The National Enquirer's Circulation Plummets

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by Felix Richter, Statista

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos made waves last week by writing a blog post on Medium in which he accuses the National Enquirer of extortion, citing several emails threatening to publish delicate private photos of him in case he doesn’t publicly rebut allegations that the Enquirer’s reporting (including the previous publication of private messages of Bezos) is “politically motivated or influenced by political forces”.

The National Enquirer had recently come to fame for its role in a so-called catch-and-kill scheme involving President Trump. The tabloid’s publisher AMI entered an immunity deal with the Department of Justice after admitting to buying former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story of an alleged affair with Donald Trump on behalf of the latter’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, only to bury it so as not to hurt Trump’s presidential campaign.

While AMI may have gotten away with dishing out hush money on behalf of a then presidential candidate, it may not get off that easily this time around. “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?” Bezos asks in his blog post, undoubtedly referring to the unlimited resources at his disposal to fight AMI and the National Enquirer. After seeing its circulation drop by roughly 90 percent over the past two decades, picking a fight with the richest man in the world may be the final nail in the infamous tabloid’s coffin.

Meanwhile, while grocery stores, drug stores and even libraries boast racks of celebrity gossip magazines, with titles such as “Star,” “People” and “Us Weekly” lining the shelves. But despite these publications having a large reach, some of them have seen a decline in readership in recent years, and a new Morning Consult/The Hollywood Reporter poll shows that a plurality of adults don’t think highly of the paparazzi, whose work fills the pages of these magazines.

Forty-four percent of the 2,203 U.S. adults surveyed in the Feb. 1-3 poll view paparazzi photographers as intrusive and think that they “need to get a real job,” with 43 percent saying that the government should be able to regulate paparazzi activities. Most respondents (55 percent) said that the celebrity photographers do not generally act in a responsible and civil manner.