The Ur-Text of a Tabloid Age

Generoso Pope Jr., the MIT-educated founding father of America's guiltiest pleasure, was stuck behind a long line of rubberneckers gawking at the scene of an auto accident when inspiration struck. There might be a market for a newspaper trafficking in blood and guts. The stories would be short and graphic—newswire copy with pulp flourishes. And so the National Enquirer was born. In a couple of hundred words, readers learned about a boy smashing in his father's skull with a wooden board, rooting through the dead man's pockets for loose change, drinking up that loose change in a saloon, then, sober and full of remorse, begging the judge to send him to the electric chair. The paper also featured gross-out stories with an ironic touch: FAMILY EATS BARBECUED MEAT—FINDS IT WAS THEIR DOG.

To its dedicated readers, 1 million strong, the tabloid was the perfect antidote to the cheerful "Ozzie & Harriet" optimism that held sway in the late '50s and early '60s. But the dynamics of the media marketplace soon changed. In the ongoing suburbanization of America, the newsstands and corner cigar shops where men in fedoras had once anonymously browsed the racks looking for something to satisfy their more prurient desires were fast becoming relics. More and more Americans were picking up their magazines in the checkout lines of supermarkets and drugstores—neither of which was eager to carry a publication with screaming banner headlines advertising lurid stories about hideous murders and gruesome accidents. And there was now a new market to tap: the suburban housewife. So the Enquirer reinvented itself, this time as a purveyor of so-called gee-whiz journalism. Mystics, pop psychologists, UFO sightings and tales of survival against impossibly long odds all became standard fare. Behold the supermarket tabloid.

There was another ingredient, too, one that quickly became the Enquirer's favorite beat—celebrity scandal. Lately, the tabloid has been knee-deep in the private lives of our politicians. Some of their scoops have made their way into the mainstream media; most haven't. If you're reading this magazine, you probably know that John Edwards has admitted to having an extramarital affair with a former campaign aide named Rielle Hunter. What you may not know, unless you are also a reader of the National Enquirer, which broke the Edwards story months before his televised mea culpa, is that Hunter was apparently "whisked away" to the Caribbean on a private plane days before Edwards came clean about their tryst, and the former presidential candidate has reportedly arranged to support her and their "love child" to the tune of $15,000 a month. (Edwards has not commented on the latest Enquirer reporting, and the journalistic establishment has yet to touch it.)

Surely you know that the unmarried daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant. (Here, too, the Enquirer was there first, but the tabloid says its planned story on the unplanned pregnancy was pre-empted by a formal announcement from Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign.) But you may not know of a host of other provocative allegations about the Palin clan raised in the Enquirer's reporting—allegations vigorously denied by the McCain campaign, which has threatened legal action, and unconfirmed by any other major news organization, including this one.

Such is the strange place that America's premier scandal sheet occupies in our media landscape. The Enquirer doesn't compete with newspapers like The New York Times or newsweeklies like Time or NEWSWEEK, but with celebrity magazines like People, Us Weekly and OK! It uses methods scorned by the mainstream media—rifling through trash cans, stalking subjects and, most of all, paying for information. And it pursues the sorts of seamy stories from which most newspapers and magazines tend to recoil. Yet the Enquirer lands too many big scoops for the mainstream media to ignore—or, more accurately, that they ignore at their peril.

Think of the Enquirer as the media establishment's rogue uncle who likes to throw back a few at family reunions and then regale relatives with tacky, delicious stories of debatable veracity. He isn't entirely assimilated into polite company, but then you can't stop listening to him, either. The tabloid's arrival in our nation's newsrooms is eagerly greeted with a combination of admiration, disgust and envy. Journalistic hand-wringing (should we have had that story?) and soul-searching (is it even news?) invariably follow. "Most journalists approach the Enquirer with radioactive tongs," says Howard Kurtz, longtime media critic for The Washington Post. "But they know full well that the paper has a track record of nailing big stories about politicians and sex —even while using methods that we don't approve of."

It's gotten tougher to ignore the rogue uncle of late. "Despite our initial reticence, journalists ended up doing the Edwards affair story and the Jesse Jackson love-child story and others," Kurtz says. "The fact is that we all live in a tabloid world now, and sometimes public people do stupid things."