis, and one of her sisters also arrived
and removed some personal belongings.
We had a reporter who was in really tight
with Nicole's family.
He was dating both the daughters.
Haley: We had other people
who had contacts with the Goldman family,
including Ron Goldman's mother who lived in St. Louis.
Coz: We also had a network
into some of O.J. Simpson's fellow athletes
and, don't forget, O.J. Simpson's friends.
We had a very good working relationshp
with the police.
We had moles in the prosecutor's office,
and we had jailhouse sources, as well.
Calder: We knew what he was saying.
We knew where he went to the bathroom.
I mean, we had everything.
We had it totally wired from beginning to end,
and it sold.
Everyone in the country was riveted by this.
Now the National Enquirer is competing
with the mainstream press, often beating rivals
to the punch on big headline stories.
male news reporter: A lot of the details,
uh, that have later turned up, uh, in Newsweek
or on other television shows
have first been reported in theEnquirer.
George: Our stories showed more details on that crime
than any other publication.
We were constantly on it. It was like a soap opera.
You just stay on them, and anything you heard today,
"What's going on with him now?"
Haberman: It was a story that riveted the nation.
It was one of the first cable-news national melodramas,
so people were glued to their television sets,
and the National Enquirer, essentially,
was a paper version of a T.V.
People had to follow them.
It was impossible to ignore them.
Tesh: TheEnquirer's Coz says, not only do readers love
their O.J. articles, but their commitment to coverae
has brought new respect.
This is a fascinating, interesting story.
The conventional press
is basically come into the tabloid territory,
and, uh, they've come to appreciate us.
(camera shutter clicking)
Simpson: The Bruno Magli makes shoes
that looked the shoe that they had in court
that's involved in this case.
I would have never worn those ugly-ass shoes.
Enquirerreporters were digging out material
that the establishment press had missed.
Haberman: There was a key moment
where evidence and the existence of it
was broken by theNational Enquirer.
It had to be followed by most of the major publications
in the country.
Haley: A kid from Boulder sends me this Polaroid picture
of this washed-out, chain-link fence
and this tiny, little stick figure
way in the back,
and he says, "Maybe you can blow this up
and see if O.J.'s wearing the murder shoes,"
something that the investigators during the murder trial
had not done.
Finding the Bruno Magli shoes on O.J.'s feet
was a mission,
and every single person in the newsroom
was involved in that to some degree.
Coz: O.J. said, "I never wore those ugly-ass things."
So we spent three months and tens of thousands of dollars
hiring every sports photographer we could
to go look through their old negatives.
Virga: Every photographer who shot every NFL game
that O.J. had been at, we called one by one,
slowly but surely, all of them and asked them to look.
Larry Haley found the guy.
About a thousand cops were trying to link
the shoes with O.J. Simpson.
Mainly, they were trying to do it
through finding a purchase.
They were right there in Buffalo.
And there wasn't just one of them.
There was a whole frame of O.J. Simpson
walking on the sidelines where you can see that sole
that left the footprints in blood
around Nicole Brown's head, right there on that picture.
Virga: It was... it was like finding the Holy Grail.
It was so exciting.
It was like we really did something now
that made a difference.
Haley: O.J. Simpson and his attorneys,
when we ran that, were saying that we made this up,
that we put the shoes on his feet, right?
Three other photographers had pictures from the same game
of O.J. wearing the same shoes.
Haley: We also had 33 other pictures taken
in two different locations, one in Pittsburgh
where he was getting his shoes shined,
after a sideline commentary
in the basement of the hotel across from the stadium.
That image was used
as the major evidence against O.J. Simpson.
Coz: It won the Goldman family and Nicole's family...
- the civil trial - (crowd cheering)
Coz: ...because O.J. was found guilty based upon
that photo of him in the Bruno Magli shoes.
(cheering continues)
Those ugly-ass shoes changed the Enquirerimmensely,
because that's one of the times that the mainstream media
had to give us credit, because they were there.
You know, if you just kept plugging away,
if you kept digging, you would have found them, too.
The mainstream guys suddenly said, "Uh-oh.
We wish they'd stayed with UFOs."
The establishment press finally had to admit
that they were being beaten by a sleazy supermarket tabloid.
Any newspaper in America would like The New York Times
to call them the bible of a major story like this.
King: Why, um...
Walter, did you put Steve Coz and the...
and theNational Enquirer
among the 25 most influential figures
in this country?
Uh, the Enquirerhas broken a lot of stories.
They've changed a lot of the ways
they do their reporting and their fact-checking.
They've become more respectable,
and I think it began to seep in,
for better and worse, into the mainstream press,
what the tabloids do.
So, it...
it could have been for worse, too.
- Oh... - You could be influential
for worse.
male reporter: The line between tabloid
and mainstream journalism has become blurred.
You know, everyone talks about the mainstream press
versus the National Enquirer, but you remember,
the National Enquirer is the best-selling weekly
in America, so who's defining mainstream?
O.J. Simpson caused the wheels
of traditional journalism to fall off.
That... that's the moment when traditional journalism
begins this fast slide into tabloidism.
Princess Diana: As a parent, I want to protect children,
because I brought the children out here for a holiday,
Princess Diana: ...and we'd really appreciate
- the space. - man: I understand that.
Princess Diana: We've had 15 cameras following us today.
Coz: The National Enquirer was on this incredible roll.
We had O.J. Simpson, the JonBenet story, Cosby.
We had all these great stories.
And then in 1997,
uh, we have a cover out on the stands which says,
"Sex-mad Di, 'I can't get enough.'"
Virga: We didn't have the first pictures
of she and Dodi together. on the boat.
Um, another paper had gotten those,
so, we bought the second set of pictures
of she and Dodi on the boat, and published them.
Probably biggest mistake we ever made unknowingly.
We closed on a Friday night,
and we ran it pretty small on the side...
and that paper went to press.
And Di died that night in the car crash.
man: The car was traveling extremely fast
in an attempt to escape the attentions of the paparazz,
who were on motorcycles or scooters,
uh, for reasons we don't yet know.
male news reporter: The accident happened late at night
in a road tunnel in Paris.
An unconfirmed...
uh, source from the Press Association
is that Diana, Princess of Wales, has died.
Virga: Steve was immediately called by CNN,
and all this, everybody wanted to comment
because they were all saying the paparazzi were chasing them.
Virga: But because of that headline on the cover,
the Enquirerwas pulled
from every newsstand in America.
The Enquirerheadquarters in Lantana
was besieged by crowds
and crowds of people accusing s of killing Princess Diana.
(indistinct chatter)
The real cause of her death
was the drunken driver of her limousine,
but it was enough to get everyone believing
that it was the National Enquirer'sfault,
and we lost circulation.
Spencer: This is not a time for recriminations
but for sadness.
However, I would say that I always believed
the press would kill her in the end...
but not even I could imagine that they would take
such a direct hand in her death, as seems to be the case.
It would appear that every proprietor and editr
of every publication that has paid for intrusive
and exploitative photographs of her,
encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals
to risk everything in pursuit of Diana's image,
has blood on his hands today.
(indistinct chatter)
Clooney: Princess Di is dead,
and who should we see about that?
The driver of the car, the paparazzi, or the magazines
and papers who purchase these pictures
and make bounty hunters out of photographers?
Then it got very personal.
A-listers, like George Clooney for example,
and others pointing fingers and saying,
"Steve Coz, you have blood on your hands.
You're a murderer. You killed the Princess."
And as for you, Mr. Coz, and your colleagues,
the Princess of Wales is dead, and you have gone on television,
and you have washed your hands, and you have placed blame,
and you have deflected responsibility,
and yet I wonder how you sleep at night.
You should be ashamed. Thank you.
woman: Mr. Clooney, will there be questions?
I'm not going to, thank you.
To blame one institution, i.e. the National Enquirer,
for the paparazzis on the planet is ridiculous.
The paparazzi started and existed
before the National Enquirer existed.
- (indistinct chatter) - Coz: The thirst...
for private knowledge about the celebrities
is what fuels the paparazzi.
- woman: Oh, my God. - (crowd cheering)
We were, you know,
award-winning journalism for four years,
and now suddenly we were blamed for Princess Di's death,
and I personally was blamed.
The National Enquirer and their ilk believe
they have a right to intrude on your privacy,
and to make your private life public.
Does it sell newspapers? Does it sell magazines?
Of course it does,
but what are we doing to ourselves with that...
and what are we doing to these people?
Wallace: Because they are theNational Enquirer,
they flirt constantly with the danger of libel suits.
Several times a day, Executive Editor, Steve Coz
consults with the paper's lawyer,
a man by the name of David Kendall,
who also represents the President of the United States.
- (indistinct chatter) - man: Yeah!
We break stories. We go after news-makers.
We don't care if they're politicians or celebrities.
We cover newsmakers that we think Americans
want to read about.
female reporter: When are the reports
about an official's personal life valid,
and what is the impact
- on the public? - (indistinct chatter)
woman: What did I say to you guys?
We're not coming back. Move back.
male reporter 1: Have the media gone nuts
in covering this story, or is this one of those cases
where there is no such thing as too much?
(indistinct chatter)
male reporter 2: TheEnquirergetting the scoop
just weeks after rocking the establishment press
by breaking the story of what it called,
"Jesse Jackson's Love Child."
We didn't go after them. We didn't promote them.
We didn't stand up for them.
We didn't say, "Oh, vote for this guy,"
or, "He's a good guy," or, "He's a bad guy."
They went out, and they did things
like cheat on their wife
and have affairs with interns or whatever.
And that's something that we reacted to,
'cause that's something people wanted to read.
(indistinct chatter)
We didn't say, "Oh, he's a Democrat. He's a Republican.
We're not gonna get this one. We'll leave him alone."
Believe me, if we had had George Bush doing blow,
we would've done it.
That changed when management changed.
That changed when David Pecker took over.
male reporter: Two of the nation's liveliest tabloid,
theNational Enquirer and theStar,
are being taken over by new owners
who want to extend the well-known titles
beyond the supermarket.
The first time I encountered David Pecker
was when he arose to the head of a French media company
calledHachette Filipacchi.
At that time, they hadCar and Driver andWoman's Day.
His most famous magazine was when he backed JFK Jr.
- inGeorgemagazine. - (crowd applauding, cheering)
Georgeis a magazine that understands
that culture is more powerful than politics.
The traditional lines between Democrats
and Republicans are disappearing.
The magazine they'll turn to
for a fresh, non-partisan perspective
will beGeorge.
Kelly: David Pecker insisted that he had to have pictures
of himself in with JFK Jr.
He definitely knew he was latching onto something
bigger than himself then.
Brenna: Pecker's a man who want to drive around in limousines,
wants to belong to the best clubs,
and wants to be known as a celebrity himself.
Kelly: David Pecker was not a journalist.
He was brought into media because of his financial acumen.
People would call him a bean counter,
for want of a better word, a financial guy.
In the cultured, highbrow world of media moguls...
he was seen as more of a scrappy,
"born in the Bronx" kind of guy.
I... I think he probably always felt
something of an outsider because of that.
He always wanted to be a little grander than he was.
Auletta: He is a short guy who wanted to be taller,
and one of the ways you get taller
is by being a friend of powerful people
and doing them favors, or you do it by savaging people
and making people fear you, and he's done both.
David Pecker had designs on this machine called
the National Enquirerearly on.
He bought the paper in 1999,
and the plan was to create a media company
to rival Time...
something to be at the forefrot of mass media in America.
That was his goal, and he stated it right out of the gate.
Coz: He wants to go to an advertising-driven vehice
and polish up the tabloids, make them slicker,
make them more New York.
He wanted to sort of drag this tabloid empire upscale.
Well, people aren't buying the National Enquirer
to be upscale.
The whole idea was a bad idea.
He really never wanted to learn
what this animal was, that was us.
The assets in theEnquirer
were the people who worked there.
And then came the job cuts.
You know, he immediately slashed staff.
Expense accounts were being scrutinized.
Budgets were slashed.
There was less content and more filler.
Kelly: With theEnquirer, David Pecker knew
he had a way to reach Middle America,
flyby America, supermarket America.
Maybe not as influential as it was years earlier,
but it was still a pretty healthy company
when he took over.
George: In 2001,
David Pecker built his AMI building,
which was always his dream.
And that was pretty quickly followed by 9/11.
And that was a confluence of events
that changed everything pretty drastically
all at the same time.
The FBI is searching the site of the first deadly anthrax attack.
male reporter: That building is in Boca Raton, Florida.
It houses the company, American Media Incorporated,
which publishes tabloid newspapers,
including theNational Enquirer
- The building was sealed off - (indistinct chatter)
so that the FBI and the CDC
can search the facility, looking at packages
and mail that may have been delivered to the building.
Virga: You know, the whole worl was in trauma over 9/11.
And to have a trauma hit like that a month later close to home
where the man you sit next to dies...
it was terrifying.
male reporter: The man who died of anthrax
was a photo editor there.
The man exposed to the disease worked
in the mail-room.
- (indistinct chatter) - (siren wailing)
Coz: There was a huge national fear
that anthrax was gonna spread across the country,
and there's a particular fear
that you could contract anthrax
through employees of theNational Enquirer.
(machine whirs)
Coz: Within a week, we ran a page-one story,
"Bio-Terrorism Attack," that this had occurred to us.
Why would they attack American Media?
Why would they attack... attack theNational Enquirer?
Well, it's quite simple. It's a piece of Americana.
It's a populist, patriotic American magazine,
and that's what I believe is why we were attacked.
Do you fear, though, a tremendous loss of business?
Yes, Larry, I... I... I do.
The World Trade Center was attacked.
The Pentagon was attacked,
and American Media was attacked.
You, American Media,
publisher of these many tabloids,
- were targeted. - I think so, yes.
And does the Bureau think that?
Have the police thought that, or this a David Pecker thought?
This is a David Pecker thought.
I feel that we had a bioterrorism attack here.
Management decided that we need to be more "patriotic."
That was the word was used.
And to support the war effort that was coming,
you know, we needed to show that we were strong.
People love to have patriotic stories
on the front,
and I think that they had found another nerve
that they were hitting on the readership
by doing these post 9/11 stories.
Coz: We must have put out probably five
special commemorative editions
that were slicker and glossier...
'cause remember, at our bones, we're patriotic.
Our readers believed in the U.S. government,
just like they believed in America.
(crowd cheering and applauding)
What a greeting. Wow.
Thank you.
(cheering and applauding continues)
Schwarzenegger: From a bodybuilding career,
I have gotten a large female following.
You know, you have situations where women absolutely, like,
take their clothes off in front of you.
Like, this woman just took off her clothes
and stood there naked, and she says, "Take me."
- man: Oh. Oh. - Yeah, baby.
Schwarzenegger: I mean, sometimes, uh,
it takes a little bit of respect away
that one has for women.
- Oh, hey. I gotta do that. - (crowd laughing)
I first met Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1987.
I was part of the team that covered his marriage
to Maria Shriver.
Arnold wasn't the least bit self-conscious
about interacting with the press.
He brought Maria out of the church on the steps
and posed for photographs. He was eating up the press,
and we had never encountered a celebrity like that.
So there was always a lot of good will toward Arnold.
- Let's stretch again. Come on. - (indistinct chatter)
All right. And let's do some jumping.
Come on, now, and twisting back and forth.
Oh, I see some sexy bodies out there twisting.
- Wow! - (crowd cheering)
But the downside was Arnold was a womanizer.
Shipp: We've had stories, you know, on the sets of movies
where he harassed women all the time.
He can't even deny it at this point.
I mean, he didn't drug people like Bill Cosby did,
to my knowledge, but he... he was out there constantly,
you know, cheating on his family.
George: We would catch him from time to time,
and that didn't deter him
until he developed political aspirations.
On the big screen, he's currently trying
to save the human race.
In real life, he's happy to limit himself
to the 36 million people of California.
I'm going to run for governor
- of the state of California. - (crowd cheering, applauding)
George: So, just as the campaign was gearing up,
the reality was,
what are we gonna do with all these stories about affairs
and his cheating on Maria?
And David Pecker corralled all the bad stories
and assured him that during the campaign,
he had nothing to worry about.
Kelly: At the time, the American Media
was making very highly leveraged deals
for things like the Joe Weider publications...
Muscle & Fitness magazines
that featured Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Arnold, by this time,
was on the board of directors at American Media.
He was in charge of several of the publications.
So Arnold came along with the furniture.
Arnold was family at that point,
and he and David Pecker became close friends.
(crowd cheering, applauding)
Brenna: Arnold Schwarzenegger had become forbidden fruit.
He was taken off the menu
because he'd made friends with the management,
and if you went against the management,
you were out of a job.
Which brings us to the concept of... of catch and kill.
There had been stories done on Arnold having an affair...
with this young actress.
He was seeing her off and on for ten years...
a woman by the name of Gigi Goyette.
Approximately two years after the story
was released in the National Enquirer,
we got a call from American Media,
and they were interested in the rights to my...
life story, specifically, my story with Arnold.
And I met Jerry George. It was a summer afternoon.
We sat down at the table,
and he pulled out a yellow envelope...
legal envelope
with a three-page contract in it.
We proposed to her
that if she sold us the rights to her story...
um, we, ultimately, would develop them
in terms of a book and possibly a television movie.
And he was, like...
kind of buttering me up. Like, "This is gonna be great.
We're gonna do a book-signing tour.
You'll go all over the country."
"Trust us.
Sign the rights to your story over.
We'll take care of you."
David Pecker decided to buy up her life story,
all rights,
and American Media took the contract,
put it in the safe, closed the door
and never moved any further on that project.
They didn't want to publish my story.
They didn't even wanna see the story. They didn't care.
- That was not their intent. - And I was part of it.
Um, not my proudest professional moment...
but I was the editor on that,
and I executed the contract with her.
Unbeknownst to me, it was to silence my story
from ever hitting the stands because...
Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor.
(crowd cheering)
If you work hard and if you play by the rules,
this country is truly open to you.
- You can achieve anything. - (crowd cheering)
Kelly: The public didn't think
that theNational Enquirer had a point of view.
They thought theEnquirer's point of view was,
"Cover everybody. Hold truth to power."
But I don't think...
people expected them to be burying stories
as part of their political agenda.
The public was, in a sense,
deceived into not seeing the point of view
that was really driving a lot of the agenda.
I find it very interesting that the same thing
that happened to me with American Media
also happened with Stormy Daniels
and Karen McDougal.
male reporter: The McDougal story never ran
in the tabloid.
Cohen says he worked with Pecker to bury it...
Operating at the request of the candidate
for the principal purpose of influencing the election.
This is about the most powerful people in the country
having the ability to silence
and change the news narrative at will.
And I think that the public should know that,
and... and, look, I'll defer to the election-law experts.
They say that this is worth scrutinizing.
Haberman: Normally speaking, news organizations
don't get information in order to bury it.
That's what's different here.
You're talking about silencing women...
and being involved in silencing women
with hush payments. That is a whole...
different order of magnitude
that I had never heard of before.
I don't know how many of these there are.
Those are the ones we know of,
but certainly, these were relationships
that helped powerful figures maintain their image.
(indistinct chatter)
And I know some people who work at theNational Enquirer,
and they are good, solid reporters.
It's just that when they veer into other areas
like trying to overtly help a candidate win the presidency,
that is something different.
Bernstein: When you're talking about theEnquirer
and you're talking about what happened with Donald Trump,
it is the ultimate corruption.
The idea that you would kill a story
to help the aspirations of a politician,
a businessman, to make money, whatever,
it is as corrupt as anything you can do as a journalist,
as corrupt as you can be.
Kelly: David Pecker saw Trump
as somebody he should buddy up to.
You know, "Hey, we're both New Yorkers.
We both have operations in Florida."
David Pecker was known to bump into Donald Trump in the airport
and hitch a ride on his private jet back to New York.
Haberman: They were sort of fellow travelers.
Pecker liked Donald Trump's style.
I think Donald Trump liked the ability
to be in a publication that people were reading,
and there was a symbiosis there.
Both of them had something that the other needed,
wanted, craved...
and then it grew from there.
George: David Pecker brought...
a silent editor
with him to the Enquirer, and it was Donald Trump.
Trump could not only control coverage of his own life...
but he could also offer up story ideas
on his enemies, and he did so frequently.
It's obviously been a very rough-and-tumble week, uh,
between you and Donald Trump. A salacious story about you
was published in the National Enquirer.
male reporter: Unsubstantiated stories about Ted Cruz,
including allegations of marital infidelity,
and the baseless claim that Cruz's father worked
with Lee Harvey Oswald in the Kennedy assassination.
There was a picture on the front page
of the National Enquirer, which does have credibility.
Trump spread those stories to bash his Republican rival,
all while claiming he had nothing to do
with the tabloid behind the allegations.
The National Enquirer carved out a stake
in the Trump candidacy pretty early on.
Which meant that a lot of material that they put out...
was suddenly influencing opinions.
And, you know, the National Enquirer
in its history has never endorsed
a presidential candidate until Donald Trump?
The first time I realized that the National Enquirer
had become partisan was years after I left,
when I walked into my local supermarket,
and I saw the cover,
and I had to do a... a second look.
It was a huge story,
that said how Donald Trump
is gonna make America great again.
That is so foreign
to anybody who worked at theNational Enquirer.
That concept that that is a page-one story
is... is ludicrous.
And at the same time,
every time you saw Hillary Clinton on the cover,
she was either all alone,
on her way to the hospital, dying.
And that's when I went, "Uh-oh. Something's going on here."
Today, the National Enquirer is selling about 150,000 copies,
200,000 copies.
So you might ask, why does the National Enquirer
have any relevancy in today's world?
There's a very simple reason for that.
The National Enquirer, when you think about it...
is the most perfectly placed piece of propaganda in America
that is seen by...
a hundred million people a week, probably more.
It's right there in your face.
It's like buying a banner ad on a highway,
except the highway happens to be the conveyor belt.
So if you have a political message...
it's a great place to put it.
Regan: I think the thing that people don't realize
is just how creepy...
the operations are.
I don't think any of us will ever know
what really happened
between David Pecker and Donald Trump,
and the deals that were made and the thousands of deals
that are made every day by the powerful.
- (indistinct chatter) - (camera shutter clicks)
In early 2018, American Media published a tribute magazine
to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
George: We'll make it a glossy,
and we'll put the prince on the cover.
And it will be a one-time-only deal,
and we'll rack it at Walmart for...
13 dollars.
And we'll make Saudi Arabia look like paradise.
Won't the Saudis like that?
Kelly: David Pecker was no fool.
He knew that there was a Saudi sovereign investment fund.
PerhapsAmerican Media was hoping
that they would get a slice of it.
The theory and the speculation was everywhere
that there was ulterior motives on this,
that it was not a straight-up,
"Hey, here's a pop figure that will sell
like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jole or the Kardashians,"
but they were giving him that treatment.
I don't think it resonated
with Middle America, though, so...
why were they doing it?
- What is going on here? - I don't know.
I mean, the two leading theories seem to be that AMI is either
doing the Saudis' dirty work,
President Trump's dirty work,
or a combination of the two.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos accusing the National Enquirer
of blackmail and extortion.
It is a shocking, a deeply personal post,
just published online.
female reporter: AMI attempted to extort and blackmail Bezos
by threatening to release compromising photos and texts
between the billionaire and his alleged mistress.
Williams: Claims of extortion,
blackmail coming from the world's richest man.
This publication by theNational Enquirer
might have been politically motivated.
Burnett: Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post,
which the president regularly pillories
- for its coverage. - "We have ten photos of you,
- Jeff Bezos, sexual in nature" - Carlson: In some ways,
all publicity is good publicity.
Look at all those cameras.
Carlson: There's also a really bad stench to this thing.
Trump is trying to take out Bezos Bear
with a far-reaching secret conspiracy.
They messed with the wrong guy.
And they have found that out.
This story is the stuff that tabloid dreams are made of.
What the hell happened? The Enquirergot overtaken by...
mainstream media, who out-enquired
the Enquirerin the end, and I think that's where we are.
The Enquirer's been out-enquired.
- (music playing) - (beeping)
Haberman: A lot of people used to understand
the line between...
some of the things theNational Enquirerdoes
and what the mainstream press does,
and I think that people's understanding
of that has shrunk. I think it has eroded,
and I think that that has all contributed to a bad cycle.
Bernstein: It's almost impossible
in our culture today to have a fact-based debate.
We cannot agree on the facts.
That is a terrible place to be.
Auletta: Sometimes we are guilty
of enjoying things we shouldn't enjoy...
of talking about things we shouldn't be talking about,
of claiming something as a fact when it's not a fact.
So in that sense, we are really
children of the National Enquirer.
(music playing)
A South Florida holiday tradition
is under way tonight in Lantana at the headquarters
of the National Enquirer tabloid.
NewsCenter 7'sDon Dare is live in front of what they call
the world's largest Christmas tree.
Don, you really think it's the world's largest?
I believe it is, Sally. The tree is 126 feet high.
That's 12 stories...
- (music playing) - (train whistles)
Brenna: In many ways...
I want to defend this kind of journalism
because it... it has a place. In... in other ways...
(stammers) ...there's a very shameful aspect
to it, as well. There was distortion...
and there was the degrading of the...
of the basic journalistic spirit.
I'm not happy about what I did,
but I'm not that unhappy, either.
I look at this now, and I'm thinking, "Man, oh, man.
How did we get... (sighs)
...a tabloid subject
who's now President of the United States?
And do I have any shame in this or potential guilt of my own?"
(chuckles) You know, this is the world of tabloid.
Who the hell knows? You're not planning strategy.
You're not planning a world game.
Hell, you're just trying to get a page one
that will sell in the next week.
So...
what can I say?
I was a journalist.
(music playing)
♪ All right ♪
♪ Whew ♪
♪ Baby, you're clickbait sitti' Underneath of my fingers ♪
♪ Yeah, baby, you're clickbait Sittin' underneath of my ♪
♪ Fingers Point me in your direction ♪
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♪ Wow, double major In advertising ♪
♪ If you're sellin', I'm buyin' ♪
♪ Got your Rorschach, deep deep deep in my mind ♪
♪ And you keep pulling My strings ♪
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♪ And I'm just a little fish A little fish bish, oh ♪
♪ Baby, you're clickbait sitti' Underneath of my fingers ♪
♪ Yeah, baby, you're clickbait Sittin' underneath of my ♪
♪ Fingers Point me in your direction ♪
♪ You got my, my, my attention ♪
♪ Baby, you're clickbait sitti' Underneath of my fingers ♪
♪ Unh, unh, unh, unh ♪
♪ I'm curious ♪
♪ I'm curious about you I'm curious ♪
♪ Yes, I'm curious ♪
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♪ I'm curious about you Curious ♪
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♪ Baby, you're clickbait sitti' Underneath of my fingers ♪
♪ Yeah, baby, you're clickbait Sittin' underneath of my ♪
♪ Fingers Point me in your direction ♪
♪ You got my, my, my attention ♪
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♪ F-f-fingers, whoo! ♪
♪ Fing-f-fingers, ooh! ♪
♪ Fing-f-fingers ♪