Article:
What do you call a movie about a giant medical conglomerate that sells human organs on the installment plan — and, if the patients don’t pay, sends a repo man to collect, literally, the company’s pound of flesh?

 Well, back in 2008, you called it “Repo! The Genetic Opera.” And if you were smart you avoided it.

 Now, in 2010, you call it “Repo Men.”

 And if you’re very smart, you still avoid it.

 Repo Men

 (R) Universal (111 min.)

 Directed by Miguel Sapochnik. With Jude Law, Forest Whitaker. Now playing in New Jersey.

 Stephen Whitty's rating: One star

 Ratings note: The film contains graphic gore, violence and nudity.

 The new, strangely familiar (yet supposedly original) film doesn’t share much more with the older cult horror. For one thing, it doesn’t have any opera. For another, it doesn’t star Paris Hilton.

 So, it’s got that going for it.

 But it’s just as ugly and revolting as the other movie and just as clueless. The first picture thought it was an outrageous satire. This one thinks it’s sardonic adult sci-fi. They’re both wrong. And they’re both awful.

 There’s not much to the story beyond the basic situation. Remy and Jake are a couple of strong-arm guys who drive around some slightly futuristic landscape, hunting down medical deadbeats. And when they find one, out come their scalpels.

 Until the people really are deadbeats.

 Unless you’ve already fallen asleep — which is probably the best way to get through “Repo Men” — you know what’s coming next: Remy is going to have his own, um, change of heart and reconsider his life’s work. And company man Jake is going to go after him.

 Great. Can we go home now?

 If only. Because at this point we have more than an hour of tedious torture to come, including three separate scenes of an artificial kneecap being removed, endless stabbings and so many sprays of arterial blood that the sets soon look like Jackson Pollock paintings.

 As Remy, Jude Law looks as if he has ringworm and is trying very hard to remember when he made movies like “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” As Jake, Forest Whitaker amiably confirms that, no, there is absolutely nothing he will not do.

 There are a few moments of pleasure, thanks to Liev Schreiber as the repo men’s boss. Schreiber, clearly, knows this is offal; he also knows that, if he wants to support his family, even hit Broadway plays sometimes aren’t enough.

 But he’s a pro, so even as he earns his paycheck, he does so with some style and wit.

 Those are certainly rare commodities in this movie, which sacrifices subtlety for the obvious, and originality for the tried-and-true — or, more often, the tried-and-trite. And a last-minute, pull-the-rug-out ending, far from being significant, is only the last in a long line of copouts.

 Full of over-the-top violence and misogynist caricatures (including a nagging wife so horrendous even her own son Tasers her), it’s a film to be endured more than experienced. It succeeds on one level though, even in spite of itself: It makes at least one clear-cut case for repossession.

 Taking back the union cards of everyone involved.

  ||||| Repo Men

 March 17, 2010

 Cast & Credits Remy Jude Law

 Jake Forest Whitaker

 Frank Liev Schreiber

 Beth Alice Braga

 Carol Carice van Houten

 Peter Chandler Canterbury

 Ray Joe Pingue

 Universal Pictures presents a film directed by Miguel Sapochnik. Written by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner, based on Garcia's novel The Repossession Mambo. Running time: 111 minutes. Rated R (for strong bloody violence, grisly images, language and some sexuality/nudity).

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 "Repo Men" makes sci-fi's strongest possible case for universal health care. In a world of the near future, where they still drive current cars, a giant corporation named the Union will provide you with a human heart, kidney, liver or other organ. Let's say a pancreas costs you, oh, say $312,000. No, it's not covered by insurance, but the sales guy says, "You owe it to yourself and your family." For a guy in need of a pancreas, this is an eloquent argument. Interest rates are around 19 percent.

 Now let's say you can't make the payments. If you fall behind more than three months, they send around a Repo Man who shoots you with a stun gun, slices open your body, reaches in and repossesses the organ. To be sure, he puts on latex gloves first. I don't believe the gun kills you, but after they leave you on the floor with an organ missing, your prognosis is poor.

 Let's say you were conscious during such a procedure. Would it hurt? You bet. At one point in the film, our heroes Remy and Beth (Jude Law and Alice Braga) decide the only way to outwit the company's computer is to repossess themselves. He has a donor heart, and as for Beth, her heart is her own, but is surrounded by guest organs. They don't actually carve themselves open and remove the organs. No, that would be fatal. But they have to reach inside each other with a bar-code scanner and scan them in. As Remy carves into his chest with a big old knife, you oughta see the way his fist clenches and how he grits his teeth. He's thinking, I wish I had the public option.

 I don't know if the makers of this film intended it as a comedy. A preview audience regarded it with polite silence, and left the theater in an orderly fashion. There are chases and shootouts, of course, and a standard overwrought thriller soundtrack, with the percussion guy hammering on cymbals and a big bass drum. Even then, you wonder.

 Remy and Beth find themselves locked in a corridor with a dozen guys from the evil corporation, who are well armed. They dodge the bullets and wham some guys with karate, and then Remy pauses, strips off his shirt, reveals his bare (pre-repo) chest and is wearing kinky leather pants with buckles. From scabbards in the back, he withdraws two long knives that help explain why he wasn't seated earlier in the scene. He slices some other guys. Then he shouts "hacksaw!" to Beth, and she slides it to him on the floor, and he whirls around and decapitates three guys, it looked like, although it happened real fast.

 What are people supposed to think? Is this an action scene, or satire? Does it make any difference? I dunno. I know the actors play everything with deep, earnest seriousness. The head of the Union corporation is Frank (Liev Schreiber), who demands complete dedication from his repo men and is humorously not humorous. Maybe he's not the head of the whole Union, but only their immediate boss. The Union's headquarters building is maybe 100 stories high, and Remy stumbles into a room with guys in white suits working at tables that stretch farther than a football field.

 There are enough props in this movie to clean out the Organ Department at Moo & Oink's. When I say they're up to their elbows in blood, I mean it. This work takes its toll. Remy's friend at work is a repo man named Jake, played by Forest Whitaker. Like most Forest Whitaker characters and Whitaker himself, he is a warm, nice man. I noticed for the second time in a week (after "Our Family Wedding") that Whitaker has lost a lot of weight and looks great. I hope the extra pounds weren't repo'ed. ||||| Film Reviews

 Repo Men -- Film Review

 "Repo Men"

 Bottom Line: Let the 2010 Razzies race begin!

 The future looks awfully predictable (underscore "awfully") in "Repo Men," a blood-soaked, derivative and increasingly ridiculous sci-fi thriller in which Jude Law and Forest Whitaker play a pair of hotshot repossession agents who forcefully remove artificial organs from those who fall behind on their payments.Comprising reclaimed bits from "Blade Runner," "A Clockwork Orange" and "Children of Men" and glibly served up with hyper Guy Ritchie attitude by first-time feature director Miguel Sapochnik, the resulting in-your-face mess never knows what it wants to be when it grows up.Those identity issues are destined to take their toll when it comes to tracking down an audience this weekend.When you think clinically violent, muscular, futuristic action vehicles, the nominally thoughtful likes of Law, Whitaker and Liev Schreiber don't readily spring to mind, and that should pose a problem where a targeted young-male demo is concerned.Based on the cautionary tale "Repossession Mambo" by Eric Garcia ("Matchstick Men") and set in a near future where society's quest for eternal youth has come with a price, "Repo Men" revolves around the daily activities of Law's Remy and Forest's Jake on behalf of their employer, an unscrupulous medical technology firm known as the Union.Their job description requires them to track down those in serious arrears and methodically extract those various, leased-to-own synthetic body parts and report back to the head office and their callous, soft-spoken boss (Schreiber).But when an ill-fated repo assignment results in Remy being outfitted with a top-of-the-line Jarvik ticker, he undergoes a, uh, change of heart, and, falling behind in his own payments, finds himself being chased down by his former partner.The film's smug twists and turns might have been more entertaining if one hadn't been able to see any of them coming, but the script, penned by Garcia and Garrett Lerner ("House M.D.") and especially Sapochnik's unsubtle direction signals everything a century in advance.Meanwhile, in front of the cameras, though Law seems to be having fun transformed into a mean, buff fighting machine, one just can't buy him as a kick-ass, Jason Statham-style tough guy when the contrived plotting demands it.Although Whitaker and Schreiber are only slightly less unconvincing, others, including Brazil's Alice Braga ("City of God") and the Netherlands' Carice van Houten ("Black Book"), appear uncomfortable in their English-speaking roles.Shot extensively in Toronto, the film gets decent futuristic value for its production-design buck, courtesy of David Sandefur ("Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D") and visual effects supervisor Aaron Weintraub ("Remember Me"). ||||| Focus Features Ben Stiller as the title character in 'Greenberg.'

 One of the most touching lines in Noah Baumbach's remarkable "Greenberg" is an announcement by the wistful young heroine, Florence Marr: "I've gotta stop doing things just because they feel good."

 Good? There's no evidence that Florence—a portrait of heartbreaking delicacy by Greta Gerwig—feels truly good about anything. She feels bad about herself, and properly anxious about an emerging love affair with Roger Greenberg, a middle-aging misanthrope played with intransigent brilliance by Ben Stiller. Everything's relative, of course. Florence is joyous compared to Roger, a former musician whose anger at the world is matched only by his narcissism. Yet the wonder of the film is how good it makes us feel. "Greenberg" scintillates with intelligence, razor's-edge humor and austere empathy for its struggling lovers.

 Watch a clip from the movie "Greenberg," starring Ben Stiller, Juno Temple, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rhys Ifans; directed by Noah Baumbach, of "The Squid and the Whale." Video courtesy of Focus Features.

 This is a new departure for Mr. Baumbach, even though he might seem to be working the same territory of neurotic dysfunction and mutual need that he explored, sometimes relentlessly, in "The Squid and the Whale" and "Margot at the Wedding." What's new is the combination of warmth and reserve. The film is extremely entertaining—a real romance, however tortured it may be—yet tough-minded and confidently self-contained.

 The setting is Los Angeles, whose physical and spiritual sprawl has been rendered with eerie accuracy. Fittingly, the first extended sequence takes place in a car, with Florence behind the wheel and the camera fixed on her pretty face. (Harris Savides did the fine cinematography.) "You gonna let me in?" she asks nervously. She's alone, running errands, so the question is clearly directed at another driver in another lane. But it's also the anthem of her needy psyche and her lonely life. She works as a personal assistant to Phillip Greenberg (Chris Messina), who lives with his wife and kids in the Hollywood Hills. When the family goes off on vacation to Vietnam, Florence stays behind to take care of their German shepherd, Mahler, and to provide whatever support may be needed for Phillip's brother, Roger, newly arrived from New York via a mental institution that was treating him for depression.

 Of the ménage à trois that forms in the family's absence, Mahler proves to be the most stable member, and even he comes down with an autoimmune disease that lands him at the vet's. "Greenberg" is a love story, yes, but it's also a tale of two people adrift in separate currents, constantly sinking and bobbing to the surface like synchro swimmers out of sync. Florence's judgment is dreadful when it comes to men in general, and potentially disastrous when it comes to this one. She can't understand why Roger lets her into his life, then brutally ejects her, not just once but repeatedly. "You like me a lot more than you think you do," she tells him after one rebuff. Although she's right, Florence is a slow learner who takes a long time to recall a cautionary phrase—"hurt people hurt people"—that she picked up along her painful way.

 Ms. Gerwig's performance is extraordinary—notably nuanced, commandingly tender. But the movie's title is "Greenberg," not "Marr," and Mr. Stiller commands a kind of awe in his refusal to clothe the naked hostility of a character who suffers from the autoimmune disease of self-loathing. ("Life is wasted on people," the hero says at one point.) An ardent arsonist, he has burned most of the bridges that once connected him to friends and a flourishing career. Much of the time Roger looks either haunted or absent, not a black hole but a gray one.

 Focus Features Greta Gerwig plays Greenberg's love interest.

 Rhys Ifans plays Ivan, a former band mate whom Roger seeks out after arriving in L.A. Ivan comes on quietly, a sweet-spirited seeker who has found his way after losing it, but he finally gets his own turn at eloquent anger and Mr. Ifans rises powerfully to the occasion. Mr. Baumbach's wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh (she collaborated with him on the story and served as producer) is attractive and understated as Beth, Roger's old flame.

 A movie with an off-putting hero represents a huge risk. Messrs. Baumbach and Stiller made a bet that we would stay with Roger, and the film, until things took a turn for the better. The bet pays off beautifully—not because the hero is revealed to be nice, but because he reveals himself to be human in a series of startling rages and astonishing monologues that lead to a pleasing climax (and an inspired shot of a giant red balloon-man, arms and legs flapping wildly.) Roger delivers one monologue to Florence's phone mail, and another to a bunch of heedless twenty-something kids at a party. It's a poignant expression of mortality by a man who's finally growing into his life.

 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'

 Music Box Films Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist in 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.'

 A stylish thriller with real complexity, people with interesting faces, a sensational actress cast as an ambisexual Goth hacker heroine—the news about "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is nothing but good. Niels Arden Oplev directed this first of three feature films, in Swedish with English subtitles, to be adapted from the widely admired Millennium Trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson. The crime at the center of the mystery is the coldest of cases in a very cold climate. Forty years ago, a young woman named Harriet Vanger vanished during the course of a family gathering on a private island. Now her uncle, obsessed with her loss, has hired a disgraced journalist as his private detective, and instructed him to concentrate on the Vanger family, with its history of Fascist leanings and general nastiness.

 Scene: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 1:16 Watch a scene from "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," a Swedish thriller based on the bestselling novel by the late Stieg Larsson. Video courtesy of Music Box Films.

 Michael Nyqvist plays the journalist, Mikael Blomkvist. He's very good, a sophisticated actor who's thoroughly comfortable in the role of an urban sophisticate. But all eyes, including his, are on Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander, the tattooed—and in at least two ways tortured—young woman who hacks into Mikael's life and becomes his uninvited co-investigator.

 Lisbeth is a mystery within the mystery. "How did you turn out this way?" the journalist asks her, as well he might. The clues to that question are shockingly persuasive but inevitably incomplete. The mystery of what happened to Harriet Vanger is much more abstract, since she vanished so long ago, but the techniques involved in solving it are intriguing, a computer-age update of such classic films as "Blowup" (teasing out information from photographs), "The Conversation" and "Blow Out" (doing the same with sound recordings). And Mikael and Lisbeth are a matchlessly mismatched couple who complement each other all the same in what amounts to intimate file-sharing.

 'The Art of the Steal'

 IFC Films Albert C. barnes with his dog Fidèle in 'The Art of the Steal.'

 After Don Argott's "The Art of the Steal" played the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival last fall, the Journal assigned a Philadelphia cultural reporter, Julia Klein, to write an article about the documentary, which deals with the bitter cultural battle that ensued when the Barnes Foundation decided to move its peerless collection of post-Impressionist paintings from its gallery in suburban Merion, Pa. to downtown Philadelphia. Now that the film is in commercial release, I'll say only that Ms. Klein judged it to be a skillful though far from impartial summary of a complex subject, while I found it fascinating for a number of reasons, balanced reporting not among them.

 The complexity flows from the nature of the conflict, which pitted partisans of the Barnes credo—maintaining the collection as a private adjunct to the foundation's educational function—against civic, political and philanthropic advocates of making the paintings available to the largest number of people. (The film comes down firmly on the side of Barnes loyalists.) And though the final decision to move the collection has been made, the bitterness still flows from the question of whether that decision violated provisions of the trust that established the foundation. (The film makes a vigorous case for the notion that it did.) What "The Art of the Steal" documents most dramatically is the irresistible pull of irreplaceable art.

 'Repo Men'

 All too often in studio films—especially rotten ones like Universal's "Repo Men"—you can hear the studio notes. They're the needless explanations inserted into scripts at the insistence of production executives who fear that filmgoers won't be able to understand what's going on without help. "The thing is," Jude Law's character muses helpfully in this film, "I have an artificial heart, and she has an artificial everything else. It's just two parts of the same puzzle. Maybe it's not just her I'm trying to save." The real puzzle is how a major studio could put its name on such a heartless piece of hack work.

 Watch a clip from the movie "Repo Men," a science-fiction thriller starring Jude Law. Video courtesy of Universal.

 "Repo Men" shouldn't be confused with Alex Cox's 1984 classic "Repo Man," to which it bears no resemblance, or "Repo! The Genetic Opera," a bizarre 2008 flop from which it repossessed a premise and plenty more. In a sci-fi future when organ replacements are routine and financed like cars, Mr. Law's Remy, a repo man for a transplant company called The Union, retrieves organs—violently and graphically—from customers who have fallen behind in their payments. Until, that is, he must go into hock for a new ticker of his own.

 The film starts out as a cheerfully lurid buddy picture, with Forest Whitaker as Jake, Remy's dim-bulb partner in disorganization. Enrique Chediak's cinematography does right by David Sandefur's handsome production design. And authentic looniness looms when Remy and Beth (Alice Braga), the extensively transplanted and retrofitted girl he is trying to save, perform grisly extirpations on one another. Yet "Repo Men" is basically a soulless slasher flick, and one that demeans its gifted performers. The cast includes Carice van Houten in a small, drab role as Remy's wife. You'd never guess she's the dazzling Dutch actress who starred as the heart and soul of Paul Verhoeven's World War II thriller "Black Book."

 Note to studio: get a soul transplant.

 Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com |||||Summary:

– Repo Men, a sci-fi thriller about men who repossess organs, is probably supposed to be biting commentary on divisive issues like health care, but critics are united in shouting it down: “Let the 2010 Razzies race begin!” declares Michael Rechtshaffen of The Hollywood Reporter. “Blood soaked, derivative and increasingly ridiculous,” Repo Men is an “in-your-face mess that never knows what it wants to be when it grows up” and telegraphs its plot twists “a century in advance." On paper, the cast—Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Liev Schreiber—looks great, but this “heartless piece of hack work” demeans them, writes Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal. “Note to studio: get a soul transplant.” The movie “sacrifices subtlety for the obvious, and originality for the tried-and-true—or, more often, the tried-and-trite,” writes Stephen Whitty of the Star-Ledger. “It’s a film to be endured more than experienced.” Roger Ebert can’t figure out if the film’s supposed to be a comedy. When Law decapitates three people with one swing of a hacksaw, he writes for the Chicago Sun-Times, “what are people supposed to think? Is this an action scene, or satire? Does it make any difference?”


Summarize this article:

MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski Friday accused the White House of threatening them with a negative tabloid story as a way to extract an apology for their tough comments on President Donald Trump.

 In an op-ed article in the Washington Post, and then in a live appearance on "Morning Joe," the couple said top White House officials warned them earlier this year that the National Enquirer was planning an exposé about their relationship, and urged them to beg Trump to get the paper to back off.

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 The accusation came a day after Trump attacked the newly engaged couple on Twitter. Scarborough and Brzezinski were friendly with Trump in the early months of his candidacy, and had him on their show often. Scarborough and Brzezinski told Vanity Fair that when they visited the White House just after Trump's inauguration, the president suggested he could host their wedding, or officiate.

 But that warmness has evaporated, as Scarborough and Brzezinski have stepped up their criticism of him, and Trump has lobbed back invective.

 "The president and his relationship with the media is now starting to resemble 'The Jerry Springer Show' at its worst, with taunts and insults and name calling," said Jonathan Marshall, a professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. While bashing journalists works well with his base of supporters, "I don't think it's good for his presidency in the long term or the country in the long term."

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 Scarborough said on "Morning Joe" that he got calls from "three people at the very top of the administration" pointing out that Trump was friends with "the guy that runs the National Enquirer."

 It was an apparent reference to David Pecker, the chief executive of American Media, Inc., which publishes the Enquirer. Pecker is a longtime friend of Trump, and their friendship was the subject of a New Yorker article this week.

 The Enquirer has been reliably pro-Trump. It helped Trump launch his campaign by running personal essays about him. It published critical articles about his rivals, including an attempt to link Sen. Ted Cruz's father to John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. And it often portrayed President Trump as heroic with headlines such as “TRUMP’S PROFILE IS IDEAL FOR THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF, SAY TOP EXPERTS” and "TRUMP DECLARES WAR ON DICTATORS!”

 Scarborough, describing his conversations with the White House aides, continued: "And they said, if you call the president up and you apologize for your coverage, then he will pick up the phone and basically spike the story."

 Scarborough and Brzezinski moderate a town hall during the presidential primaries with Trump in Charleston, South Carolina on Feb. 17, 2016. Mark Peterson/Redux / Redux for NBC News file

 Prior to the reporters' calls, Brzezinski said, the Enquirer had been phoning her teenage daughters and friends for comment on the story, citing her ex-husband as a source. Scarborough added that he'd encountered a man in a van outside her home, and believed the man was a reporter staking her out.

 Scarborough and Brzezinski said they refused to make calls to Trump about the story.

 But Trump tweeted after the segment that Scarborough actually had called him to spike the story, and he refused.

 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 — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017

 Scarborough responded by calling Trump a liar. "I have texts from your top aides and phone records," Scarborough tweeted.

 Yet another lie. I have texts from your top aides and phone records. Also, those records show I haven't spoken with you in many months. https://t.co/TZWiElo6Gs — Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) June 30, 2017

 The story ran in the Enquirer on June 2 with the headline, "Joe & Mike: TV Couple's Sleazy Cheating Scandal."

 The Enquirer tweeted out the story after Friday's "Morning Joe" segment and said later on its website that it wasn't involved in any discussions between the White House and the television personalities.

 Related: ‘Morning Joe’ Hosts Respond to Trump’s Tweets: ‘We’re OK. The Country’s Not’

 "At the beginning of June, we accurately reported a story that recounted the relationship between Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the truth of which is not in dispute," Dylan Howard, chief content officer at American Media, Inc., said in a statement.

 "At no time did we threaten either Joe or Mika or their children in connection with our reporting on the story. We have no knowledge of any discussions between the White House and Joe and Mika about our story, and absolutely no involvement in those discussions," Howard said.

 The spat is part of a pattern by Trump to undermine the media, which could be dangerous, said Marvin Kalb, a former reporter for NBC News, who researches the impact of media on public policy and politics at The Brookings Institution.

 "The thing that is upsetting to a lot of people who care about the way this country works is the time the president puts into an argument with an anchorman or woman would better be spent on health care or foreign affairs or what it is that the president said during the campaign ─ that many middle-class people need help," Kalb said. "Well, help them. This is your opportunity."

 Theodore Glasser, a communications professor at Stanford University, said it was "perfectly reasonable" for Scarborough and Brzezinski to harshly criticize Trump and for Trump to do the same to them, as long as it involves a discourse about issues, and an acknowledgment of the role of a free press in a democratic society.

 "But that’s not what he's doing," Glasser said. "He’s being mean and spiteful." ||||| Photo-Illustration: Daily Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

 As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump used his close alliance with the National Enquirer to attack his enemies. Now that he’s president, he’s continuing to benefit from the tabloid’s support.

 This morning in a Washington Post op-ed, Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski disclosed that White House officials offered to spike an Enquirer story about their romance if the pair apologized to Trump for the show’s critical coverage. In recent months, Scarborough and Brzezinski have questioned Trump’s mental state and fitness for office. They elaborated on the op-ed on MSNBC this morning. Morning Joe regular Donny Deutsch said it was “blackmail” for Trump to use a hit-piece in the Enquirer to extract an apology from media critics. Trump then tweeted a quasi-confirmation of the behind-the-scenes conversations, saying that Scarborough called to enlist his help to kill the story. Scarborough called Trump’s version a “lie,” tweeting that he never spoke to the president.

 According to three sources familiar with the private conversations, what happened was this: After the inauguration, Morning Joe’s coverage of Trump turned sharply negative. “This presidency is fake and failed,” Brzezinski said on March 6, for example. Around this time, Scarborough and Brzezinski found out the Enquirer was preparing a story about their affair. While Scarborough and Brzezinski’s relationship had been gossiped about in media circles for some time, it was not yet public, and the tabloid was going to report that they had left their spouses to be together.

 In mid-April, Scarborough texted with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner about the pending Enquirer story. Kushner told Scarborough that he would need to personally apologize to Trump in exchange for getting Enquirer owner David Pecker to stop the story. (A spokesperson for Kushner declined to comment.) Scarborough says he refused, and the Enquirer published the story in print on June 5, headlined “Morning Joe Sleazy Cheating Scandal!”

 The Morning Joe co-hosts decided to talk about the episode a day after Trump inaccurately tweeted that Brzezinski attended a New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” (A photo from that evening backs up Scarborough and Brzezinski’s denial of this.) While the Enquirer denies that Trump encouraged Pecker to investigate the MSNBC hosts, Trump himself has pushed the story publicly. Last August, he tweeted, “Some day, when things calm down, I’ll tell the real story of @JoeNBC and his very insecure long-time girlfriend, @morningmika. Two clowns!”

 In a statement, Enquirer editor Dylan Howard said: “We have no knowledge of any discussions between the White House and Joe and Mika about our story, and absolutely no involvement in those discussions.”

 Note: Gabriel Sherman is an NBC News/MSNBC contributor. ||||| At 6:56 A.M. on Friday morning, Mika Brzezinski was hustling down a fluorescent-lit hallway at 30 Rock, en route from the makeup room to the set of Morning Joe. Joe Scarborough, her co-host and recently unveiled fiancé, was trailing slightly behind her. The two anchors had intended on taking the day off in order to commence the July Fourth holiday a little early, but all planning had been thrown out the window some 24 hours earlier. On Thursday morning, of course, President Donald Trump had sent the news cycle into convulsions, and Washington into disarray, by tweeting that “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when she and “Psycho Joe” visited him at Mar-a-Lago around New Year’s Eve.

 The series of tweets immediately struck a nerve. Rival networks expressed their support for the anchors; a slew of Republican lawmakers, including Paul Ryan, Susan Collins, Ben Sasse, and Lisa Murkowski, spoke out against the tweet. Brzezinski responded, at first, by tweeting an image of the back of a box of Cheerios depicting a boy with small hands—a reference to Spy magazine, which famously called Trump a short-fingered vulgarian. (Graydon Carter, Spy’s co-founder, is the editor of Vanity Fair.) Subsequently, she and Scarborough composed an op-ed for The Washington Post to run Friday morning declaring that “America’s leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president. We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show.” Meanwhile, both decided to address the furor at the top of the 7 A.M. hour on Friday morning.

 As they walked to the set, the newsroom seemed to orbit around them. A huddled scrum of colleagues applauded Brzezinski as she entered the set. Katy Tur, the NBC correspondent who had appeared on the first hour of Morning Joe on Friday, asked Brzezinski if she could give her a hug. The panel awaiting them around the glass desk—including Willie Geist, Katty Kay, and Donny Deutsch—resounded with choruses of "you go, girls," jokes about a missed day off, and a smattering of hugs. As a gaggle of contributors, producers, and support staff gathered to watch what Brzezinski would say, one nearby P.R. person noted that she expected they would be on for seven or eight minutes.

 They stayed on for a little more than a half-hour, with no commercial breaks. “It’s unbelievably alarming that this president is so easily played,” Brzezinski said to the camera at one point. “He’s so easily played—by a cable news host. What is this saying to our allies? What is this saying to our enemies?” Scarborough echoed her concern. “We’re O.K. The country is not.”

 They shared a story about how top White House aides warned them that the National Enquirer, owned by Trump’s longtime friend David Pecker, would publish a negative story about them unless they called the president and asked him to get it killed. (The president later tweeted what appeared to be a confirmation. “He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no!” he wrote. Scarborough responded that this was “yet another lie.”)

 Afterward, they walked off set to more claps and made their way through high-fives and fist bumps to a small hair-washing room across the hallway. Brzezinski, in jeans and tennis shoes, perched on a makeup ledge in front of a wall of mirrors, and took a breath. It had been nearly 24 hours since the president thrust personal details about her—incorrect ones, she contends—into the national spotlight. She had a feeling that the jokes she had made on air on Thursday would “tweak” the president, but she was searching for a “moment of levity,” she said.

 She hadn’t seen the president’s tweets herself until she looked over at Geist on the set, who she said was looking at something on his phone and kind of angling it away from her. Her producer then told her in her ear to stay where she was; he needed to show her something.

 “I said, ‘Guys! What did he tweet?’ Willie showed me, and I started laughing, and said, ‘Shit. I kind of wanted to keep that to myself,’” she said, referring to the procedure she had undergone to tighten the skin under her neck. “I had a turkey neck. My mom told me to get it done,” she explained. “I was FaceTiming all my friends, telling them to get it done, that it wasn’t so bad.”

 She said that she had told Melania Trump about the procedure when the couple stopped by Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve. “The irony of it all is that Donald kept saying, ‘That’s incredible. You can’t even tell. Who did it? Who did it?’ He kept asking for the name of the doctor. He literally asked 10 times. ‘Is he down here? Who is he?’” Scarborough recalled. (A spokesman from the White House declined to comment.)

 In the wake of the president’s tweets, the co-hosts said their staff went quiet. “It was like they were at a funeral,” Scarborough said. “We realize we had to tell everyone we were fine with this, but they were all gone by the time we went out. They were spooked.”

 It wasn’t the first time the co-hosts and their staff had to react to being on the other end of the president’s ire. Last summer, he tweeted that Brzezinski was “a neurotic and not very bright mess!” and threatened to “tell the real story” about their relationship.

 Afterward, they said that the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, brokered a meeting with the four of them. Brzezinski said she explained that the tweet had caused a lot of hurt to her children and family. Trump, she said, apologized.

 “Jared said we should end the meeting right then and there, because it was one of the only times he had heard him apologize,” Scarborough said. (A White House spokesman had no comment about this meeting and the apology.)

 They are not holding their breath for a “sorry” this go-round. “We would take these insults seriously from anyone else,” Scarborough said. “We don’t from him, because, unfortunately, we believe he is in decline.” ||||| Every Wednesday afternoon, in a windowless conference room in an office building at the tip of lower Manhattan, David Pecker decides what will be on the cover of the following week’s National Enquirer. Pecker is the longtime chief executive of American Media, Inc., which owns most of the nation’s supermarket tabloids and gossip magazines, including the Star, the Globe, the Examiner, and OK!, as well as the flagship Enquirer. Pecker’s tabloids have few subscribers and minimal advertising. Virtually all their revenue comes from impulse purchases at the checkout counter. A successful Enquirer cover can drive sales fifteen per cent above the weekly average of three hundred and twenty-five thousand copies, and a lemon can hurt sales just as badly, so the choice of cover headlines and photographs represents a nearly existential challenge every week. Pecker started in the media business as an accountant, and he has attempted to impose a numbers-based rigor on the raucous world of tabloids. In the past decade, he has devised a proprietary database of the covers of all celebrity magazines, including those of his competitors. The “cover explorer,” as it’s known internally, tells A.M.I. executives how each cover sold in comparison with the magazine’s four- and thirteen-week averages. The explorer is indexed by celebrities and, uniquely, by words in the headlines. Pecker knows with some precision which stars sell (Kelly Ripa, Jennifer Aniston, Brad and Angelina, and, for the older generation, Dolly Parton and the Kennedys), and which phrases draw readers (headlines with the words “sad last days” and “six months to live”). To open a recent meeting, Pecker, who was calling in on speakerphone from Dallas, asked Dylan Howard, A.M.I.’s chief content officer, to review the competition’s covers from the previous week. Howard, an ebullient Australian, is thirty-five, and something of a tabloid prodigy. He made his name with a three-year quest to prove that the actor Charlie Sheen had contracted H.I.V. (which Sheen ultimately acknowledged), and now supervises celebrity coverage for Pecker’s empire. Shuffling through a stack of magazines in front of him, Howard pulled out Life & Style, which is owned by Bauer, a German conglomerate. The issue featured Jennifer Lopez on the cover, with a headline claiming that she was expecting a child with her boyfriend, Alex Rodriguez. “Her ‘miracle’ baby at 47!” the cover announced. Howard dismissed the story. “She’s forty-seven,” he said. “Of course she’s not pregnant.” But there was another reason for Howard’s disdain. “J. Lo doesn’t sell,” he said. For the forthcoming issue of the Enquirer, Howard presented a mockup of a cover on Megyn Kelly, who would be making her début as an NBC News correspondent the week that the issue went on sale. The headline read “What she’s hiding!,” which Pecker praised because the phrase had worked well on another coverline, “What Hillary’s Hiding!,” during the Presidential campaign. Bullet points under the Kelly headline promised revelations about plastic surgery and a “criminal past.” Pecker believes in constant market research, so the Enquirer conducts a rolling telephone poll in which it tests cover-story ideas, summarized in a sentence or two, on readers. Howard felt optimistic about the Kelly cover, because seventy-three per cent of respondents said that they would be interested in the story. “She got over seventy per cent, even without the benefit of seeing the cover image,” Howard said, referring to a high-school-yearbook photograph of Kelly with an eighties-style perm, which he felt would attract buyers. For the “skyboxes,” the block headlines above the cover logo, Howard proposed an unflattering recent photograph of the actress Eva Longoria, which had tested at sixty-eight per cent, under the headline “Packs on 40 pounds!” Howard explained, “We did ask the rep if she’s pregnant. Unfortunately for her, that just seems to be a burrito belly.” A photo in the other skybox was of Pamela Anderson, also in an unbecoming shot, who was, according to the headline, “Destroyed by Plastic Surgery!” “I’d like to keep my gun on.” Pecker called on Cameron Stracher, the Enquirer’s lawyer, to see if he anticipated any legal problems with the Kelly story. “We know she got the ‘comment call,’ ” Stracher said. At the Enquirer, these offers for comment on critical articles are routinely made to subjects and just as often declined. “It’s factually accurate,” Stracher continued. “She did have this surgery, she does have a criminal past, and the other stuff is opinion, really.” (In a recent memoir, Kelly acknowledged shoplifting, once, when she was twelve. So she was not “hiding” much at all.) As the meeting wound down, the discussion turned to the following week’s issue. Someone suggested a story about a video from Donald and Melania Trump’s first overseas trip. The video, which had just gone viral, showed the couple walking down a red carpet on the airport tarmac in Israel. When Donald reached for Melania’s hand, she slapped it away with a sharp flick of her wrist. “I didn’t see that,” Pecker said, on the speakerphone. The half-dozen or so men in the room exchanged looks. One then noted that the footage of Melania’s slap had received a good deal of attention. “I didn’t see that,” Pecker repeated, and the subject was dropped. It was a telling moment. Even if the leader of a celebrity-news empire had missed the viral video from the President’s trip, Pecker’s decision to ignore the awkward moment for the First Family was not surprising. The Enquirer is defined by its predatory spirit—its dedication to revealing that celebrities, far from leading ideal lives, endure the same plagues of disease, weight gain, and family dysfunction that afflict everyone else. For much of the tabloid’s history, it has specialized in investigations into the foibles of public personalities, including politicians. In 1987, the Enquirer published a photograph of Senator Gary Hart with his mistress Donna Rice, in front of a boat called the Monkey Business, which doomed Hart’s Presidential candidacy. Two decades later, the magazine broke the news that John Edwards had fathered a child out of wedlock during his Presidential race. When Donald Trump decided to run for President, some people at the Enquirer assumed that the magazine would apply the same scrutiny to the candidate’s colorful personal history. “We used to go after newsmakers no matter what side they were on,” a former Enquirer staffer told me. “And Trump is a guy who is running for President with a closet full of baggage. He’s the ultimate target-rich environment. The Enquirer had a golden opportunity, and they completely looked the other way.” Throughout the 2016 Presidential race, the Enquirer embraced Trump with sycophantic fervor. The magazine made its first political endorsement ever, of Trump, last spring. Cover headlines promised, “Donald Trump’s Revenge on Hillary & Her Puppets” and “Top Secret Plan Inside: How Trump Will Win Debate!” The publication trashed Trump’s rivals, running a dubious cover story on Ted Cruz that described him as a philanderer and another highly questionable piece that linked Cruz’s father to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was even tougher on Hillary Clinton, regularly printing such headlines as “ ‘Sociopath’ Hillary Clinton’s Secret Psych Files Exposed!” A 2015 piece began, “Failing health and a deadly thirst for power are driving Hillary Clinton to an early grave, The National Enquirer has learned in a bombshell investigation. The desperate and deteriorating 67-year-old won’t make it to the White House—because she’ll be dead in six months.” On election eve, the Enquirer offered a special nine-page investigation under the headline “Hillary: Corrupt! Racist! Criminal!” This blatantly skewed coverage continued after Trump took office. Post-election cover stories included “Trump Takes Charge! Success in just 36 days!” and “Proof Obama Wiretapped Trump! Lies, leaks & Illegal Bugging.” Pecker and Trump have been friends for decades—their professional and personal lives have intersected in myriad ways—and Pecker acknowledges that his tabloids’ coverage of Trump has a personal dimension. All Presidents seek to influence the media, but Trump enjoys unusual advantages in this regard. He is also in close contact with Rupert Murdoch, whose empire includes Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. (While the Times and the Washington Post have produced repeated scoops about Trump and Russia, the Journal, which employs a large investigative staff, has largely been silent on the issue.) Unlike Murdoch, Pecker heads a fading and vaguely comic archetype of Americana; sales of the Enquirer are down ninety per cent from their peak in 1970. But the impact of the tabloids, particularly their covers, remains substantial. A.M.I. claims that a hundred million people see the Enquirer in more than two hundred thousand checkout lines around the country every week. And the Enquirer’s covers invariably include statements about celebrities that are deeply misleading, if libel-law-compliant, as well as claims about politicians that are outright lies. Pecker is now considering expanding his business: he may bid to take over the financially strapped magazines of Time, Inc., which include Time, People, and Fortune. Based on his stewardship of his own publications, Pecker would almost certainly direct those magazines, and the journalists who work for them, to advance the interests of the President and to damage those of his opponents—which makes the story of the Enquirer and its chief executive a little more important and a little less funny.

 I asked Pecker about Trump during our first lunch, at one of the posh Upper East Side restaurants that Pecker frequents. His fondness for long, wine-filled lunches is only one of the ways in which he resembles the media moguls of a bygone age. At a hale sixty-five, Pecker looks as though he could be heading out for a night at the disco. He sports the same kind of bushy mustache as the seventies porn star and period icon Harry Reems. Pecker combs his luxuriant hair straight back over the collars of his monogrammed shirts. He collects sports cars and high-end wristwatches. Still, he feels that the key to the success of the Enquirer is his engagement with his down-market readers. Pecker said that the Enquirer’s support of Trump is a straightforward response to its audience. Since January, 2016, Enquirer issues with Trump as the main image have sold between two and fifteen per cent more than the weekly average for non-Trump covers. “They voted for Trump,” Pecker told me, speaking of his readers. “And ninety-six per cent want him reëlected today. That’s the correlation. These are white working people, who love to see takedowns of celebrities, and they want to see—which is unusual, who would think these people would love a billionaire?—the billionaire’s pulpit. They know him from fourteen seasons on ‘The Apprentice’ as the boss, and they loved it when he fired those people and ridiculed them.” Pecker conveyed this admiration to Trump directly: “I’d tell him every time I’d see him. I’d say, ‘Who cares about governor or mayor, you should be President. They love you. These people love you.’ ” Pecker is eager to use his media empire to help his friends, especially Trump, and unabashedly boasts about doing so. Earlier this year, he bought US Weekly, the glossy celebrity magazine, from Wenner Media. (Last week, A.M.I. also bought Men’s Journal from Wenner.) He negotiated the sale primarily with twenty-six-year-old Gus Wenner, the heir apparent of the company, which was co-founded by his father, Jann. “After my first lunch with David, I called up my brother and said, ‘This guy belongs in the Smithsonian,’ ” Gus Wenner told me. “He is the type of character you just don’t come across anymore. The way he operates, the way he does business—it’s completely honorable, but it feels of another era.” The lunch took place at Le Bernardin, one of New York’s temples of haute cuisine, where Pecker is a favorite customer. “When I get there, he’s drinking champagne, and our deal isn’t even done yet,” Wenner said. “And then Éric Ripert, the chef, comes to our table, and he tells us he is working on a TV project. David says to him, ‘We should talk. I could get you some ink.’ It was all very transactional.” Wenner was curious to hear about Pecker’s relationship with the President. “I thought I would have to pull it out of him smoothly,” he said. “But he offered it up pretty readily, and I was all ears. He was painting Donald as extremely loyal to him, and he had no issue being loyal in return. He told me very bluntly that he had killed all sorts of stories for Trump. He hired a girl to be a columnist when she threatened to go public with a story about Donald.” The readers of the National Enquirer love stories about celebrities plagued by disease, weight gain, and family dysfunction. “These are people that live their life failing,” Pecker said. “So they want to read negative things about people who have gone up and then come down.” Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker Pecker denies telling Wenner that he killed stories for Trump or that he hired a columnist in order to suppress a story about Trump. Nevertheless, last year the Wall Street Journal reported that Pecker paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to a woman named Karen McDougal, who had alleged that she had a months-long romantic relationship with Trump, beginning in 2006, during his marriage to Melania. When I asked Pecker about McDougal, who was Playboy’s Playmate of the Year in 1998, he told me that he first met her when she modelled for the cover of Men’s Fitness, another A.M.I. magazine. “When her people contacted me that she had a story on Trump, everybody was contacting her,” he said. “At the same time, she was launching her own beauty-and-fragrance line, and I said that I’d be very interested in having her in one of my magazines, now that she’s so famous.” But Pecker had a condition for hiring her: “Once she’s part of the company, then on the outside she can’t be bashing Trump and American Media.” I pointed out that bashing Trump was not the same as bashing American Media. “To me it is,” Pecker replied. “The guy’s a personal friend of mine.” I e-mailed McDougal, who declined to discuss the matter, writing, “I don’t really like to talk about things other than my interests and passions—and that’s health, wellness, etc, etc!!”

 There are still traces of David Pecker’s Bronx boyhood in his accent and his attitude. He grew up on a Jewish block in a mostly Italian neighborhood until the family moved to New Rochelle, in Westchester County. His parents were older and unwell. His father, a bricklayer, died in 1967, when David was sixteen, and David needed to work to support his mother. He started bookkeeping for local businesses, including some of the rougher-edged outfits from his old neighborhood in the Bronx. By the end of his college days, at Pace University, he was making about two thousand dollars a month, a substantial sum in the late nineteen-sixties. One of his clients was an excavating contractor who couldn’t get a license to buy explosives, because he had a criminal record. “I was the one who was able to get the license, and I received the Dynomax in the Bronx,” Pecker told me. After passing the C.P.A. exam, Pecker went to work as an accountant for CBS, which during the seventies had a magazine division that included Car & Driver, Road & Track, Field & Stream, and Modern Bride. He moved up the ranks at CBS but chafed against the bureaucratic culture. “You could not go to the bathroom there without getting permission from somebody first,” he told me. “You couldn’t give your secretary a dollar raise, you couldn’t do anything.” In 1987, Pecker made a deal with an entrepreneur named Peter Diamandis to buy out CBS’s magazines, some of which they sold to Hachette, a French conglomerate that owned such magazines as Paris Match and Elle, and also manufactured fighter planes. At Hachette, Pecker set out to learn about the sales, marketing, and manufacturing sides of the magazine business. Notably, he never worked as a journalist, an omission that has led him to disdain certain conventions. In 1990, Pecker was named the president of Hachette, which later bought Premiere, a movie magazine, with the financier Ronald Perelman. In 1996, after Perelman questioned a Premiere investigation about financial problems at Planet Hollywood, a company to which Perelman had business ties, Pecker killed the story. “The last time I looked, I am the C.E.O. of this company,” Pecker told a reporter. When I asked him about the contretemps, Pecker explained it as a financial decision. “I called the editor up and I said, ‘Why are we doing an investigative piece on Planet Hollywood, when this is supposed to be a film magazine?’ ” He told the editor that he had spent two hundred thousand dollars on a research study showing that every time the magazine did an investigative piece sales went down. “I said, ‘I don’t really feel that this is appropriate.’ So he calls a news conference, resigns, and the whole staff is upset.” The actor Kevin Costner even joined in the protest, refusing to appear on the cover of the magazine. Pecker said that he told Costner, “It’s a coveted thing to be on the cover of Premiere magazine. John Travolta took it in a second.” Pecker quickly earned a reputation for producing magazines more cheaply than his competitors could. He also invested in new projects, including George, a political magazine founded, in 1995, by John F. Kennedy, Jr. “Hachette seemed like a different kind of place than some of the other publishing companies,” Michael Berman, Kennedy’s partner on George and now the head of the investment firm Galaxy Partners, told me. “It was a little grittier than most, a little more bottom-line-oriented at the time. Not a lot of bells and whistles. Since we were going to be owners as well as implementing it, we liked that there was attention to the bottom line.” George got off to a fast start but ultimately foundered after Kennedy’s death, in a plane crash, in 1999. Pecker has no strong political views, but he has a fascination with, and a reverence for, celebrity. Recalling his first meeting with Kennedy, Pecker told me, “It was February, he comes up on his bike, he’s outside, he has his hat over his head, he comes inside, he takes off his coat, he has a beautiful Armani suit on, and he pulled his cap off and it was like he never even had to comb his hair! I don’t understand it. I mean, every hair was perfect. Every hair was perfect!” Pecker met Trump around the time he launched George, and his relationship with the developer resembled his connection to Kennedy. Talking about an early visit to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Palm Beach, where he was pitching advertisers on George, Pecker described Trump’s then wife, Marla Maples: “I have never in my entire life seen a more beautiful woman in a bodysuit than Marla Maples. I mean, seriously, out of ten she was a fifteen.” For Pecker, Trump represented an aspirational figure in every dimension of life: in his glamour, his wealth, his access to beautiful women, and his style of living. Pecker created a custom-publishing division at Hachette, producing magazines for clients who would dictate the content and then distribute them to customers. The first, Sony Style, was made for the electronics company. Pecker’s next idea was for a magazine about Donald Trump. Pecker had a home in Palm Beach, not far from Mar-a-Lago, and a neighbor there introduced him to Trump, who agreed to the project. The result was a magazine called Trump Style, which today looks like a glossy preview of the coverage Pecker later gave Trump in his tabloids. Representative samples include “Trump Tower, with its bronze façade and swaths of rose marble, combines New York City’s most glittering destination with shops both popular and posh”; “40 and Fabulous: Donald Trump’s latest real estate venture, a landmark office building at 40 Wall Street, could not be in a better location”; “A weekend at Trump Taj Mahal can’t help but be an exhilarating exercise in glamour and fun.” The magazine came out for five years and was, according to Pecker, “very successful.” In the late nineties, just before the dot-com boom, money managers still regarded print magazines as a market for growth. In early 1999, the private-equity firm Evercore went looking for media opportunities and came upon American Media, Inc. Evercore recruited Pecker both as an investor and as the chief executive of the company, and closed a seven-hundred-and-sixty-seven-million-dollar deal for A.M.I. in March of that year. A.M.I. owned a number of magazines, but its core asset was the Enquirer. “Please, John, think of the plants.” A New Yorker Cartoon

 The Enquirer has unapologetically paid for interviews and photographs since the days of its founder, Generoso Pope, Jr. Pope’s immigrant father published the highly successful Italian-American newspaper Il Progresso, and Pope grew up in luxury. He was driven to school at Horace Mann in a limousine each morning, often accompanied by his friend and classmate Roy Cohn. (Cohn later became an aide to Joseph McCarthy and a mentor to Donald Trump; he represented Trump in the 1973 Justice Department case that accused his company of violating the Fair Housing Act.) According to “The Godfather of Tabloid,” by Jack Vitek, Pope breezed through M.I.T. and did a brief stint in the C.I.A., then in its infancy, before returning, in 1952, to New York, where he struck out on his own, buying a moribund Hearst weekly and rechristening it the National Enquirer. Pope was a dour and mysterious character, who exerted almost total control over the Enquirer for thirty-six years. The early days, during which he attempted to brand the Enquirer as a serious, upscale weekly, were rocky. As Pope later told the tale, he 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. “It suddenly hit me,” Pope recalled. “That’s what people want to see. That’s what I’ll give them, blood and gore.” In the fifties and sixties, the 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. The Enquirer developed a specialty in photographs of newly dead celebrities, and the paper scored a famous scoop with a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald on the autopsy table. (Dylan Howard found an original of that cover on eBay and displays it in his office.) In the late sixties, Pope moved his operations to Florida, where he had another insight that transformed the magazine. At that point, the Enquirer was sold only through traditional venders, such as newsstands, but Pope pioneered the practice of putting magazines in supermarket checkout lines. 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.” A cover photograph, in 1977, of Elvis Presley in his casket sold 6.7 million copies, an all-time record. (According to a former editor, the Enquirer had paid Elvis’s cousin Billy Mann eighteen thousand dollars for the image. In the past, the tabloid has paid anywhere from a few hundred dollars to six figures for scoops.) After Pope started printing the Enquirer in color, he used his old black-and-white presses to produce the Weekly World News, a compendium of true lunacy, often featuring space aliens, which was also a financial success, with as many as a million readers. Pope died in 1988, when the Enquirer’s circulation was about four million, and the company fell into limbo. The Enquirer tabloids were eventually sold to Evercore, as a part of the A.M.I. deal, in 1999, and David Pecker became the C.E.O. Meanwhile, competitors were eating into the Enquirer’s circulation. Rupert Murdoch had started the Star, and a Canadian publisher named Mike Rosenbloom had launched a series of look-alike tabloids called the Globe, the Examiner, and the Sun. Pecker quickly took steps to crush the competition. He bought the Star and Rosenbloom’s magazines, and closed the Weekly World News. He also relocated the operation to Rosenbloom’s old headquarters, in Boca Raton. Kevin Hyson, Pecker’s longtime deputy at A.M.I., told me, “He renovated the entire building, spent five or six million dollars, and the building was beautiful, and it came out great, and it was virtually all done. The cafeteria was just about to open, when we were attacked.” In late September, 2001, Bob Stevens, a sixty-three-year-old photo editor at the Sun, fell ill. On October 2nd, he checked into a local hospital and was later given a diagnosis of inhalation anthrax. On Stevens’s desk, in the A.M.I. building, investigators discovered an envelope containing powdered anthrax and addressed to the “photo editor” of the Sun. Stevens died on October 5th, becoming the first anthrax fatality in the United States since 1976. In short order, the Centers for Disease Control closed the Enquirer building, and most of the employees never set foot inside it again. The structure was so contaminated that all of its contents were destroyed in 2003; the Enquirer’s archive, including photographs, back issues, and notes, was lost in the process. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Karen McDougal, a Playboy Playmate, claimed to have had an affair with Trump during his marriage to Melania. Pecker hired McDougal as a columnist and paid her a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the rights to the story, which he never published. “The guy’s a personal friend of mine,” Pecker said. Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker During the outbreak, Pecker offered to bring in a team of doctors to dispense Cipro, an antibiotic, to hundreds of employees at his own expense. (Only one other employee was exposed to anthrax, and he survived.) Pecker also located alternative offices. “He protected his people,” Hyson said. “And we never missed an issue.” As a former Enquirer staffer, who was generally critical of Pecker, told me, “This was his finest hour.” (No arrests were ever made in the 2001 anthrax attacks, which ultimately killed four people in addition to Stevens. Bruce Ivins, a government scientist who was a leading suspect, committed suicide in 2008.) By the time of the anthrax attack, the market for tabloids was shrinking. Competition from the Internet, the decline of print, and the growth of gossip shows on cable television had combined to cut into circulation numbers. Still, there was a core market for Pecker’s products, and he raised prices for his remaining customers. The Enquirer cost a dollar and forty-nine cents when Pecker bought it; the current price is four dollars and ninety-nine cents. He also targeted his tabloids to specific age groups. OK! and US Weekly, the newest A.M.I. magazine, have the youngest and most affluent readers, most of whom are in their late thirties and forties and gravitate toward Hollywood gossip. The Enquirer appeals to people in their fifties, who like investigations. The Globe is pitched to buyers in their sixties, who are fascinated by the British Royal Family and loathe Hillary Clinton. According to Pecker, “They love to read the worst possible, horrible things you could read about Hillary.” (A recent Globe headline asserted, “Hillary: The Real Russian Spy! . . . New Treason Indictment!”) The oldest audience buys the Examiner, whose readers, remarkably, average eighty years old. “They have the lowest income,” Dylan Howard told me. “We do a lot of giveaways for them, and stories about ‘The Golden Girls.’ ” As Pecker said to me, “The people that pay those five dollars, we get a spike the week that they get their Social Security checks. And then they pay us down from there, and then it spikes again. So they actually budget for it.”

 Pecker and I had lunch in May, just after Tiger Woods was arrested for driving under the influence, and the occasion evoked some wistfulness about the difficulty of publishing a weekly magazine in a world that operates at the pace of the Internet. “That jail photo—we would have had that first,” Pecker told me, referring to Woods’s mug shot. “We would have shown the ‘before’ and ‘after’ on the cover of the Enquirer.” Instead, Woods’s booking photo hit the Internet well before the tabloid could run it in the magazine. Pecker’s relationship with Woods suggests how he’s leveraged his brands even in a declining market. In 2007, the magazine’s tip line received a call claiming that Woods was having trysts with a waitress named Mindy Lawton, who worked at a diner near his home in Orlando. The tipster was Lawton’s mother. As Pecker recalled, “She said her daughter serves him, and then she has a relationship with Tiger, and she goes out to the parking lot behind there and they have sex together.” After talking to Lawton’s mother, Enquirer reporters staked out the parking lot by the diner, and they saw Woods and Lawton together. “What happened was, Tiger gets into the S.U.V., she came out of the restaurant,” Pecker told me. “The Enquirer guys were behind the bushes and she must have had her period, so she threw the tampon and they grabbed it.” After the obligatory comment call to Woods, Pecker received a phone call from Mark Steinberg, Woods’s agent. Men’s Fitness had asked Woods to appear on its cover several times, but he had always declined. A negotiation ensued, whereby Woods would pose for the magazine’s cover in return for a cancelled story in the Enquirer about the diner tryst. Neal Boulton, the editor of Men’s Fitness at the time, recalled, “Pecker was all over me about the negotiations with Tiger’s people.” Boulton quit before the Woods cover was published. “I allowed myself to get sucked into this situation,” he told me. “I just felt pretty lousy about it all.” (Lawton, Steinberg, and Woods declined to comment; Lawton’s mother could not be reached for comment.) Pecker didn’t see the negotiation as blackmail. “I was never going to run any of it, because I’d be thrown out of Walmart tomorrow,” he said, referring to the parking-lot encounter’s unsavory details. Twenty-three per cent of the Enquirer’s sales come from Walmart, and the next biggest outlet is the Kroger supermarket chain, at ten per cent; chain stores account for roughly three-quarters of total sales. There are no formal rules for the level of explicitness or vulgarity that the chains will tolerate, but Pecker is careful not to push the limits. In the end, he scored dual victories with Woods: the golfer posed for the cover of Men’s Fitness, and later the affair appeared in the skybox of the Enquirer. Woods’s marriage and career dissolved not long afterward. Steinberg’s attempt to negotiate with the Enquirer was unusual. For celebrities in the tabloid’s gaze, there are often only two options. Marty Singer, a Beverly Hills attorney who represents many subjects of Enquirer stories, told me that the publication will back down in the face of contrary evidence. “You can’t just tell them that a story is wrong,” Singer said. “But, if you present actual evidence that it’s wrong, they usually will respond appropriately.” (Libel suits against the Enquirer are rare these days, though in 2014 the magazine settled a case filed by a friend of Philip Seymour Hoffman, apologizing for a false story in connection with the actor’s death and agreeing to fund an annual playwriting award in his name. Richard Simmons, the fitness guru, recently sued the Enquirer for libel based on stories alleging that he had disappeared from public view because he was transitioning into a woman; the case is pending.) The other approach is a fatalistic withdrawal from the Enquirer ecosystem. “If the story is just in the tabloids, we tend to ignore it,” Jon Liebman, the chief executive of Brillstein Entertainment Partners, a leading talent-management firm in Hollywood, whose clients include Brad Pitt, said. “If you engage in tabloid culture, it will never stop, because the tabloid culture feeds on the conversation. If you respond, they just turn your response into a story. But if the fire jumps the road, and a story gets into the mainstream press, then we deal with it.” Politicians almost never engage. For Pecker, the Tiger Woods story encapsulates the grim ethos of Enquirer readers. “Do they care about Tiger Woods? No,” Pecker said. “Do they play golf? No. But do they want to read about his indiscretions? Yes. Do they want to read that someone who is that successful is now failing? Yes. These are people that live their life failing, so they want to read negative things about people who have gone up and then come down.”

 After Pecker acquired A.M.I., his friendship with Trump deepened. Pecker joined Mar-a-Lago in 2003 and attended Donald’s marriage to Melania there in 2005. When Pecker gave a speech at Pace, his alma mater, Trump introduced him. The Enquirer held its ninetieth-birthday celebration at the Trump SoHo Hotel. Pecker was also invited to a lavish wedding that Trump organized for his ex-wife Ivana, in 2008. “Donald threw this unbelievable party for her at Mar-a-Lago—maybe seven or eight hundred people,” Pecker told me. (Ivana’s marriage, to Rossano Rubicondi, an Italian model and actor more than twenty years her junior, ended in less than a year.) Pecker hired Ivana to write an advice column for the Globe, but later replaced her with Debbie Reynolds. When Pecker got to know Jared Kushner, the pair bonded over their interest in the media and considered doing business together. (Jared has owned the New York Observer, which was once a weekly, since 2006.) Trump has a great affection for venerable media institutions like the Enquirer, according to a longtime associate: “Donald came up in the seventies and eighties, and he still loves the iconic brands, and the National Enquirer was an institution in those days. It reached millions of people. Even though it’s smaller now, Donald’s mind-set is that it’s an influential publication. And he reaches out to those readers when no one else will.” Trump’s personal relationship with Pecker facilitated that outreach. “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me gain weight.” A former Enquirer employee told me that Pecker would frequently fly from New York to Palm Beach and back on Trump’s private plane. “David thought Donald walked on water,” the employee said. “Donald treated David like a little puppy. Donald liked being flattered, and David thought Donald was the king. Both have similar management styles, similar attitudes, starting with absolute superiority over anybody else.” In the eighties and early nineties, Trump was something of a fixture in the Enquirer, thanks to his multiple marriages. A typical headline from 1990 read “Trump’s Mistress Cheats on Donald with Tom Cruise.” But, once Pecker took over, critical coverage of Trump vanished. “They have an agreement where David would not write anything that damages Donald,” a senior A.M.I. official from this period told me. One employee said that Trump was also a frequent source for Enquirer stories. “When there was something going on in New York, David would talk with Trump about it. Trump provided David with stories directly,” the employee said. “And, if Donald didn’t want a story to run, it wouldn’t run. You can put that in stone.” Indeed, early in the 2016 campaign Pecker simply turned over the pages of the Enquirer to Trump, allowing the candidate to write columns under his own byline. |||||

– More details about President Trump's alleged attempt to blackmail the hosts of Morning Joe are leaking out, including the reported involvement of his son-in-law. New York reports Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski found out in March the National Enquirer was planning to run a story about their affair, which had not yet been made public. Scarborough texted Jared Kushner about the story in April, and Kushner told him he needed to personally apologize to Trump for negative coverage in order to kill the story, according to sources close to the situation. Scarborough declined, and the Enquirer ran a story titled "Morning Joe Sleazy Cheating Scandal" in June. The Enquirer denies any knowledge of conversations between the White House and the Morning Joe hosts. In a tweet, Trump claimed Scarborough tried to get him to kill the story; Scarborough denies that. Scarborough also claims to have text and phone records from Trump aides proving his version of events, NBC News reports. Brzezinski also claims the Enquirer had been calling her teen daughters about the story. Trump is friends with the head of the tabloid—a relationship detailed in the New Yorker—and last August tweeted that he would "tell the real story of @JoeNBC and his very insecure long-time girlfriend, @morningmika. Two clowns!” Earlier this week, Trump falsely claimed Brzezinski had shown up at Mar-a-Lago "bleeding badly from a face-lift." Scarborough tells Vanity Fair that at the time an impressed Trump had relentlessly pestered Brzezinski for the name of her plastic surgeon.


– Next time someone complains that American TV has gone a little too far, suggest they take a look at the new gimmick of one of Pakistan's most popular shows: free baby giveaways. As in, actual human babies. Host Aamir Liaquat Hussain gave away two infant girls last month and plans to keep going, reports Reuters. Witness the posting on his website: "If any family cannot afford to bring up their new born baby due to poverty or illness then instead of killing them, they should hand over the baby to Dr Aamir." The first two babies were provided by a Pakistani aid organization that takes in abandoned infants, and both the show and the organization insist that the recipients were vetted. "If we didn't find this baby, a cat or a dog would have eaten it," Hussain told his cheering audience before handing over one of the baby girls to a childless couple. Reuters explains that Pakistan has loosened its control over broadcasting in recent years, leading to a slew of such ratings-grabbing stunts. CNN describes this particular show, Aman Ramazan, as a Pakistani version of The Price is Right. Audience members typically win prizes for correctly answering questions about the Koran. Only now, the show is giving away babies along with fridges and microwaves.

Expand this summary.

Story highlights Pakistani game show gives away unwanted babies

 Childless parents received baby girls during live broadcasts

 Critics say it's a publicity stunt to win Ramadan ratings battle

 Another newborn due to be given away in coming days

 Plumbing new depths in the battle for television ratings, abandoned babies are being given away on a controversial prime-time game show in Pakistan.

 TV host Aamir Liaquat Hussain presented baby girls to two unsuspecting couples during his show, which is broadcast live for seven hours a day during the month of Ramadan.

 "I was really shocked at first. I couldn't believe we were being given this baby girl," said Suriya Bilqees, now a mother of a two-week old. "I was extremely happy."

 Another baby, a boy, is due to be given to another couple at some point in the coming days.

 The show's host has been described as a religious scholar, TV megastar and even a sex symbol. His heady mix of religion and entertainment is often followed by controversy.

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 "At Christmas there's Santa Claus to give everyone gifts, it's important for Christians. For us Ramadan is a really special time so it's really important to make people happy and reward them," said Hussain.

 His show -- Aman Ramazan -- has been dubbed Pakistan's version of The Price Is Right, with members of the 500-strong audience receiving prizes in exchange for answering questions on the Quran.

 The giveaway bonanza includes motorbikes, microwave ovens, washing machines and fridges.

 He also cooks while men sing Islamic hymns and discusses religion with children in a garden full of rabbits, snakes and goats.

 The baby girls given away on the show were found by an NGO, the Chhipa Welfare Association , which says it receives up to 15 abandoned babies a month.

 "Our team finds babies abandoned on the street, in garbage bins -- some of them dead, others mauled by animals. So why not ensure the baby is kept alive and gets a good home?" said Ramzan Chhipa, who runs the organization.

 "We didn't just give the baby away. We have our own vetting procedure. This couple was already registered with us and had four or five sessions with us."

 But, the couple didn't know they would be handed a newborn when they were invited to take part in the show and paperwork was not processed before the live broadcast.

 Adoption is not officially recognized in Pakistan and there is no adoption law. The couple will have to apply for guardianship at a family court.

 Some viewers praised the show's baby giveaway but others declared it a publicity stunt.

 "Pakistan wake up," Shamim Mahmood wrote on the NGO's Facebook page. "Babies are not trophies to be handed to just anyone."

 Hussain says it isn't a gimmick to win ratings during the Islamic holy month. He believes his show is unifying a fractured nation, plagued by sectarian violence, religious intolerance and terrorism.

 "These are the disenfranchised babies that grow up to be street kids and used for suicide bombing attacks. We have tried to show an alternative," he said.

 "Telling people to take these kids off the rubbish on the streets, raise them and make them a responsible citizen, not to destroy society through terrorism," he said.

 The show has proved extremely popular, breaking ratings records and may be extended beyond its Ramadan run. He is also planning another program where the audience will be from the minority Hindu, Sikh and Christian communities.

 "We've created a symbol of peace and love, that's our show's theme -- to spread love. I'm setting an example. Giving a childless couple an abandoned child," Hussain said. ||||| 1 of 8. A childless couple kisses their newly adopted daughter, Fatima, whom Pakistani television talk show host Aamir Liaquat Hussain gave them on his show, as they sit at the Chhipa Welfare Association office in Karachi August 1, 2013.

 ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani television is screening what many call its most controversial content yet in a ruthless quest for ratings: a talk-show host who gives away babies live on air.

 Aamir Liaquat Hussain, a bespectacled 41-year-old with a neatly trimmed beard, gave away two abandoned infant girls to childless families last month and plans to give away a baby boy this week.

 "If we didn't find this baby, a cat or a dog would have eaten it," Hussain proclaimed during one broadcast, before presenting a tiny girl wrapped in pink and red to her new parents. The audience erupted with applause.

 Hussain is one of Pakistan's most popular talk-show hosts. During his marathon broadcasts he cooks, interviews clerics and celebrities, entertains children and hosts game shows.

 He usually gives prizes like motorbikes, mobile phones and land deeds to audience members who answer questions about Islam.

 But at the beginning of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, when television stations battle fiercely for ratings, Hussain astonished Pakistan when he presented two families with babies.

 "We were told that we had passed all the interviews and had been selected to adopt a baby," said Riaz Uddin, 40, an engineer. "We got our baby on live TV."

 The abandoned babies were rescued by the Chhipa Welfare Association, a Pakistani aid organization.

 "In a day or two, the next baby will be given away, God willing," its head, Ramzan Chhipa, told Reuters on Thursday.

 While the Chhipa teams scour the garbage dumps and other sites for discarded newborns, Hussain is also appealing for babies directly.

 "If any family cannot afford to bring up their new born baby due to poverty or illness then instead of killing them, they should hand over the baby to Dr Aamir," a notice on his website reads. The children would be given to deserving couples on air, the notice said.

 The show's producers did not return Reuters calls seeking comment. It was not clear if poor families wishing to keep their children would also be helped.

 FIGHTING FOR VIEWERS

 Many Pakistanis expressed disgust that abandoned babies were being given away in what they see as an attempt to boost ratings. Chhipa insisted thousands of people wanted a baby and all potential parents were properly vetted.

 The true outrage, he said, was the poverty forcing families to abandon children.

 Hussain's show is one of many such broadcasts. The Pakistani media has flourished over the past decade or so following the liberalization of the industry, particularly broadcasting, after decades of tight state control.

 Now, instead of battling state restrictions, presenters fight for audiences and advertising by seeing who is most outrageous.

 Recent episodes include a female anchor stalking couples in a park to challenge their morality, and a news program which once ran a live broadcast showing a staff member bleeding to death in an operating theatre after he was shot in a riot.

 Even among this company, Hussain stands out. In 2008, he hosted scholars who called for the deaths of Ahmadis, a persecuted religious sect in Pakistan. Within a day, two prominent Ahmadis had been shot dead.

 The year before, he had to resign from his post as junior minister for religious affairs after denouncing author Salman Rushdie for blasphemy, a crime punished by death in Pakistan.

 Since then, his university degree has been exposed as a fake and a video showing him making crude jokes with clerics between takes of his show has leaked onto YouTube.

 "There is nothing they won't do to get viewers," said comedian Sami Shah. "If I was a cynic, I'd say this can only end badly. But since I'm a realist, I'll say it's already ended terribly."

 (Additional reporting by Zeeshan Ahmed; Editing by Robert Birsel) |||||