Pecker Pics and Tabloid Tricks

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In many ways, President Donald Trump owes his success to tabloid journalism.

John Cassidy writes in The New Yorker that during the 1980s, when he was an up-and-comer on the New York real estate scene, Trump was constantly planting puff stories about himself in the city's tabloids.

During the 1990s, Trump resurrected his career by persuading the banks not to abandon him and eventually by becoming a star on reality television, itself a bastardized form of tabloid journalism.

Perhaps no tabloid has been more helpful to Trump than the National Inquirer.

We learned last year that the paper purchased and then killed multiple stories that were unflattering to Trump as he campaigned for president.

And now we have allegations that the Inquirer sought to blackmail one of Trump's chief rivals, at least in Trump's eyes, Amazon CEO and owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos.

We know this because Bezos himself posted details last week about what he called an extortion and blackmail attempt by The Inquirer.

How did a celebrity magazine get into the rough and tumble world of extortion?

And why does the President of the United States keep appearing or not appearing in its headlines?

This is Radio Atlantic.

With me now is Jeffrey Toobin, staff writer for for The New Yorker and chief legal analyst for CNN.

What a pleasure.

Jeff, it's great to have you on the podcast.

Hi, Alex.

So two years ago, you presciently profiled AMI CEO David Pecker, a name we now have seen in the headlines quite a bit in recent weeks.

His company was under scrutiny for a pattern of suppressing negative stories about President Trump.

For people who don't know the very interesting history of the National Enquirer, it wasn't always a tabloid rag that you pick up at Walmart while you're waiting in the checkout line, right?

The origins of it are sort of more unusual.

Can you tell us a little bit about how it first began?

Well, it began early in the 20th century, and it was actually a fairly serious

magazine, you know,

in the same time period where Time magazine started, the Time Life business began, but it really began to change after World War II.

And this really extraordinary character named Generoso Pope took it over and it began, it turned into

at least a version of the National Enquirer

that we know today.

That's when we start getting the blood and gore photography, the kind of like car crash you can't look away from.

Right.

But it's interesting.

I mean, even within the sort of seed supermarket tabloid

world,

it has gone through several iterations.

Is that it started, as you point out, in the Pope era with the really grotesque, the horrible car accidents, the deformed babies, the,

but

Pope had the brilliant idea of

starting to sell it in supermarkets.

And supermarkets wouldn't put blood and gore on its checkout lines.

So in the 50s and 60s, it evolved into

the celebrity gossip

magazine that more or less it remains.

But the blood and gore were gone.

Interestingly,

a lot of that went to a crazy publication called the Weekly World News,

which still barely exists, or actually it doesn't exist at all anymore, but was invented because they still had these black and white presses that they needed to use for something.

So they would just sort of make up crazy news, call it the Weekly World News, and that...

You know,

in the glory days, sold hundreds of thousands of copies a week as well.

To be a reporter on the Weekly World News, I can only imagine those editorial meetings.

Yeah.

Now, we should note that

the Inquirer, as much as it is dismissed as as kind of a tabloid rag, does have a history of breaking some actual real political news that had

implications for national politics.

In 1987,

The Enquirer famously published that photograph of Gary Hart and Donna Rice on the monkey business boat, which was the end of Hart's presidential bid.

And then two decades later, the National Enquirer was first on the story that John Edwards had fathered a child out of wedlock during his presidential race.

I wonder, Jeff, in your research for this story, did you find any instances of the Inquirer

taking a gimlet eye to Republican candidates and Republican politics?

Or has it always been sort of a right-wing leaning populist mag?

I would not describe it as intensely political, in

particularly, you know, up in,

I mean, even

the

heart

and

the Edward scoops, I don't think were particularly motivated by, you know, screwing Democrats.

I think they were motivated because they were great scoops.

And I don't, it was really only when David Pecker took over and really even during the Trump campaign, you know, very recently, that

the Inquirer became explicitly political.

And, you know, for example, 2016 was the first time the Enquirer ever endorsed a candidate for president.

That candidate, of course, was Donald Trump.

Was Trump, right?

But before Trump,

who, as I'm sure we'll discuss, is a long-term friend of Peckers,

there was not a heavy-duty political orientation to the Inquirer.

It was much more gossip-driven and driven, above all,

by

newsstand sales, whose face

on the cover

would sell magazines.

That is really

what drove it.

And even to a certain extent in the Pecker-Trump era,

that's what drove it, at least during the campaign.

But that was more, there was not a heavy-duty political orientation through

most of the history of the Inquirer.

So the orientation is more scandal than partisan.

Right.

I mean, you know, one of the fascinating things I learned in reporting this story, and Pecker and his colleagues gave me tremendous access, is they have a very scientific way of proving, you know, what sells and what doesn't, even what words sell and what words don't.

You know,

Jennifer, oh God, I'm blanking.

The one from Friends.

No.

From Friends.

Oh, Jennifer Aniston, chat.

Jennifer Anniston.

Jennifer Aniston sells.

Jennifer Lopez does not sell.

You know, words you often see on the cover of the Inquirer, tragic last days, that sells.

That is what mostly drives the Inquirer more than politics.

And at least during the period of 2015, 2016, Trump sold.

And yes, there was a friendship with Pecker, but the fact that Trump sold was also a major factor.

And that's not entirely surprising when you think about the Inquirer's audience, which is largely lower middle class.

It sells most of all in Walmart.

And the great

swaths of central Pennsylvania, central Ohio, central Wisconsin that won Trump the election, that was prime inquirer territory.

Well, yeah.

And so we'll get to that in a second, the sort of chicken or the egg scenario.

Right.

Right.

Does Trump just happen to move a lot of national and inquirers, or was there a sort of benefit benefit to giving your friend favorable press?

Let's talk a little bit about Dave Pecker, who becomes the head, the steward of the National Enquirer.

He is a fascinating character.

He's not a journalist, but he is, in a way, a kind of throwback to a certain kind of New York City media mogul, isn't he, Jeff?

He has these kind of old school characteristics.

He is.

I mean, you know,

most of the news media, I mean, you work, you've worked with the MSNBC, I work at CNN, you know, they're corporations, they're owned by, you know, shareholders and sort of CEOs who are very bottom-line driven and business school graduates.

Pecker is a throwback to when

newspapers and magazines were owned by individual people and reflected the personalities of the, you know, like the Henry Luces, the,

and Pecker, you know, has brought this

slightly down market, swashweckling mentality to a series of magazines over the years.

And before Trump was never known as a particularly political person,

but

everything changed with Trump.

And he seems to be very much in the thrall of Donald Trump.

Trump's sort of brand of New York success, the gilded ceilings and

the supermodels on each arm, is very, it seems like it intoxicated Dave Pecker in terms of what a definition of success should look like.

Well, it certainly did.

And

there was a long relationship there in part because Donald Trump was a familiar figure in The Enquirer and he used to give Pecker and company tips about things to cover.

But there was a business relationship between them two.

When you checked into

a Trump hotel for many years, and this is true for several different hotel chains, you got a Trump magazine.

that was produced by American Media, which is Pecker's company, the parent company of The Enquirer.

So

he did this, what's called custom publishing,

which

he did a magazine for Trump's hotels, and that built a relationship.

The Enquirer was based for many years very close to Palm Beach,

and he also acquired the star, and now he's acquired all.

He essentially now has a monopoly on the shrinking universe of supermarket tabloids.

But

he was, I believe he was a member of Mar-a-Lago.

He was certainly there a lot.

And there was definitely a social relationship.

And as you point out,

Pecker, in a very open way, looked up to Trump as the kind of model of success he would have liked to have had.

Fascinating.

So we see that admiration.

sort of made public in 2016.

You talked about the fact that the Inquirer endorsed Trump the first time the paper ever endorses a political candidate.

They endorsed him for president in 2016.

But in addition to that move, there are a number of other ones that indirectly helped the Trump campaign.

The Inquirer is ruthless in terms of trashing President Trump's rivals, then candidate Trump's rivals.

They were the ones that linked Ted Cruz's father to the assassination of John F.

Kennedy, which we heard about on the campaign trail from Trump himself.

And they were breathtakingly tough on Hillary Clinton and her so-called health issues.

I remember you point this out in your piece.

On Election Eve, the Inquirer offered a special nine-page investigation under the headline, Hillary, Corrupt, Racist, Criminal, with friends, with journalists like these.

I mean,

it was fairly stunning.

Well, and

you cite 2016.

This really started in 2015.

You know, because as I needn't tell you,

our presidential campaigns don't begin in the year of the election.

Throughout the campaign,

2015 and 2016,

the magazine was relentlessly cheerleading for Trump and trashing his rivals,

as you point out,

Ted Cruz during the primaries and then just outrageous

stuff about Hillary.

And

without,

I mean, I don't want to sound too much like a journalistic scold, but

we can't have this conversation without...

saying

that they were lies about Hillary Clinton and distortions and terrible, terrible, unfair journalism.

And, you know, it's easy to roll your eyes about The Inquirer.

And it is true that the circulation of The Enquirer, you know, which was in three or four million in the 60s, is now in the range of 300,000.

So it's dramatically, dramatically smaller, though the price has increased so that the revenue is not as different as it was.

But, you know, millions of people see see the cover of The Inquirer every week.

And so

when I wrote my New Yorker piece, you know, obviously I had some fun with The Inquirer and

you can't help but

get a sort of perverse kick at a hat of how crazy it is.

But you also need to say how irresponsible and damaging

the kind of journalism they practice is.

It sort of reminds me of the analog version of the Russian Russian troll farms that were pumping out the sort of fake news tidbits that were then circulated on social media during the 2016 campaign, right?

This is the sort of supermarket tabloid version of some of that.

I think that's right.

And I can't connect all the dots, but I would not be surprised if there was a feedback loop between what went on on social media that got into the Inquirer, which fed what was on social media.

I mean,

the troll farms had to work from something.

And I wouldn't be surprised if they used stuff in the inquirer and then the inquirer would amplify what was on social media.

Anything that they could do to help Trump and damage his rivals, they did.

Fascinating.

We are going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to talk more about the inquirer's current legal woes involving Dave Pecker, the Southern District of New York, the world's richest man, and of course, President Trump.

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All right, we are back with Jeffrey Toobin.

Jeff, you are a legal eagle.

The National Inquirer got in trouble for a practice last year called Catch and Kill, which your colleague Ronan Farrow wrote about last year in The New Yorker.

For people who are not familiar with catch and kill, what is it and how did the inquirer practice it and how has it landed the paper in hot water with the feds?

Well, the crucial fact you have to understand about the inquirer's journalism is that it's based on financial transactions.

They pay for news.

They pay people for interviews.

They pay people for photographs.

They pay people for tips,

which respectable news organizations don't do.

The corollary to simply paying people for interviews is paying people for a story that someone could do,

but you pay them not to talk about it to anyone else.

And what happened with Karen McDougal was they paid her $150,000

not to talk about her affair that she said she had with Donald Trump.

The colloquial term for

what went on there is catch and kill.

That is, you catch the subject of a story, but instead of publishing the story, you kill the story.

And that's what went on with McDougal.

There's an anecdote you have in the piece about Tiger Woods and the Inquirer that sheds more light on the practice.

Can you tell us that story just because it's such a fascinating insight into the way this paper works?

Well, and know, the Tiger Woods story is an example of how complex it can get.

The inquirer was doing an investigation of Tiger Woods, and they saw that he was having this sort of CD affair with some woman in Florida, and

it involved sex in cars.

And there were photographs, and it was very incriminating.

Well, they confronted Woods or his representatives, and

instead of

running it, they negotiated for Woods to appear on the cover of Men's Fitness magazine.

Men's Fitness, a magazine he had not yet appeared on the cover of.

So this was kind of a big thing.

And

they really wanted Tiger on the cover.

So in payment, and essentially, for not running the photographs of him with this woman in Florida, he agreed to appear on the cover.

That's a good example of sort of how these transactions can work.

It's not always as simple as: here's $500,

tell us, you know, where you saw John Travolta.

It can be a much more complex web of transactions as it was in this Tiger Woods story.

And indeed, as the contours of the Bezos scandal seem to be more complicated than your usual catch-and-kill.

But because of the Karen McDougal catch-and-kill arrangement,

the feds

have basically crafted a deal with AMI and Dave Pecker because the inquirer was effectively violating campaign finance laws.

They were giving, right?

Absolutely.

Although it's so interesting, you know, how different this looks two years hence.

You know, when I was sitting in a restaurant interviewing David Pecker and he said to me,

Donald Trump is a friend of this magazine.

We didn't want that story out there, so we paid to kill it.

I mean, he was very open about it.

What generous friends?

Yeah, you know, we should all have such friends, although we probably shouldn't engage in the underlying behavior.

But

he,

I mean, he very openly said it.

It didn't occur to me, and it certainly didn't occur to him or the people who were at the lunch that that would be later seen as potentially an illegal campaign contribution.

That money that was paid to engineering that transaction was one of the things that Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to

as an illegal campaign contribution.

That led to,

and that led to the investigation in the Southern District of New York.

As part of that investigation,

David Pecker and his top deputy, Dylan Howard, effectively got immunity and a non-prosecution agreement saying,

we're not going to prosecute you in connection with uh this the the the payments to karen mcdougal but you got to keep your nose clean you can't commit any more crimes and that's sort of where things stood until the bezos story until jeff bezos the world's richest man the ceo of amazon the owner of the washington post publishes a week ago a medium post where he details what he basically alleges is an extortion scheme by the national inquirer wherein they say, look, we know you're having an affair with this woman, and we have photos you sent her, dick pics.

I can say that on this family podcast, dick pics that we're going to publish unless you say that our investigation into your private life had nothing to do with politics.

Well, let me just amend

your version of the facts a little bit.

First, the Inquirer sort of broke the story of their relationship,

of Bezos' relationship with this woman, and Bezos announced that he was getting divorced.

Then they approached him with the dick pics and the other

embarrassing photographs and said,

you know, unless you either drop your investigation or say that our investigation of you,

you Bezos, and unless you say in the Washington Post,

either drop the Washington Post investigation or say our motives were not political,

we will publish these photos.

The reason I make that correction is that

when they approached Bezos with what he calls a blackmail offer,

the news of his relationship with Ms.

Sanchez was already public.

So the impact of the photographs was probably not going to be as big.

I mean, obviously it'd be very embarrassing, but the underlying news was out there already.

So the leverage that the inquirer had was somewhat less.

Yes.

Although I will say, who really wants dick pics circulating on the internet?

I would say no one wants that.

Absolutely.

Precisely no one.

But so let's talk a little bit about this political angle.

Jeff Bezos is effectively asserting that the National Inquirer

is

doing someone's bidding by revealing the Bezos affair and subsequently the Bezos dick pics.

And the implication is that it's President Trump's bidding, right?

President Trump doesn't like the Washington Post.

He's been very public about his feelings about Jeff Bezos.

He now calls him Jeff Bozo.

What do you think about that angle?

Well, you know,

it's interesting and it's probably somewhat more complicated than the simple the inquirer doing Trump's bidding.

Yes, it's true in 2017 that

David Pecker was very happy to say to me, look, we love Donald Trump and we were helping him out with this Karen McDougal situation.

This has been a nightmare for

Pecker and for

American media, his company, and for Dylan Howard.

Yes, it's true that in 2017 and 2018,

it was all jolly to talk about how much they liked Donald Trump.

This has been a problem.

And frankly, my

sense is, and also if you just look at the inquirer, as I continue to do, they have carried a lot less water for Trump in recent months.

Trump is not selling the way he once did, as far as I can tell.

And

I think the relationship between them, Pecker and Trump, is somewhat

is less close, probably a lot less close than it once was.

So I think you need to keep that in the background.

And look, and Bezos is a good story.

He's the richest man in the world.

It is a classic Insquirer story to reveal that

he was having this affair.

Is it a benefit that it helped Trump and embarrassed one of his enemies?

Probably yes.

But was that the primary motivator?

I don't know.

Now, I'm sure you're going to get to this.

There is also the related Saudi Arabia angle, which may actually be bigger than the Trump angle.

Let's just pause on the Saudis first, because I do want to get to that.

You say that this has been a nightmare for Dave Pecker.

We were just talking about the non-prosecution agreement that AMI and Dave Pecker have with the federal prosecutors in the Southern District.

Do you think that this allegation on the part of Jeff Bezos that this was an extortion scheme on the part of AMI and Pecker violates the non-prosecution agreement.

I mean, how much jeopardy are they in right now?

I'm going to give you a ringing, I don't know, to that answer because

I don't know, but it is certainly worthy of investigation.

You know,

you work in TV, I work in TV.

Everybody asks you, you know, is someone guilty or not guilty based on like one piece of information?

That's not how it works.

What is appropriate here is that the Southern District do an investigation of whether this was blackmail.

Look at all the communications between AMI and Bezos.

Look, interview these people.

Talk to people.

Learn all the facts.

Because on its face, it does look like it might be extortion or blackmail.

You know, extortion is obtaining a thing of value by threats.

or force.

You know, give me a million dollars or I'll kill you.

The question is,

did Trump, did

AMI obtain a thing of value?

Certainly there were threats.

I mean, the photos are, you know, we'll release the photos is clearly a threat, but did they get a thing of value?

Well, they got or they sought

The news coverage or the absence of news coverage.

That's certainly a thing of value, especially to a company in perilous financial shape like AMI is.

So you could say they did get a thing of value.

However, they would say, look, we were just trying to get the truth published in the Washington Post, and we were using what leverage we could to do it.

So it is an unconventional extortion or blackmail case, but it might still be a case.

And

I think it is worthy of investigation.

And I can't say right here and now whether I think AMI is guilty of it.

You mentioned the financial straits that the National Enquirer, AMI, is in.

I think that bears mentioning an exploration because there's another angle to this entire bezos, la faire bezos, we shall call it,

that involves a Saudi Arabian government.

Right.

If you can believe it.

The story isn't bizarre enough.

So let's just, just for people, for people who haven't been following

the highs and lows in the National Enquirer, basically sales are down 90% from their peak in 1970.

And Bloomberg reported this week that the publisher of The Enquirer has been facing financial losses of more than $1 billion in debt and a negative net worth.

Now, Dave Pecker has in the past been a very resourceful manager.

He reorganized the company in 2010 under bankruptcy laws.

There have been various owners, but Pecker has always been the chief executive.

It sounds like he may have been going overseas for financial assistance or the hope of financial assistance in recent months.

Is that accurate to say, Jeff?

Well, first of all,

the financial straits are obvious.

The Inquirer is even more vulnerable than

most magazines and newspapers to the Internet because they have essentially no Internet presence, virtually no advertising.

Everything they get, all their revenue pretty much, is from newsstand sales.

And you don't have to be a big media expert to know that magazines are not selling the way they once did.

And the Inquirer has, as you point out, the circulation is down 90%.

He has engaged in remarkable financial engineering over the past couple of decades to keep the place afloat, but

he is very much on the lookout for new financing.

And it does appear he was looking to Saudi Arabia for

money.

He was entertained at the White House, a dinner with

the president

after the inauguration.

And one of the people he brought with him was a potential Saudi financier.

I mentioned custom publishing earlier.

They did this very weird, untypical

AMI production of a magazine devoted to

MBS, the prince who was effectively running Saudi Arabia when he visited.

Right, when he visited the United States last year.

Certainly looked like a cultivation of Saudi contacts.

What is the big story about Saudi Arabia now?

It is about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist who was killed in Turkey and whose murder has been a subject of understandable obsession on the part of the Washington Post.

Saudi Arabia is very mad at the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, and that

may be part of the motivation for what went on with Bezos and the National Enquirer.

So you have two people that that don't like Jeff Bezos, President Trump and Saudi Arabia, for different reasons.

President Trump and Saudi Arabia publicly have remained weirdly aligned even through the Khashoggi murder, to the consternation of even other members of the president's party.

Republicans in Congress are not happy with the way the White House has handled the Khashoggi murder.

But you have alliance there, right?

And then you have Bezos effectively having his life turned upside down to some degree by by the National Inquirer, which has relationships with both Donald Trump and the Saudi Arabian government.

So how do we put the pieces together here, Jeff, as we stand this second week of February and O'Domini?

Well, this is why

prosecutors and FBI agents have subpoena power and

the ability to go out and interview people.

This is highly, highly suspicious that the inquirer went after in a potentially illegal way an enemy of both Donald Trump and the Saudi government.

Bezos, unlike so many of the inquirer's subjects, decided to stand up to them and embarrass them.

Whether that will lead to a criminal prosecution, I don't know at this point.

But, you know, this whole bizarre episode is, I think, a fascinating illustration of how this corner of the news media works,

which

is not a pretty picture, but

it is

revealing about

the transactional nature of tabloid coverage.

Let me ask you just two more big picture questions here.

The first is, Bob Bauer, who is a former White House counsel to President Obama, wrote in The Atlantic that he does not believe the Inquirer is subject to journalistic protections.

He basically says they've passed over from the pursuit of news to corporate bullying for self-interested purposes, or in the campaign finance catch-and-kill case, coordinated political activity with the candidate.

And therefore, he suggests they've forfeited the constitutional protections that normally work in a paper's favor.

Do you agree with that?

Is the National Inquirer part of the press?

Well, I would agree partially.

I think when it comes to

outright payments of money, like payments to Karen McDougal, there is nothing First Amendment protected about that.

I agree with Bob Bauer in the sense that that could be seen as an illegal campaign contribution.

You know, writing a favorable story about Donald Trump is protected by the First Amendment.

You know, writing critically about Hillary Clinton is protected by the First Amendment, but paying money to one of Donald Trump's alleged mistresses is not.

When it comes to these photographs, you know, there is nothing First Amendment protected, I think, about extortion.

or blackmail, but what they put in the magazine is First Amendment protected.

So

I would say, you know, I agree about the sort of non-journalistic activities are not protected by the First Amendment, but it is still a magazine.

And it is,

and in what it prints and sells, I do think still is protected by the First Amendment.

Aaron Powell, and knowing what you know about

the sort of

the full picture that you have of the Enquirer, the man in charge of it, the way its business dealings are done, the more nefarious aspects of its journalistic practices.

Do you you think the National Enquirer will exist in five years?

Yeah, you know,

that's a great question.

I mean, I think the National Enquirer has a better chance of surviving than the Hartford Current or the Cincinnati Enquirer.

You know, I think there will always be a market for, you know, down and dirty gossip in this country.

And,

you know, Pecker has managed to keep it afloat through the the rise of the internet.

So I do think the much diminished National Enquirer will be around.

But,

you know, and even in a shadow of its former self, which it is, we can see how much trouble it can stir up, whether it is in the 2016 election or with Bezos now.

As long as it's around, it's going to be

making trouble because it operates by such different rules than the rest of us do.

So, yeah, I do think it will be around in five years.

There's always a market for tawdry and salacious gossip.

Jeffrey Toobin, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Thank you for telling us the story of a strange, strange place.

And thanks for your time.

Thanks, Alex.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing editing this episode, to our podcast fellow, Patricia Jacob, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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