Mediator: Trump’s Tawdry Tabloid Sagas Reveal Weightier Themes

For those who wonder why any of this might apply to The Enquirer, I would direct them to the supermarket tabloid’s recent history of presidential muckraking.

It was The Enquirer that, in 2007 and 2008, discovered that the Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards had conceived a child out of wedlock with a woman who worked for his campaign, Rielle Hunter. The tabloid exposed an elaborate scheme in which Mr. Edwards, using money from his political patrons, covered his tracks by having a campaign aide pose as the baby’s father.

It was the kind of story The Enquirer was made for. It used reporting techniques that mainstream news organizations wouldn’t dare — like a dumpster dive for the baby’s diaper, for DNA testing — to pierce Mr. Edwards’s facade as a devoted husband.

That dirt-digging was fully in keeping with the tabloid media tradition of going all-out to give the powerless a glimpse of what the powerful are hiding. And it led to a landmark campaign finance case against Mr. Edwards that, while ultimately unsuccessful, set the template for the one that has implicated Individual-1.

By 2016, things had changed. During the campaign cycle, The Enquirer functioned more like a protection racket. According to prosecutors, the tabloid became part of the very sort of scheme it had once reveled in exposing, and it crossed the line into illegality when it spent money, allegedly in coordination with Mr. Trump, to protect his reputation.

A.M.I. issued angry denial after angry denial to The Times and other news organizations that pursued the story, including The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and The Washington Post. Those denials dried up in August, when prosecutors declared that the payment to Ms. McDougal was an “unlawful, corporate contribution.” (The company declined to comment over the weekend.)

The Enquirer’s behavior was part of a broader trend, in which various branches of the news media were used to distort the public debate — a corruption of mission that turned parts of the political arena into information junkyards.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/09/business/media/trump-cohen-tabloid-scandals.html?partner=rss&emc=rss