America's premier scandal sheet occupies a strange place in our media landscape. The National Enquirer doesn't compete with newspapers like The New York Times or newsweeklies like Time or NEWSWEEK, but with celebrity magazines like People, Us Weekly and OK! It uses methods scorned by the mainstream media--rifling through trash cans, stalking subjects and, most of all, paying for information. Yet the Enquirer lands too many big scoops for the mainstream media to ignore--or, more accurately, that they ignore at their peril. (The Enquirer broke the news of John Edwards's affair with a former campaign aide months before his televised mea culpa.) Keep clicking for a photographic tour through the paper's varied history-from its blood-and-gore roots in the late 1950s, through its reinvention as a purveyor of gee-whiz journalism in the '70s, to today's celebrity scandal.
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