David Pecker is the former Chairman of American Media (AMI) and Publisher of the National Enquirer:
He’s critically involved in the Trump “hush money” trial.
I’m not a young man, but I’ve struggled to stay sober at the mere mention of the name, “Pecker” in the context of this trial. I think others have, too.
So – use it or not – here’s The Pecker Thread. I’m paging @Aspenglow so she’s aware it exists, and on the off chance she’s bored enough to shift a few posts from that thread to this one.
I would like to state for the record that the “thrust” double entendre in my post above was entirely inadvertent and I didn’t notice it until I went back to re-read.
If it had been deliberate, I would have said the prosecution’s thrust with Pecker had penetrated more deeply than expected. I probably would also have said that the defense’s attempts to lick Pecker regarding his timelines and terminology had failed to produce much of a result.
Can someone explain to me what the point is of the supermarket tabloids? If it was just celebrity gossip, I don’t really care much about the private lives of famous folk, but to each their own, and there’s already People and Hello! and a zillion other lifestyle magazines to fill that need. But the tabs seem to exist with the tacit understanding that they’re spinning falsehoods. But it’s not even satire. Spy Magazine (R.I.P.) is one thing, but there’s no punchline to anything spewed by the Enquirer or the Star. I know the World Weekly News (does that still publish?) with its alien abductions and Batboy sightings is even more openly fictional, but once again, there doesn’t seem to be any actual satirical intent. I once got as a joke gift, a collection of the “Ed Anger” columns from the WWN, and they just seemed like red state ravings that are barely different from OAN’s or Newsmax’s today.
It’s terrifying to me that these things have existed for so many decades based on a business model of “exaggerate or speculate or make shit up” without an actual payoff.
When you’ve read one did you notice how short the stories are, and the primary focus is on scandals and photos? The text rarely if ever needs to be continued on another page, and if so the continuation is only like one or two more sentences stuck in the back with the diet pill ads.
Essentially it’s “news” for the lazy and willfully uninformed, and their writers level of journalistic integrity is commensurate with that format. I wouldn’t be shocked if the “writing” is being done entirely by AI now.
One of CNN’s legal analysts, this morning, mentioned that – because one has been helpful to the Defense and the other is expected TO be helpful to the Defense – that there’s “no reason to come at Pecker hard and there will be no reason to come at Stormy Daniels hard.”
I’m 65 years old, and my paternal grandmother believed every word printed in the enquirer and all of those papers like it. I like to think people don’t anymore, but I’m not that naive.
