Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Thursday, Aug. 19, 2004

The startling claim comes from Iain Calder, whose new book “The Untold Story” (Miramax) has been released with rave reviews from the mainstream press that regularly deride the tabloids.

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Calder’s book is a tour-de-force of the exciting, news-as-entertainment world America lives through on cable news today.

As Calder shows, it wasn’t all about show biz either. He reminds readers that the Equirer did some crusading journalism as well. He recounts the funny – but frightening story – of how his paper had a reporter dress up as a wealthy Arab sheik.

Another reporter drove the "sheik” in a black limousine to the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Unannounced, the sheik arrived, was whisked past security into the halls of Congress and was approached by dozens of Congressmen seeking his favor. The sheik didn’t even speak Arabic – but his driver/tranlator translated the jibberish to fawning Senators and Congressmen.

And then they had some real fun...

Like the day they sent a reporter into a small town in Kansas dressed as an alien from outer space. The alien soon got some notice – and was almost killed by a shotgun-toting American worried about the “invader.”

Recently, NewsMax chatted with Calder who says the mainstream press, and imitators like O’Reilly on TV, have a lot in common with the paper he helped create.

For example, during the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times, the media credited Times editor Howell Raines with innovating the concept of sending large numbers of Times reporters to cover a big story. He called it "flooding the zone."

But the idea was not original - thanks to Calder’s innovation at the National Enquirer, they began the practice in the 1970s and honed it into one of journalism’s sharpest weapons.

In his gripping account of his years as top editor of the Enquirer, Calder details the tabloid’s practice of dispatching whole teams of editors and reporters to the scene when big stories broke - with the rest of the media struggling along with a single correspondent apiece.

Thanks to that tactic, which enabled the Enquirer to cover the story from every angle, the Enquirer’s coverage of the story inevitably ran circles around the mainstream press.

During the O.J. Simpson case, for example, the Enquirer broke so many exclusives the major media and even law enforcement turned to the tabloid for leads.

One of their biggest - proof that O.J. Simpson owned the Bruno Magli shoes that caused the bloody footprints at the murder scene of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman - was ignored. Simpson claimed he never owned such a pair, but through painstaking investigative work the Enqurier discovered a photo of Simpson announcing a football game – and wearing Bruno Magli shoes.

The Founder

In his new book, Calder gives top credit to the paper’s long time owner and resident genius Generoso Pope. He reveals how the paper’s groundbreaking reportorial methods were developed and entertains with in-depth accounts of some of the Enquirer’s biggest stories and how he got them.

No one knew Generoso Pope better that Calder. They were, for all intents and purposes, practically joined at the hip.

To most people, including the entire Enquirer staff, Pope was a fearsome enigma, yet nobody had more effect on the world of journalism than Gene Pope.

Calder provides an intimate glimpse of the secretive and essentially modest man who turned the world of journalism upside down.

Pope awed his employees. Said one former Enquirer staffer, "I worked for three presidents of the United States, and called two of them by their first names. But I called him "Mr. Pope." For his part, Iain called him Gene.

Calder told NewsMax.com in an exclusive interview that the reaction of the mainstream media to his book has stunned him:

"I have been overwhelmed," Calder said. "I’d say 95 percent of it has been really positive. I’m very surprised. I wasn’t necessarily very complimentary about the coverage we got from the mainstream press over the years, yet the New York Times for example did two pieces on me in the same week." Both stories, he said, were positive.

Times reviewer Janet Maslin, he said, wrote, "Mr. Calder tells a jaunty tale of journalistic innovation … this book has a legitimate, if small, place in journalism history as it connects the dots between the Enquirer tactics and those of the mainstream press."

Another reviewer, at Publisher’s Weekly, he added, called his book a "compulsive page-turner."

Although often cited as the originator of the celebrity culture, Calder denies that he alone had a hand in making it one of the dominant themes of today’s celebrity-driven media coverage:

"I don’t think that I should be credited with that. But I think that Gene Pope and the team that I helped him put together helped create the celebrity culture. The incredible staff we put together should get the credit," he said. "Not only was it the journalists, it was also the people that got us into the supermarkets – that too helped create the celebrity culture."

Asked what he considered to be the most important story the Enquirer ever covered, he had two answers – one dealing with a story he covered in his early days at the paper, and one that changed the course of history. Both are fully described in the book.

"The most important story I did in the early days was the one when I learned that Judy Garland still hadn’t been buried a year after her death."

Since the Enquirer did not have any reporters in those days, Calder covered it himself.

"It was the first story the Enquirer ever ran that went world wide. It caused a sensation and within a few weeks we got Judy Garland buried. It was the first time anybody outside of New York had paid attention to us. It was huge.

"But it wasn’t as huge as when we got the Gary Hart picture with Donna Rice," Calder qualified.

That, he said, was undoubtedly the most important story the Enquirer ever ran because "that stopped Gary Hart from becoming president of the United States."

In his book, Calder recalls the incident where Hart, then the leading Democrat candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and considered an odds-on favorite to win the White House in the fall, was caught in a photograph aboard the cabin cruiser appropriately named "Monkey Business" with Donna Rice sitting in his lap.

The photo, which the Enquirer obtained, gave credence to the rumors of Hart’s womanizing and drive him out of the race.

As Calder notes, the Enquirer under his direction rarely did political stories or ever sought to set up celebrities. But Hart had challenged media reporters to follow him and that he had nothing in his closet. As it turned out, The Miami Herald did just that, and caught Hart spending time with Donna Rice.

Still, Hart denied any relationship existed.

That’s when the Enquirer got into the act by unearthing the Monkey Business photo that brought down Hart's presidential ambitions.

"At the Time everybody thought that Hart, a moderate Democrat, would beat George Bush," Calder said.

As a result of the Monkey Business scandal, however, Michael Dukakis, who Calder described as a "super left wing liberal from Massachusetts," who "had no chance of beating George Bush" ended up with the nomination and was thrashed by Bush in November.

"Just think, had Gary Hart gotten the nomination, George Bush would not have been elected," Calder said. "That was the one that changed the course of history," he said.

Fabricating Stories?

Calder had a strong reply for those who accused the Enquirer of fabricating stories.

"My answer to that is that our millions and millions and millions of readers knew that we did not make up stories, that hand-on-heart we believed our stories. It doesn’t mean that every story was 100 percent accurate - even the New York Times can’t say that. They just lost an editor, Howell Raines, who was fired because of at least one guy who made up a lot of stories, and the Washington Post, which had to give back a Pulitzer Prize when Janet Cooke said she had lied.

"We tried harder – at least as hard as any newspaper - to get absolutely true stories. Our readers knew this even when celebrities would say that’s not true and we’re going to sue you, and six months later it would turn out that we were correct."

Had the Enquirer made up stories it would have cost them millions of readers, he added.

The tabloid had a staff of meticulous researchers, who vetted every story. All interviews had to be on tape, and all tapes were listened to by the researchers, many of them lawyers.

One reporter recalled being asked to prove his assertion that during a seance with Elvis Presley the candles had flickered. How could he prove they had really flickered, he was asked. His editor had the answer – "that’s what candles do," he told the researchers, "They flicker."

The O’Reilly Factor

Asked by NewsMax.com who in television comes closest to the National Enquirer, Calder said although nobody had ever asked him that question before he had a ready answer: Fox’s Bill O’Reilly.

"Bill O’Reilly is the closest thing to the National Enquirer. He is either incredibly smart, which he probably is, or his boss, Roger Aisles, is incredibly smart. What they are doing there is not being right wing or really being conservative in the sense of politics or even being really totally Republican.

"What draws people is that O’Reilly is a populist. He understands what Reagan called the silent majority. He understands that people don’t want millions of illegal aliens flooding across our borders. They get angry about soft judges who give rapists a slap on the wrists. They get angry when people in Washington are spending our money foolishly. They get angry at these fringe people getting equal play in the press to honest middle-of-the road cops.

"What he does, he finds these stories. He understands that you have to tap into the emotions of the average person. He does that and, in addition, has an interview analysis style that is really unique. Not everybody could do what he’s doing. He is a star when it comes to TV. But that alone would not do it. I’ve often said, give me ABC, CBS or NBC news, move them out of New York and that huge liberal base and put them in St. Louis and they would knock the other two out in no time at all."

"O’Reilly, Calder added, "knows how to tap into the needs of most of the American people."

Just as Calder and his crew did.

You can get your copy of "The Untold Story: My 20 Years Running the National Enquirer" by clicking here.

Editor's note: