Tabloid Tsar

Even Before The Anthrax Attack At His Office, National Enquirer Editor Steve Coz Was Making News

Playboy Profile

As editor of the National Enquirer, Steve Coz was used to covering the most scandalous, bizarre news imaginable. But covering weird news is one thing--being in the center of it is quite another. Coz found that out in October, when the Sun, one of the Enquirer's sister publications, was the target of an anthrax attack. One person was killed, one became seriously ill and five more tested positive for exposure. In an uneasy atmosphere of war and terrorism, the incidents that followed spooked the nation. Both papers are owned by American Media, and Coz, who is now corporate editorial director, not only faced a barrage of media inquiries, but also had to find a way to publish while his offices were shut down because of contamination. It was the strangest of many strange twists in Coz' career--and another unpredictable moment in the evolution of the National Enquirer.

The National Enquirer used to be the paper that you bought to read about aliens who had landed in a cornfield or the birth of a two-headed baby. Somewhere in the Eighties it became the bane of celebrities with its barrage of gossip, sometimes scabrous, occasionally even true. But no one could have seen the Enquirer's latest incarnation: the paper that breaks hard news and gets scoops that leave The New York Times and Washington Post playing catch up. It began with saturation coverage of the O.J. Simpson case--coverage that was groundbreaking and accurate. Then came Monica and the president, Hugh Rodham and the pardons, Jesse Jackson and his love child. Now America's favorite tabloid is branching out into international reporting. Two weeks after the World Trade Center attack, it ran a major piece on a Taliban defector from one of Osama bin Laden's Afghan training camps. Even The New York Times has grudgingly praised the paper for its "aggressiveness and accuracy," and the man who gets the credit for this transformation is Steve Coz. The 44-year-old editor is a fascinating amalgam: He's a mild-mannered working-class guy from Grafton, Massachusetts who went to a Benedictine prep school before attending Harvard, where he majored in English. He's also a pit bull reporter who trained at the foot of Generoso Pope (the Enquirer's notorious founder), an ex-CIA officer who sent his staff sniffing through Henry Kissinger's trash, instituted helicopter coverage of celebrity weddings and drove circulation to a high of 6 million copies per week in the Seventies.(The paper received so many letters from readers--more than a million a year--it was given its own zip code.)

It was a pair of shoes that won Coz the job of editor of the National Enquirer. After months of searching for a shot of O.J. wearing the famed Bruno Magli loafers, the Enquirer staff finally came up with the goods. But when the editor mysteriously decided not to run the picture, Coz was incensed. He stormed into the chief executive's office and made a case for the photograph, which turned out to be key in persuading the civil jury to find Simpson responsible for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. A week after he won the battle of the shoes, Coz also won the battle for the top. He was promoted from executive editor to editor and began his campaign to get the National Enquirer something that had eluded it for decades: respect.

We talked to Coz several times--our final interview took place the day after he attended the funeral for Bob Stevens, the Sun photo editor who died from anthrax. Coz was working from the circulation building about five miles away, unable to access his e-mail and relying on his cell phone for contact with the outside world.

Playboy: What is it like on the inside of these events? You've said you and your colleagues were the last to know. coz: First, we were told that Bob Stevens had encephalitis. Then, it was meningitis. Meanwhile, we're reading on CNN.com that it was anthrax. That's how we found out--on the Internet! The local health department had told us not to worry. They were saying it was from a natural cause. So we came to work on Thursday and Friday. On Saturday there were 30 people working in the building. On Sunday David Pecker [American Media's chairman and chief executive officer] was working in the building when he got a call to get out.

Playboy: All of you could have been infected.

coz: There were kids in the building throughout that time. Anyway, on Monday they send about 400 of us into the parking lot of the local health department. We get there and there's a sign on the door that says Closed for Columbus Day. It was taking, on average, 20 minutes per person to fill out forms and give blood samples, and we're outside in the blazing sun for hours. People start fainting. We asked them to open the building next door so we could go in and sit down, and only after we refused to sign the papers allowing the FBI to search our offices did they do so. The Department of Health was a joke. But to be fair, they have never dealt with anything like this. They are overwhelmed. They should probably be distributing Valium with that Cipro. The FBI has been fantastic, though. They were precise, accurate, quick to respond and professional. I'll tell you something else. You know how Giuliani and Pataki were at the WTC that day? Jeb Bush still hasn't been to south Florida. He's sitting in his office in Tallahassee in northern Florida, issuing statements urging people not to treat the employees of AMI the way the first people with AIDS were treated. This, while the feds have gone to great extents to say that anthrax is not contagious. To equate this with AIDS is ridiculous. It's insane. It's an insult.

Playboy: Why the Sun?

Coz: My theory is that Bob Stevens got an envelope, and because he's farsighted, he held it up to the light to see what was in it. We think that's how he inhaled so many spores. A few other people probably handled the envelope.

Playboy: Could this have been the work of some disgruntled Sun reader?

Coz: It's definitely some sort of bioterrorism, but who or why is still the question. A Sun reader? No way. Bioterrorism is a very complicated, sophisticated weapon to build and distribute. If Ted Kaczynski couldn't figure out how to do it--and he went to Harvard--I don't think a reader of the Sun could. Don't forget, Mohammed Atta was a few miles from here. He went into a local pharmacy because he had a red irritation on his hands. My feeling is that he may have been trying to bleach away some sort of contaminant.

Playboy: But why would they target AMI?

Coz: Look, the WTC was an obvious symbol of American capitalism. The Pentagon, the obvious symbol of American defense. Imagine being a foreigner who's only been here for 18 months or so, and in every supermarket or pharmacy you see the tabloids. They are everywhere. It's very possible you might think that this is the symbol of American freedom of expression. In a lot of ways it is.

Playboy: I'm sure you've noted the irony of the tables' being turned, that for the first time you're the subject of the story rather than the reporter of it.

Coz: Being the subject of the media is nothing compared with people dying and being terrified.

Playboy: When the Twin Towers were hit, the National Enquirer broke form by featuring on its cover a shot of firemen raising the flag atop the rubble. What was the last world event the Enquirer had covered?

Coz: I believe it was the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979. We didn't respond to the Gulf war. You know, the reason the tabloids have covered celebrities so exhaustively in the past eight years is that people want to read about them. But tabloid readers are extremely patriotic. This was a direct attack on Americana.

Playboy: Americana?

Coz: Americana is the deeply engrained lifestyle that includes our national foibles--from county fairs to Aunt Sue's apple pie to the town mayor kissing a baby when he's running for office.

Playboy: You ran a story about a Taliban defector. It's hard to imagine the National Enquirer having a Pakistan correspondent.

Coz: We sent someone over to Pakistan to pound the streets the same way they do here. Apparently, the Taliban has stacks of guns, but their soldiers are starving. This soldier left camp because they chopped off his buddy's hand for stealing food. The buddy bled to death, then this guy threw himself into a crevice to injure himself. At that point they let him leave because he was no good to them injured. Apparently, there was open talk in the training camps that there was going to be a bloodbath in America at the end of summer.

Playboy: Do you pay sources there?

Coz: We haven't paid anyone in Pakistan. We haven't had to. When you're there, the surprising thing is that Osama keeps popping up all over the place. These people are talkative, and they will pose for pictures with machine guns. We could only photograph half of the defector's face because he was worried about retribution.

Playboy: That story is an example of a big change at the paper. What's the biggest difference between today's Enquirer and the old scandal sheet?

Coz: Eight years ago the Enquirer was pushing the envelope to a tremendous degree.

Playboy: Pushing the envelope or the facts?

Coz: Pushing the facts. It was a free-and-loose environment, and we'd do anything to get a sale. In the past five years we have focused on bringing out a news product that's as truthful as we can make it and that will sell in a tabloid environment.

Playboy: But there are still credibility issues. You'll have groundbreaking reporting on a major story, but when readers turn the page there's a psychic urging them to rub the Blue Dot to make wishes come true.

Coz: The Blue Dot is loved by our readers. It's an interesting anachronism. Getting rid of it would be the equivalent of The New Yorker getting rid of its cartoon with the monocle.

Playboy: So what is the real purpose of the National Enquirer?

Coz: To sell papers.

Playboy: The New York Times called you the bible of the O.J. Simpson trial. You were out in front on Monica Lewinsky, and you broke the Jesse Jackson love-child story and the Hugh Rodham pardon scandal. Why, suddenly, is the paper going mainstream?

Coz: It's not that we're going mainstream; the mainstream has had to go entertainment. Do you watch the Today show? Katie Couric was on a trapeze during sweeps. We did not do Bill Clinton stories to go more mainstream. We did them because the public was interested. It gets even more confusing when you consider something like the autopsy photos of JonBenet Ramsey. We refused to run them--the cord is tied so (continued on page 191)Steve Coz (continued from page 92) tight around the little girl's neck, it makes your stomach turn. But the Today show, NBC, MSNBC all ran them. It's pretty confusing when a bubbly Matt Lauer shows pictures of a dead six-year-old and gets away with it. We also decided not to publish any of the photos of Princess Diana in the car crash. We were offered them within 24 hours, but we just weren't going to do that.

Playboy: And now, mainstream newspapers and networks sit on controversial stories, seeming above the fray, and then ride in on your coattails when you break a story.

Coz: True. I think they want the tabloid press to bubble up the scandals so they can redo them in a more intellectual fashion and jack up their ratings. The only debate is how long the mainstream media wait before they absorb a story. Remember that picture of Bill Clinton and Monica in a beret? It was the first picture ever of Monica and Bill in the same frame, and it speaks volumes about the intimacy between them. One major magazine called us to partner with them on buying it--$100,000, and we split the cost down the middle. Here's why: It went against the magazine's ethics to buy the picture from the source because it wasn't a professional photographer. But if we bought it they could license the rights from us. You see how tortured that is?

Playboy: Is it your contention that stars automatically forfeit their right to privacy when they become famous?

Coz: It depends on how much the stars use media to claim their success. Look at Meryl Streep. You know anything about her? She's a raw talent who didn't go the hype route. It's the ones who use the media that the media develop an appetite for. They thrust themselves into the soap opera of public life in order to sell movie tickets, and once they reach a level of income, fame, elitism, whatever, they say, "OK, I've used the public. I don't want to do it anymore." That's where the nastiness starts.

Playboy: The Enquirer's image is on the upswing, but circulation has fallen from 5 million in the Eighties to about 2.1 million today.

Coz: In a way we've been victims of our own success. Ninety percent of tabloids are launched by the tabloid industry itself--we cannibalize ourselves. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's been a huge growth industry, which has fanned out to include People magazine, Us Weekly, etc. It gets unhealthy when the mainstream press goes tabloid to shore up ratings and circulation, but then, to differentiate themselves, they knock the tabs. That was a particularly nasty period in the mid-Nineties. Another issue is money. Tabloids sell on the stands, and the mainstream sells with advertising. That's a huge difference in economy. Our ad revenue is between 10 and 15 percent. On the other hand, that allows us to chase stories. Magazines that are more influenced by advertising have restrictions. We do what we want.

Playboy: How do your ethics differ from those of other publications?

Coz: We don't do anything illegal. We demand that our reporters go right to the heart of the story, and if that means knocking on a celebrity's door knowing that when it opens the reporter is going to get punched in the face, then he has to do that. We're not shy about what we do. When we're on a story we're very aggressive.

Playboy: There's a fine line between gutsy and sleazy. I'm thinking of that instance when reporters dressed as priests to go to Bing Crosby's funeral to "comfort the widow" and extract the story.

Coz: I don't know if they comforted the widow. Did they dress as priests to get in to see what was going on? Yes. Enquirer reporters will do that.

Playboy: Gutsy or sleazy?

Coz: I think that's putting the story above everything else. Everyone calls us sleazy when we do what it takes to not allow a celebrity to control the image--which is basically what journalists are supposed to do anyway.

Playboy: How about giving tiny Minox cameras to the mourners at Elvis' funeral to photograph the corpse? Classic picture, but pretty invasive, no?

Coz: I don't have a problem with that. The media is not a nice business. Our job is to intrude into people's privacy. I was watching the local NBC TV news and the reporter was criticizing a tabloid story. The next clip shown was of a horrible accident--a station wagon on fire, with twin two-year-olds trapped inside, burning. And she didn't have the sensitivity to see the hypocrisy in what she was doing.

Playboy: What about the insanity of helicopter coverage of weddings?

Coz: Did you know that celebrities actually brag about their weddings by counting how many helicopters there are? They do! Is it a 10- or 20-copter affair? It's ludicrous. Let's say you hire one of those security firms for $250,000 to guarantee a private wedding, and your guests have to go through five security checkpoints, and waiters are security guards, and anything that even looks like a camera is impounded. All that hassle could be avoided if they'd simply hand out one or two pictures to AP. End of story.

Playboy: Let's talk checkbook journalism. No major news organization would do it. You have refused to pay sources in Pakistan. It's considered unethical, part of the prostitution of American journalism. And yet you do it here in America

Coz: It's not prostitution, it's evolution. Remember Tonya Harding? I know her manager. He goes to ABC and says, "For $100,000, you can have Tonya and her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly." The producer says, "No, I can't pay. But I'll tell you what I can do. I'll guarantee we'll put two of your other clients on Prime Time Live in the next few months." That kind of national advertising would cost him $360,000--not including the limo, the hotel, Barbara Walters--so he's getting a good value. We're much more straightforward. We skip the dinners, the limo. We just sit there with a check. You give us truthful information and we pay. And in most cases the motivation is clear: greed.

Playboy: If the information is false, does the check clear?

Coz: We do deals based on two things: exclusivity and whether or not we can support the core of the story through other sources.

Playboy: And you've been known to send a Lear jet with piles of cash to keep people quiet.

Coz: That was GP [Generoso Pope, the Enquirer's founder]. He sent 20 reporters, a Lear jet and the bagman, a big Australian guy with a safe full of money--I think it was $50,000--to a gardener who lived in front of the place where Princess Grace drove her car off the cliff. Turned out he had knelt beside her during her final minutes and heard her final words. We had a long lead time, so we moved in with him for two weeks to protect our exclusive. We didn't let him answer the phone or talk to any other reporters. It's no different from when a network flies somebody to some other location to keep him away from the press.

Playboy: What's the highest price you've paid for a story?

Coz: Four hundred thousand dollars, but we got a rebate. It was on Michael Jackson's baby. The broker on the deal was so brain-dead that he also sold the story to England and held a press conference. When you hold a press conference in this day and age, it's worldwide. So the pictures got here 24 hours before we hit the stand. Eventually, we settled for $250,000. Jackson took that money, by the way. He was strapped for cash.

Playboy: How do you price a story?

Coz: It's flexible. If Michael Jackson wants to sit down with us and tell us everything that has happened in the past decade of his life, it's priceless. If he wants to put his spin machine to work, it's worthless.

Playboy: What's in your lying-publicist file?

Coz: We have four of them, each 10 inches thick. Take what happened with Demi Moore, when she was in the final stages of her marriage to Bruce Willis. We heard she was pregnant, so I called her publicist, who started screaming, "It's absolutely not true, and if you publish that story she's going to deny it! This is a troubled patch in the marriage, don't introduce a pregnancy into it." I figure there's no way she can be this vehement and not be telling the truth.

Seven weeks later I'm talking with the same spin doctor for a story about Bruce being furious at a male friend for paying attention to Demi. And the publicist starts screaming, "You can't do this to Demi, especially not now. She's in a very delicate state--she just had a miscarriage!" You quickly learn which publicists lie and which don't.

Playboy: How did you discover Jesse Jackson's illegitimate child?

Coz: We had the story from sources close to the mistress, and we spent an additional four weeks trying to get sources close to Jesse. They finally confirmed it for us. We went back to the mistress and told her we were going to press and that her denial would look foolish because people in Jesse's camp were confirming it. At that point she changed her denial to a "no comment." She said the reason she was changing it was that she didn't want her daughter to grow up and see that denial. She's a mom taking care of her daughter. There was one reporter from Chicago who said he'd heard the same rumors but had run into a brick wall. The National Enquirer, he said, ran through the wall.

Playboy: When you started working at the Enquirer, a hot feature was a two-headed baby. Wasn't that a comedown for a Harvard grad?

Coz: When I started, my beat was human interest. I was doing great stories on fascinating things, like the time I interviewed a woman who was entering the Mrs. America pageant. She was a beautiful woman who'd had a preventive double mastectomy and breast reconstruction because breast cancer ran in her family. So, I'm sitting on the couch with her and she's talking about being an inspiration to women, and she says to me, "Wanna see my breasts?" I was like, "Yes, of course." She whips off her shirt and bra and puts her hands over her head, and her breasts are bouncing up and down--the implants are under the muscle tissue. While she's doing that, her husband is about 15 feet away making us tuna sandwiches for lunch. Where else are you going to get experiences like that?

Playboy: When Burt Reynolds left Loni Anderson for a cheerleader, he went to the Enquirer because he said it was the one place that would quote him accurately. How the hell did that happen?

Coz: Burt started his relationship with us back in the Seventies by chasing [Enquirer senior reporter] Alan Smith around a couch trying to beat him senseless because Smithie had asked him a question about his hair. Burt was trying to kill him. He got so worked up over this, he started calling the editors and talking to them. They reached an understanding, and Burt became friends with us. When celebrities call us, we are very precise about what they're saying. There's a huge trust. Everyone pictures us as the bad boys in Hollywood, but celebrities know that when they talk to the Enquirer, we'll get it exactly as they told it.

Playboy: Who's the most fascinating celebrity you have covered?

Coz: Hillary Clinton. That's a Greek tragedy on a public stage. This is humanity played out from every angle: children, family, trust, fidelity, jealousy. Just when we think we've got a handle on what's going on, suddenly her naked ambition rears its head. The public is fascinated because these are all the emotions that a normal woman would have privately, but they're aired for everyone to see.

Playboy: Why hasn't she divorced Bill?

Coz: I think she loves him. I think she will divorce him if that love stands in the way of her ambition. But right now Hillary can't go through a public divorce. It's like Howard Stern. His radio show worked when he was married. Now that he's not, it struggles.

Playboy: Last year, when a gay porn star was reported to have had a relationship with Tom Cruise, Cruise sued the porn star for $100 million. Does that worry you?

Coz: Amazing, isn't it? I think that was a warning to the press not to impinge on Tom's ability to earn money as a macho leading man. I also think it was a horrible PR move, as it allowed the words Tom Cruise and gay porn star to be used in the same headline over and over.

Playboy: Why did he risk it?

Coz: I think there's something else his PR people are afraid will come out. I'm not saying Tom is gay, but there might be someone else with a story they're trying to stop.

Playboy: Ever lie awake at night wondering about the social significance of your job?

Coz: In journalism, you have to put out a product that people will read in order to keep the fires going until you hit something of social relevance. It broadens when you tick through the list of celebrities with political pals. John Travolta tried to influence social policy in Germany with the Scientologists. Woody Harrelson wants to legalize marijuana, George Clooney wants to change the First Amendment, Whoopi Goldberg rants about the Pope--these are all facts. You have a slew of celebs in the White House influencing a president, and they don't want the press to scrutinize them? It doesn't work that way.

Playboy: An editor at the Columbia Journalism Review had this to say on the Enquirer's ethics: "As they're heading into the mud, there may be a point in the arc where they're doing the right thing, but that's not where they're going. It's almost accidental."

Coz: The mud has cracked. I think the biggest problem with journalism today is that journalists are so full of themselves. What are we? We're public servants. We have to sell a product to the public, and you get these pinheads trying to hold up journalism as an institution. The people who scrutinize journalism are not connected to what's going on in society. They're living in some fairy-tale land where journalism and their code of ethics would be out of business. I wonder who pays their salaries.

Playboy: In your new photo book, The National Enquirer: 30 Years of Unforgettable Images, it's surprising to see a 20-year-old shot of George Clooney posing with a pet pig, considering he recently started a crusade to boycott the tabloids.

Coz: A few years ago, right around the time of Princess Di's crash, Clooney was calling for my head and getting a petition started to boycott the tabs, which is unbelievable, because when Clooney was starting out--and this is a little-known fact--he was in Return of the Killer Tomatoes! He had a potbellied pig and did numerous photo stunts to get his name in the paper. He took the pig out dancing, kissed the pig, took it for a drive in his car--and he came to us. There are thousands of B-minus-level actors out there and whoever does something interesting is going to make it in.

Playboy: How do you avoid becoming cynical about people in power and in the public eye?

Coz: You can't become cynical. People in power are human beings and they have great qualities and flaws. Through reading the Enquirer, you get to know these powerful people in a way you wouldn't know them otherwise, and as you do, you start to root for them. You don't become cynical, you become more interested in the fabric of their lives. I mean, O.J.--he's a Shakespearean character. And that story isn't finished yet. His kids will turn 18 soon, and they're going to have things to say.

Playboy: Do you worry that this country's fixation on celebrities is on the wane? After all, the world has inexorably changed. Will your mission?

Coz: I just got a first copy of our new photo book, and looking at all those old celeb photos made me nostalgic for a time when Michael Jackson dating Mariah Carey was a significant event. Where is the American psyche headed? Are people going to want to read about the Taliban for the next six months? I find that hard to believe.

Playboy: Between the anthrax and the war, you must realize how easy you had it with Monica.

Coz: I'm longing for the days of the Greek tragedies' being acted out without the tragic endings.