"It suddenly hit me. That’s what people want to see. That’s what I’ll give them, blood and gore."

Said Generoso Pope, Jr., the founder of The National Enquirer, who had begun the newspaper as "a serious, upscale weekly," but "had an epiphany one day when he found himself gazing at a particularly gruesome traffic accident, and noticed how many other people had also stopped to stare."

He's quoted in a New Yorker article by Jeffrey Toobin that has a title — "The National Enquirer’s Fervor for Trump/The tabloid is defined by its predatory spirit. Why has it embraced the President with such sycophantic zeal?" — that makes it seem pretty blood-and-gore — metaphorically, anyway. But it turns out to be more of a — how you say? — nothingburger.

I did though enjoy reading about the early history of the paper. I remember stealing glimpses of The Enquirer at newsstands back in the mid-60s, when it was considered too evil for a decent person to look at. As The New Yorker puts it:

In the fifties and sixties, the [blood and gore] formula was a resounding success. With headlines like “mom boiled her baby and ate her” and photographs of purported freaks of nature, such as two-headed babies, circulation soared to more than a million. 

I can still remember getting drawn into the story of a murderer who cut up a body and put the head in some kind of box and threw a foot out the window. There was a photograph of a severed foot. Was it still wearing the cut-off end of a nylon stocking? 

Pope had a second epiphany in the late 60s which was to sell the paper at the supermarket checkout display.

This required him to scale back the gore (which was unacceptable to the markets) and amp up the celebrity coverage. The transformation proved a boon to business. So did a television campaign featuring the catchphrase “Enquiring minds want to know.”

The grisly gunk was gone, and we got the insane, cheerful message that we were sorta intellectual — "enquiring" — to want to know pointless crap about celebrities:



Those were simpler times, back when Princess Di was blasting heartless Fergie for inadequate baby care. Today, the Enquirer is run by David Pecker, and most of Toobin's article is about Pecker, who is friends with Donald Trump, but Toobin didn't dig up anything shocking about the Pecker-n-Trump bromance, so I left the table still hungry.

Fortunately, The National Enquirer popped into the news today: "Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough’s Extortion Claim Against Donald Trump and the National Enquirer." That too is by Toobin in The New Yorker. Trump used extortion against Mika and Joe??

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have just caused a sensation by claiming, in effect, that they were extorted by Donald Trump and the National Enquirer. According to their op-ed in the Washington Post, White House staffers told them that the tabloid would run damaging stories about them unless they could persuade the President to intervene.

At that link to the WaPo op-ed, the word "extortion" is not used. It just says:

This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas.

Why would White House staffers be "desperate" to save Mika and Joe from a negative article? And where's the "extortion"? Extortion is a legal term. It is the actual or threatened use of "force, violence, or fear" to obtain property from someone. I think Toobin's idea is that the threat and what was to be extorted with the threat were both press coverage: Trump was trying to get good coverage from Joe and Mika by threatening them with bad coverage from The Enquirer.

But in Mika and Joe's telling, it was only Trump's staffers urging them to get Trump to intercede with the third party — The Enquirer — that was threatening to harm them. But it takes another few leaps to get to the idea that The Enquirer was in cahoots with Trump, cooking up a negative story against Mika and Joe to work as a threat that would bring them begging to Trump and that if they had done so, Trump would have extracted from them a commitment to give him good coverage on their show.

As Toobin puts it:

[I]t’s certainly possible that there was some connection between the Enquirer story about Scarborough and Brzezinski and Trump’s quest for favorable coverage from “Morning Joe.” Bizarrely enough, Trump’s most recent tweet suggests that he served as the middleman between the anchors and the magazine, though he denies that he did ultimately intervene.

The recent Trump tweet is: "Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show."

What a screwy mess! I attempted to watch "Morning Joe" today, but it was so dumb and slow-moving I couldn't put up with it. In the little I saw, I was mostly fascinated by the visual: Mika and Joe looked incredibly glum, positively morose. What's the problem? Why aren't they happy that they got under the President's skin and have everyone talking about them? How can it hurt? Is it just that people are motivated to dig up the terrible story that The Enquirer in fact published about them earlier this month? Or is there something more to this — some trap Trump has set with his oddball tweet about Mika's "bleeding badly from a face-lift"?

Everybody stopped to stare. That’s what people want to see. That’s what I’ll give them, blood and gore.