Harvey Weinstein wasn’t the only suspect investor to stump up funds for Radar. Jeffrey Epstein whipped out his chequebook too. But what possible reason could a notoriously secretive billionaire with myriad ties to high society and a rumoured penchant for sex with young girls have for wanting to own a stake in a celebrity gossip magazine?
Of all the strange contortions involved in trying to rationalise Donald Trump’s most recent racist tirade, one of the strangest is the idea that Trump is actually making an extremely smart PR move. Why have we all become so obsessed with these Dead Cat tactics? And why do we see them everywhere we look?
With Michael Cohen headed to the Big House and Roger Stone now in cuffs, we thought it was high time we revisited our series on the National Enquirer to catch up with some of our old favourites and see how they’re all getting on. Here’s three more tales of tawdry tabloid gossip that have somehow turned into internationally significant affairs…
InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has a long and inglorious history of branding school shootings as staged hoaxes – but this time around the view that the kids at the centre of it are deep state stooges isn’t just a crazed fringe opinion. It’s started going mainstream…
NBC was all but ready to cancel The Apprentice in 2007, but the Writers Guild strike of the same year gave NBC boss Jeff Zucker pause for thought. Cancelling a cheap, script-free reality show in advance of a multi-million dollar strike? It must have felt like a no-brainer to recommission it – but little did Zucker know that, in doing so, he was creating a monster…
When things are running smoothly you may not feel that Hollywood has much of an effect on your life. But when it’s put on hold, terrible things can happen. Thirty years after the 1988 writers’ strike began – and ten years after the 2007 one ended – we unpick the peculiar and profound effect that the Writers Guild of America has inadvertently had on media, pop culture and international politics.
Stormy Daniels appeared on Jimmy Kimmel this week, shortly after President Trump’s State Of The Union address, to field questions about whether or not she shagged him during Shark Week. You’d have thought that the $130,000 non-disclosure agreement she supposedly signed would have made an interview like that a little tricky – but apparently not. How is she doing it? We have some theories.
Michael Wolff’s explosive new book on the Trump White House, Fire And Fury, has been making headlines for its rip-roaring details. But as we learned from that David Cameron pigfucking memoir a few years ago, these things are usually sprinkled with a few tabloid tricks to make things sound extra juicy.
Russian interference. Piss-tape kompromat. Montenegrin fake news factories. Shadowy billionaires on both sides of the political divide trying to ignite a culture war. There’s been one hell of an elaborate backstory contrived to explain the shock result of the 2016 US election, but a look through the lens of the National Enquirer suggests that some of it may have been a little more straightforward.
The criminal underworld of New York, the closed corridors of Washington, the magazine industry of Florida. They’re all very interesting – no question about that – but these aren’t regular people we’ve been talking about here. For the National Enquirer to cut any sway with millions of average American Joes, things would have to change. They’d have to go corporate. Which is where American Media, Inc. comes into play.