Biggest cover story of all: 35 ways the National Enquirer's publisher boosted Donald Trump

https://qz.com/1369399/david-peckers-national-enquirer-ami-trashed-hillary-clinton-to-help-trump

Prosecutors say David Pecker was instrumental in burying the stories of two women who say they had affairs with Donald Trump before the 2016 election. The CEO of AMI, publisher of the National Enquirer and Globe supermarket tabloids, also did a great service for Trump by printing wild stories about his opponents—while spiking a few about him.

Here’s a look at how 35 covers built an over-the-top narrative of the dangers of a Hillary Clinton presidency and the benefits of a Trump one. Could decent Americans vote for a lying, dying, criminally minded candidate? Enquiring minds in checkout aisles across the US were told there was little reason to doubt Trump was the right choice.

They didn’t even have to buy a single copy to get the message.

The Enquirer spent many weeks in the months in the run-up to the 2016 election bashing Clinton. She had everything from lung cancer to a husband with a teen sex ring, as Politico’s Jack Schafer detailed in an in-depth article after the election. The strategy had “all the hallmarks of classic propaganda,” he wrote, including publishing “wild story after wild story that ‘entertains, confuses, and overwhelms the audience,’ ” just like the Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” model.

The tabloid’s coverage trashed Clinton for weight gain, claimed that she had six months to live, and asserted she had blackmailed the FBI, as this compilation of 18 covers—courtesy of Politico—shows:



*snip*