Or pseudo-newspaper.
American Media Inc. is actively seeking to sell off the National Enquirer, according to three people familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The decision to sell came after the hedge fund manager whose firm controls American Media became “disgusted” with the Enquirer’s reporting tactics, according to one of these people.
American Media has been under intense pressure because of the Enquirer’s efforts to tilt the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, who is a longtime friend of American Media’s president and CEO, David Pecker. Pecker and his supermarket tabloid have also been embroiled in recent months in an unusually public feud with Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.
In August, just as AMI and two of its top officers were finalizing a non-prosecution agreement with federal investigators, the company’s board of directors started looking for ways to unload the tabloid business “because they didn’t want to deal with hassles like this anymore,” another person said.
The company was also facing financial difficulty.
[...]
American Media was “very, very leveraged” and repeatedly found itself “on the brink,” Pecker told the Toronto Star in 2016.
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The tabloid represents a corner of the media landscape virtually ignored by coastal elites, and it has long provided fervently positive coverage of Donald Trump, along with other celebrities known inside the Enquirer newsroom as “friends of Pecker.”
And Trump returned the praise. He once tweeted that Pecker should run Time magazine; he also said that the Enquirer deserved to win the Pulitzer Prize.
WaPo
No surprise there. He thinks HE should get a Nobel Prize.
The imminent sale removes the Enquirer from Pecker’s control and puts some separation between the tabloid and recent scandals stemming, in part, from Pecker’s close relationship with Trump.
Will the buyer get the rights to that alleged safe full of blackmail material?
n January, Pecker and the Enquirer devoted the cover and 12 pages of its Jan. 28 edition to an exposé of Bezos’s affair with Lauren Sanchez, former host of Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance.”
Bezos later wrote a blog post accusing AMI of trying to blackmail him by threatening to publish explicit photos of the billionaire if he didn’t publicly state that he had no basis for suggesting that the Enquirer’s exposé was politically motivated. The Bezos story helped seal the Enquirer’s fate.
[...]
The Bezos reporting also threatened to renew legal scrutiny on the company. Federal prosecutors reviewed accusations made by Bezos to determine if American Media may have violated the terms of a non-prosecution agreement, according to people familiar with the matter.
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Bezos’s security consultant, Gavin de Becker, alleged in an opinion piece on the Daily Beast last month that AMI was “in league with a foreign nation that’s been actively trying to harm American citizens and companies, including the owner of the Washington Post.” De Becker said his “investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information.”
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The security consultant said that the Saudi government “has been intent on harming Jeff Bezos since last October, when The Post began its relentless coverage of” the killing of its editorial contributor Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul.
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American Media is also exploring the sale of two other tabloids, the Globe and National Examiner.
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