National Enquirer Boss Is Building a Gossip Empire to Do Trump's Bidding
Trump acolyte David Pecker now controls tabloid mag conglomerate AMI—giving the president effective control of the pop-culture engine that helped propel him to the White House.
LLOYD GROVE
06.26.18 5:06 AM ET
When Donald Trump acolyte David Pecker purchased 13 of Bauer Publishing’s gossip, celebrity and teen-oriented weeklies for a reported $80 million on June 15, the transaction permitted Pecker’s perennially strapped company, American Media Inc. (publisher of the National Enquirer, Us Weekly, Star, Globe, OK! and Radar Online) to corner the tacky tabloid journalism market.
AMI’s acquisition of Bauer’s In Touch, Life & Style and Closer mags also awarded the 45th president a valuable prize: effective control of the pop-culture engine that helped propel him to the White House and could very well keep him there.
“Mr. Pecker has repeatedly used his brands as a cudgel on behalf of his friend Trump,” Larry Hackett, the former editor of People argued last week in Australia’s New Daily. People, along with EW, is the nation’s only celeb-focused magazine not owned by Pecker—with the rest of Time Inc.’s magazines, they were recently purchased by Meredith.
“He has peddled false stories about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama without any regard for the facts,” Hackett continued. “That’s regrettable if it’s one or two publications. But now he has control of… magazines with an estimated readership of 38 million, a virtual monopoly on the eyeballs of supermarket and Walmart shoppers. What’s to stop him from using those titles [to launch] unfounded attacks on Mr. Trump’s political foes, his Hollywood critics, unwanted immigrants?”
more
https://www.thedailybeast.com/national-enquirer-boss-is-building-a-gossip-empire-to-do-trumps-bidding?ref=home
= new reply since forum marked as read
