Taking a brief break from my Twitter hiatus to write a Thread about the history of tabloids.
As @sarahkendzior points out, bad actors cover up crimes with scandal.
Tabloids are propaganda tools that help them do this. It's dangerous to call them harmless gossip rags.
Thread.
In 1952, an MIT grad who spent a year working for the CIA as a "psychological warfare officer" bought the paper that would become The National Enquirer.
His name was Generoso Pope Jr. and he was backed by his childhood friend and his godfather: Roy Cohn and Frank Costello. 1/
Cohn's connections to organized crime is well documented, but he also had ties to government officials, media figures, and even intelligence.
When McCarthy was staffing up for his anti-Communist hearings, J. Edgar Hoover personally recommended Cohn for chief counsel. 2/
Frank Costello, Pope Jr's primary backer, was the head of New York’s Luciano crime family.
He wasn’t just his godfather, but the inspiration for Marlon Brando’s infamous character as well. 3/
The first tabloid was a project funded by the mob and crime-adjacent individuals tied to corrupt government officials. It also happened to be run by a CIA-trained psy-ops guy.
This legacy remains in the industry today. 4/
In the years that followed, tabloids consolidated under acquisitions from individuals tied to intelligence agencies, organized crime, and government officials.
Two of the biggest players? Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch. 5/
The landscape changed a bit after the deaths of Pope Jr and Robert Maxwell, but this consolidation continued through the 90s.
In 1999, Clinton-ally Roger Altman bought a controlling stake of AMI, the conglomerate which owned the National Enquirer. 6/
Tabloids may not seem important, but they're tools exploited by people of influence and governments to sway public opinion.
Through "Catch and Kill" operations, they're also used to hide damaging secrets through NDAs. 7/
If tabloids are little more than harmless "scandal rags", why do nefarious individuals with unimaginable resources keep using them?
If they don't matter, why have powerful people spent decades fighting over their control? 8/8.
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