In this age of conglomerated media, the figure of a newspaper baron, a person like Hearst who reshaped papers in his image, seems an antiquated notion, one that hasn’t existed since before WWII and the late rise of television news. But the documentary Enquiring Minds persuasively makes the case that one newspaper baron adapted to the new shape of the country and thrived – the savvy tyrant Generoso Pope Jr., the mogul behind the paranoid supermarket staple The National Enquirer. Enquiring Minds tells the story of Pope’s fascinating personal background and how he took an also-ran New York paper and turned it into a notorious national phenomenon.
The story of Pope Jr. begins with Pope Sr., an embodiment of the American rags to riches story. Pope Sr. arrived in America alone as a fifteen year old, with no English and ten dollars to his name. He found work carrying water to construction workers and years later, owned the construction company, which went on to help build many of New York City’s landmarks, such as Rockefeller Center. The film portrays him as a Godfather-like figure, a man of immense power and prestige, especially in the Italian-American community, but also in New York City politics. He was the first Pope to own a newspaper, buying and controlling the immensely influential Italian language Il Progesso. He wasn’t outright mafia, but he was mafia-connected; his good friend Frank Costello would later become Pope Jr.’s godfather.
Despite two older brothers, Generoso Jr. inherited his father’s mantle and for a while wielded immense power for a man in his late teens and early twenties. But after his father’s death, a political misstep cost him his behind the scenes power and allowed the rest of his family to take control of the family fortune from him, leaving him a shadow of his former self. Pope Jr. responded by buying a small newspaper (possibly with funds from “Uncle Frank” Costello), the New York Enquirer, with the intention of taking it to the top.
Once in control of the Enquirer, Pope Jr. began to chart a course that seemed heretical to the standards of journalism but proved incredibly influential to our media today (for better or, probably, worse). First, he found success by publishing the bloodiest pictures possible, sensational coverage of freak accidents and terrible crimes, with headlines like “I Tore Out Her Heart and Stomped on It!” His most prescient realization was that as Americans moved from the city to the suburb, the urban newsstand was losing prominence, replaced by the supermarket check-out aisle. He waged a huge campaign to win over supermarket owners, including changing the content of the paper from blood and gore to less threatening topics like celebrity gossip (today a billion dollar industry) and UFO speculation. He pioneered a format that continues to thrive today on internet click-bait sites – shocking celebrity pictures alongside cute pictures of puppies, skeptical science stories next to speculation on political scandals.
We might not want to thank Pope Jr. for his influence on American journalism, but it’s undeniable that he sensed a desire in the public and fulfilled it with sensational flair for decades. His story tells the larger story of the sea change American journalism has undergone in the last century. Enquiring Minds takes this fascinating story and tells it well, also giving insight into Pope’s personality and the unique culture he created at the Enquirer.
