WASHINGTON — Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker’s testimony in Donald Trump’s hush money trial this week revealed the underhanded tactics his publication used to defend the former president, flagrantly violating not only mainstream journalism ethics rules, but even the more lurid standards typical of tabloids like his.
“I knew the National Enquirer was slimy, but I didn’t know they were this slimy,” said Kelly McBride, the senior vice president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the non-profit Poynter Institute. “It is so far outside the practice of journalism that it’s hard for me to even imagine that this was happening.”
In testimony this week during Trump’s trial in New York City, the former CEO of National Enquirer’s former parent company explained in stunning detail how he agreed to act as “eyes and ears” for Trump’s campaign, purchasing the rights to stories in order to suppress them, and even outright fabricating negative stories about Trump’s opponents.
“I wanted to protect my company, I wanted to protect myself, and I also wanted to protect Donald Trump,” Pecker said about why he released a false public statement about his publication’s “catch and kill” agreement to purchase and bury Karen McDougal’s story about her alleged monthslong affair with Trump.
Paying for stories, fabricating stories and striking secret details to support political campaigns are all flagrant violations of basic journalism tenets, codified in many news outlet’s internal ethics policies and the Society of Professional Journalism’s Code of Ethics.
Some of the Enquirer’s tactics were already known. But it mainly came through reporting from anonymous sources — including from one former National Enquirer editor who is now covering the trial for another publication — so it was stunning to hear the tabloid’s former boss explain matter-of-factly how he struck a deal with former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen to work with the campaign during a 2015 meeting at Trump Tower.
Some details were new, including Pecker’s acknowledgment that the Enquirer doctored photos to invent a story about the father of Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, one of Trump’s 2016 opponents, palling around with Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated former President John F. Kennedy.
“We mashed the photos and the different pictures with Lee Harvey Oswald. And mashed the two together. And that’s how that story was prepared — created I would say,” Pecker said.
Trump defense attorney Todd Blanche argued the National Enquirer’s practice of paying sources for stories was standard journalistic practice. But in reality, that practice is largely confined to only a small handful of tabloids and celebrity publications and most mainstream news outlets explicitly prohibit actions like paying for stories, according to experts and media insiders.
“It is in the Code of Ethics: Do not pay for news. It is one of the rare black-and-white things in there,” said Chris Roberts, a University of Alabama journalism professor and member of SPJ’s Ethics Committee, who helped draft the latest version of the rules.
Pecker said ABC News was also trying to secure exclusive access to McDougal and Stormy Daniels’ stories, that he knew the National Enquirer had an edge because they could offer cash.
“The ABC offer was interesting because they were offering apparently Karen a slot on Dancing with the Stars, but I knew from my experience that ABC doesn’t buy stories. So I didn’t think they would pay the cash for the story,” Pecker said. ABC did not respond to a request for comment.
Watchdogs have sometimes accused mainstream outlets of flouting that principle by, for instance, covering the travel costs or meals of sources. But Pecker described something much more nakedly transactional, saying the publication had a policy of paying sources directly up to $10,000 in cash for exclusive rights to their stories, and that amounts over that could be considered if approved by him.
“We used checkbook journalism, and we paid for stories,” Pecker explained.
While tabloids like the National Enquire have long had a sordid reputation for their brash style and bending of journalism norms around issues like paying for sources, alumni of the publication say the arrangements Pecker described go far beyond even the looser rules of tabloid journalism.
“We veterans of the Golden Age well and truly lament what happened later to our saucy Tabbie,” said Barbara Sternig, a former longtime reporter at the tabloid and author of Celebrity Secrets of a National Enquirer Reporter. “Not that there weren’t some characters in our day too. But in general the bad rep was just because of the ‘indelicate’ nature of many big stories.”
The Enquirer’s reputation had long been offset by its ability to break major news. For instance, beyond its celebrity bread-and-butter, the publication revealed extramarital affairs that helped sink the presidential candidacies of Gary Hart in 1987 and John Edwards in 2008. The Edwards scoop led the Pulitzer Prize Board to reverse an earlier policy and announce in 2010 that the Enquirer was eligible for an Investigative Reporting award. It did not win.
The Enquirer, former employees and observers say, was an equal opportunity gossip — eager to break news on any and all famous or powerful people. Trump seemed like an ideal target for the kind of salacious scoops the publication trafficked. Pecker even testified that he expected women would come forward from Trump’s past — but he decided to bury those stories instead of reporting them.
Sternig, who left National Enquirer before Pecker took over, said there were occasional “let’s make a deal” negotiations with big-name celebrities where the publication would bargain to have a negative story killed in exchange for sit-down interviews or other exclusive access. But she said in her 20 years at the publication, those were rare and “certainly no kind of norm.”
Pecker described one instance like that, where the Enquirer buried an unflattering story about professional golfer Tiger Woods in exchange for him appearing on the cover of one of their publications.
But it’s unclear what the publication or its readers won in exchange for its burying of the Trump stories.
“I can’t even figure out what his own motivations were except to curry favor for himself,” said McBride. “They’re not even loyal to their own audience.”
Pecker described the arrangement with Trump as “mutually beneficial” and said he personally benefited, particularly before Trump ran for president and offered him behind-the-scene details about “The Apprentice.” But for the time in question when Trump was running for office, the publication lost out on scoops with no clear payoff — a sin worse than ethical violations for some former tabloid reporters.
Alan Duke, who spent 26 years at CNN and now runs a company that provides fact-checking services for social media platforms, spent five months at National Enquirer in late 2014 and early 2015 between those two jobs.
“I thought it would be interesting to see how they worked. It was sort of like a master’s education in tabloid journalism,” he said. “There was a very definite pattern of what they were interested in and what they were and let’s just say I wasn’t impressed with their news judgement.”
Pecker and his deputy, Dylan Howard, assigned Duke to cover Jeffrey Epstein, but Duke was surprised when they turned down stories about Trump’s dealings with the disgraced financier, instead wanting him to focus on Epstein and Bill Clinton, as the former president’s wife, Hillary, prepared to run for president.
The so-called catch-and-kill operations were particularly impactful, he said, because, given the publication’s reputation, nothing they printed would be fully taken seriously. “I realized that what they didn’t publish maybe had more impact that what they did publish,” Duke said.
Lachlan Cartwright, a former top editor at the Enquirer under Pecker who is now covering the trail for the Hollywood Reporter, has said he was kept in the dark about Pecker’s agreement with Trump and could not understand why he and his reporters were were bending over backwards to protect the then-GOP candidate.
“It’s been cathartic hearing this aired in court because this is what I whispered to friends late at night in bars, saying, ‘Hey, there’s something going on here. There’s something more than just a series of hit pieces [on Trump’s opponents]. I think there might be sort of an agreement in place here,” he said in a Boston Public Radio interview this week. “But I had nothing to go off, I had no hard proof. And my friends would say, ‘Lachlan, you need to chill out. You need to stop drinking. You’re turning into a conspiracy theorist.’ And now I’m hearing it in court, in testimony, from David Pecker, and it’s confirming everything that I had thought in real time but just had no way to prove.”
Those pulled punches seem to have hurt the Enquirer, which has not broken a major national story in years as its circulation has fallen. Newer and more agile publications like TMZ have taken over the mantle of celebrity scoop machines, even when it means paying a “tip fee” to sources.
“That will be David Pecker’s legacy,” Cartwright said. “Whatever sort of credibility it had was totally damaged by what happened in court this week.”
Some worry that mainstream outlets will be collateral damage too, even though mainstream outlets would never tolerate even a fraction of the kind of behavior Pecker described. Trump and his allies have falsely accused mainstream news outlets of doing exactly what Pecker admitted he did for Trump, and Trump’s lawyers in court argued — inaccurately — that Pecker described standard journalism practices.
But Roberts, the professor and journalism ethicist, said it’s critical for journalists to call out other journalists who break the rules and undermine the credibility of the entire industry, even if highlighting bad behavior might make the industry look bad in the short term.
“We have to do a better job of explaining what the real rules of journalism are for those who practice it ethically,” he said. “Journalism is about the only industry or institution where the code of ethics not only encourages but outright requires people to publicly call out peers who are practicing bad journalism.”
