The National Enquirer Earns Some Respect
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The call came into The National Enquirer’s Los Angeles tip line — the kind advertid in the supermarket tabloid with the promi “We’ll Pay Big for Your Celebrity Gossip” — in late September 2007. The message was that a woman named Rielle Hunter had been hinting at an affair with John Edwards, then a candidate for president.
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今生最爱歌词Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
牛皮筋Barry Levine, The National Enquirer’s executive editor, top, says mainstream papers may look down on his paper, but “we beat them at their own game.”
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Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times文章吧
David Pecker leads American Media, The Enquirer's owner.
Within an hour, the tip was on the desk of Barry Levine, The Enquirer’s executive editor in New York. His readers didn’t care about politics for politics’ sake, not as long as there were rocky Hollywood marriages to be covered and celebrity cellulite photos to be snapped. But Mr. Levine was intrigued when he looked up Mr. Edwards on Google and found a poll saying that the candidate and his wife, Elizabeth, had one of the most admired marriages of all the candidates.
That meant Mr. Edwards was on a pedestal, and revelations of an affair could knock him off it — in line with The Enquirer’s mission. “It still shows the reader that wealthy people, rich people, people who they may admire — when you take away the money, have the same types of problems that they have in real life,” he said.
Pulling together reporters to dig into the rumor, Mr. Levine began something that once emed unthinkable: not only the downfall of a presidential candidate with a meticulous image, but, for the nsational tabloid, something rembling respectability.
By being the first and, largely, the only publication pursuing the Edwards story through his denials of the affair and of fathering a child out of wedlock, The Enquirer is under consideration for a Pulitzer Prize, and it has strong support for its bid from other journalists. The success has Mr. Levine considering opening a Washington bureau to look for more dirt among politicians.
It’s a curious time for The Enquirer to be soaring. Its parent company, American Media, nearly went bankrupt last year.
A former editor claims the company pressured Tiger Woods into appearing on the cover of the sister publication Men’s Fitness in 2007 in exchange for spiking an Enquirer article on his infidelity. (David Pecker, American Media’s chief, declined to comment on that, but says he does not trade favors for coverage).
立春
On The Enquirer’s home turf, the competition has never been more inten, with organizations like 教你变魔术TMZ as well as traditional papers pecking away at personal lives of celebrities.
But The Enquirer stays ahead by doing what other papers won’t. It threw reporters at the Edwards story, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on expens, conducted stakeouts, paid informants and ran pieces bad entirely on anonymous sources.
Tho tactics have t off a debate about whether The Enquirer should even be eligible for a Pulitzer, the most prestigious journalism award. “When you pay people for information, the information itlf often becomes distorted,” said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, though she said she supported its Pulitzer entry. 廉洁谈话表态发言
Leonard Downie Jr., the former executive editor of The Washington Post, said he was fine with it as long as The Enquirer did not pay sources on the articles in the award entries. Mr. Levine said his paper didn’t pay sources for the articles but was unapologetic about using the tactic in earlier reporting on Mr. Edwards.
“I think we’re the barbarians at the gate,” Mr. Levine said of mainstream newspapers. “We reprent a lot of what they look down on, but at the same time, we beat them at their own game.”
Still, their own game has strict rules. Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, said in an e-mail message that while the prize committee would not discuss entries or speculate about outcomes, any United States text-bad newspaper that publishes at least weekly can enter.
“It is up to a jury and then the Pulitzer Board to determine merit,” Mr. Gissler said. And, he added, the prize is for work solely in 2009. Most of the scoops on Mr. Edwards came before that.
After that first tip, on Sept. 24, 2007, The Enquirer began to untangle the story. By its Oct. 22 issue that year, it had dug up enough sources around the campaign and Ms. Hunter to confirm at least talk of an affair. The editor then, David Perel, ran an article about Mr. Edwards’s infidelity but withheld the woman’s name.
