Weaponized Journalism

“It has been a great and very profitable partnership with David Pecker and the team at AMI over the last four years and we look forward to the next phase of growth.”

- Austin Beutner

At best, the National Enquirer, published by AMI, is mindless entertainment for people stuck waiting in line at their local supermarket. While stories about aliens and other ridiculous conspiracy theories are harmless, their coverage about celebrities crosses a darker line. Intruding into a person’s private life during times of adversity to sell copies of a tabloid is bad enough when the stories are real. Churning out works of fiction using a real person as the main character shows a lack of any moral center.

This is the type of business that Austin Beutner invested in as the founder and president of Evercore Partners. After a recapitalization Evercore became the controlling shareholder of AMI. Beutner saw a business with a raw material of human pain and focused on the possible financial gain. As parents, is the message “profit above all else” something we would like to teach our children? It is an important question to ask given the fact that Beutner is currently the Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest…