National Enquirer's Publishers Emerges from Bankruptcy

American Media Incorporated, Florida-based home to the National Enquirer, WWE, and other publications, will emerge from bankruptcy "as early as this week," according to a Palm Beach Post report posted in today's Miami Herald.

The Enquirer is a curious media creature. It specializes in publishing salacious stories about public figures. Its approach involves working the edges of the First Amendment and the dodgy side of human behavior. Its reporters are not exactly "investigative reporters"; rather, they are similar to private detectives unearthing dirt on behalf of divorce clients. In this case, the customer is the Enquirer's readership.

Who reads the Enquirer? Well, millions of Americans do, although it's difficult to envision the publication's subscription list. The Enquirer is an impulse purchase typically done in supermarkets and the endangered species known as the news stand. Many people read it standing on line, killing time in a laundromat, or getting a haircut. I am among them.

The Enquirer and like-minded tabloids have occasionally provided revealing stories that have entered the national dialogue. The articles typically demonstrate a combination of old-fashioned journalistic hustle, pay-to-tell sourcing, and a shameless shaping of fact to drive reader interest. As with its Britsh and other Anglo-Saxon cousins, the Enquirer has always proudly flown journalism's version of the pirate flag. However, unlike Rupert Murdoch's politically slanted slander sheets, the Enquirer is intriguingly nonpartisan. It has broken stories on right-wingers such as Rush Limbaugh's drug addiction and left-wingers such as John Edwards' love child.

The Enquirer is Hollywood's particular bete-noire. Stories about movie stars provide a volatile amalgam of fully founded facts and lurid speculation that provides readers with the feeling of opinionated escape. The American public insatiably devours this information. To feed the public's craving for dirt, the Enquirer is cozy with the hellhound paparazzi that mercilessly track celebrities, relentlessly invade their privacy, and commercially benefit from their exploitation. Agents, publicists, and attorneys have a love and (mostly) hate relationship with the publication's writers, editors, and lawyers. It's not a business for the faint of heart.

During my undergraduate years at the University of Wisconsin, I worked on the student newspaper. One of its editors at that time later joined the Enquirer staff and eventually became a name near the top of its masthead. Given the editor's collegiate years' interest in radical leftist politics, I found his career move a puzzling one. I have never understood his motivation to work, and achieve a sort of success, with a supermarket tabloid. By extension, I don't know why any Enquirer reporter chooses to call "home" the dicey neighborhood where fact, innuendo, and dark motives uneasily co-exist.

Yet, as most journalists would admit, there's something about the hunt for the story that deeply matters to them. It's in every good journalist's blood, from the Pentagon Papers' Neil Sheehan on down. Enquirer reporters fit quite comfortably into that way of being, although they find embarrassing sexcapades more compelling than national policy.

The Enquirer supposedly faces an uncertain commercial future. Analysts cite its declining audience, inability to draw sufficient advertising, and competition from specialized Internet sites and dreadful television programs. We'll see. The psychological phenomena that form the foundation of tabloid success are essential elements of our collective character. They are unlikely to disappear, and neither will the public's desire for a publication that provides a goofy look into our lives' shared, unseemly desires.

However, the Enquirer could be literally killed. In the fall of 2001, an American Media employee died from anthrax delivered to the premises, and the building had to be abandoned for a substantial period of time. The subsequent federal investigation suggested a domestically-based scientist produced the deadly material. The episode remains part of the anthrax scare mystery, in which high profile targets experienced fatal consequences. Not even the Enquirer's top reportorial bloodhounds could find a trail, or enough printable information to pass its editorial and legal team's scrutiny. One wonders why.