Scandalous (2019)

Scandalous (aka Scandalous: The Untold Story Of The National Enquirer) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

The National Enquirer could be considered the genesis of the concept for “fake news.” It could even be considered the first instance of click-bait before consumers ever began clicking around for their news at all. There’s something insidious about such a publication that is often referred to as a rag and for good reason. You can still find magazines such as this littering the grocery store checkout line, making you scoff at the big headlines of ridiculous claims.

There’s a mild bit of catharsis in this documentary. There are interviews from many who worked within the National Enquirer who speak rather openly about how it came to be. They talk about what made the paper so notable and what they were advised to right about. You can clearly see the early workings of the click-bait, grifting online sensation taking form here. After all, there were many magazines and news publications at the time. How could you stick out? Well, if you didn’t have the hottest story that nobody else was publishing, you just made it up.

It was such a simple concept. Take a story that looks like nothing, forms a wild thesis, and just runs with it in the most provocative of headlines. Sometimes the reporters would be correct but most of the time they wouldn’t be. That didn’t matter though. All that matters is if you grab people’s attention. If someone is in a grocery store checkout line and they see the National Enquirer with a headline like “Tom Cruise Caught in Alien Sex Cult With Half-Twin” you might turn your head twice to check it. You might even remark, “What an absurd headline.” Hey, maybe you’ll even pick it up just to see how they spin it. At that point, the article has done its job.

Of course, Scandalous is about more than just ripping that National Enquirer for being wrong (and, boy, did they have a track record of being wrong). There are also many instances covered where they literally did get a legit story that nobody else was publishing. What’s fascinating about this angle is how easily it gets overlooked. These stories are engaging but also confounding that they’d share the same publication space with stories about UFOs and ghosts. It’s a bit tragic that this publication tried to stay alive with absolute lies and also tried its hand at real journalism to get a real scoop.

In a way, this is a rather sad documentary for focusing on the only ways that journalism can stay afloat. Just look at the landscape we have now for journalism. I’ll tell some tales out of school here. When I write for publications, the only thing they care about is SEO. They’ll question if you use enough keywords, links, taglines, headings, quotations, and pictures. The content is secondary. I could really be writing about snails for all they care. All that matters are the eyeballs that come filtered through search engines. If you’ve ever seen that joke about newspapers from The Critic, where an editor stresses that every headline needs to have certain keywords (nude, subway, mayor, decapitation), it’s literally that.

We live in an age of online National Enquirers that have polluted the online discourse. Actually, that might be too harsh. This documentary reveals that some of the journalists within the publication took their job seriously. That being said, there were some truly insidious tactics at play. It went beyond celebrity gossip; there was blackmail involved. Yet there’s some bitterness to how ineffectual it is considering how the film covers OJ Simpson and Donald Trump's many dark sides and they’re still walking around free of concern or accountability.

Scandalous is a bit of an off-putting film considering how nostalgic it gets with the material. It likes to harken to a chaotic time in journalism where being sensationalist and gossipy was considered juicy and edgy. Now that it’s a new norm that many people hate, it’s a bit hard to share those rose-colored glasses, despite the fascinating history of this publication.