Tabloids are our thing. We’ve talked quite a bit about how influential they were during the 1950s. Apparently, considering the revelation that a recent presidential candidate depended upon one to catch and kill stories that could harm his campaign, they still are. This National Enquirer hit newsstands today in 1958. The cover has a rare shot of Ireland born actress Maureen O’Hara, who says she doesn’t have a lot offer but wants a man around the house. She had plenty to offer, but she’d been divorced for around five years, so the headline makes sense. We’d have bought this but some joker wanted eighty bucks for it, which made milk come out our noses, we laughed so hard. We generally get our tabloids for fifteen, and the ones we choose are usually far more colorful than this early-period Enquirer.
We wonder if the ask was so high due to the paper’s current newsworthiness. The whole situation is interesting, because unlike old top-tier tabloids like Confidential and Whisper that often uncovered inconvenient truths, the newer interations generally just make everything up, which places them closer to satire than news. Even so, tabloids remain the traditional last stop for people wanting to sell sensational stories, but who’ve been turned away by more ethical publications, which means facts occasionally land on tabloid editors’ desks. Former Enquirer head David Pecker understood that, has testified during the ongoing Donald Trump hush money/finance disclosure trial that he expected it to happen, and, as it turns out, he was correct in spades.
Politics is a dirty business, but politicians are generally pretty square. Enquirer wouldn’t have found itself in a position to help 95% of them, but for a serial cheat and swindler like Donald Trump (fact, not opinion), whose flaws have been famously described as “fractal” (i.e. inside his flaws are more flaws, ad infinitum into bottomless, kaleidoscopic eternity), Enquirer was uniquely able to weight the electoral scales. Pecker must have felt a tremendous sense of power. We would have. The politics-journalism nexus hinges upon access, and having access in D.C—basically being an insider—is like being an insider in Hollywood, but with the added heady sensation of being in the center of world-shaping events. It must really be something to have the president’s ear.
We’d give a lot to have been in some of those Enquirer interview sessions, especially the Karen McDougal ones. A year after McDougal was made Playmate of the Year, PSGP (one of your two Pulp boys) started as a temporary hire at Playboy Entertainment Group and rose to have an office and a staff, before chucking it and running away to Guatemala. So there’s a six degrees of separation aspect to it for him. It’s a shame Enquirer killed McDougal’s and Stormy Daniels’ stories. Tabloids are part of the dark underbelly of U.S. culture. They’ve always catered to prurient interests. And reveled in it. But hiding prurience? That’s low. In a rational world that would cost Enquirer the actual designation “tabloid.” We’ll talk to the National Association for Tabloid Oversight (the other NATO) about that. Oh right—it doesn’t exist. Well, it should.
