Which media organizations use "catch and kill"?

Question

It has been reported that the National Enquirer bought the exclusive rights to a story, not to report on it, but instead so that the facts do not become public:

[This] highlights a tactic called "catch and kill" -- where a publication buys the rights to a story and then buries the story as a favor to someone.

This seems like a somewhat unethical practice for a news organization to engage in.

The earliest reference I could find to "catch and kill" is this Wall Street Journal article from 2016; though their article sounds as if this were a previously existing phrase and practice.

I wasn't able to find any other examples apart from the National Enquirer though.

Is this a common practice? And if so, which media organizations use it?

Answer 1

It's certainly not a new thing at American Media Inc. (AMI) / National Enquirer. There's a 2005 LA Times story that they (AMI) did the same thing in 2003 with a story on Arnold Schwarzenegger, who at the time was developing a close business relation with AMI.

Days after Arnold Schwarzenegger jumped into the race for governor and girded for questions about his past, a tabloid publisher wooing him for a business deal promised to pay a woman $20,000 to sign a confidentiality agreement about an alleged affair with the candidate.

American Media Inc., which publishes the National Enquirer, signed a friend of the woman to a similar contract about the alleged relationship for $1,000.

On Aug. 14, 2003, as candidate Schwarzenegger was negotiating a consulting deal with American Media, the company signed its contract with Mora, who said she received $1,000 cash in return. Goyette declined to say whether she received the $20,000 promised in her contract. [...]

But American Media was effectively protecting Schwarzenegger's political interests, said a person who worked at the company when the contracts were signed. At the same time, American Media was crafting a deal to make Schwarzenegger executive editor of Flex and Muscle & Fitness magazines, helping to lure readers and advertisers.

If American Media was buying exclusive rights to the women's stories, said the person, who has a confidentiality agreement with the company and spoke on condition of anonymity, "why didn't the stories run? That's the obvious question."

"AMI systematically bought the silence" of the women, said the person. Schwarzenegger "was a de facto employee and he was important to their bottom line."

Schwarzenegger biographer Laurence Leamer wrote in his book, "Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger," that Schwarzenegger understood the tabloids would not skewer him if he was entering a business relationship with the company -- although Schwarzenegger told Leamer he did not specifically seek such assurances.

Indeed, during the recall campaign, American Media put out a 120-page magazine celebrating Schwarzenegger as an embodiment of the "American dream."

The Enquirer did run a story repeating allegations in the British media that Schwarzenegger had an extramarital affair. The story was published first on its website before the election, and then in the newspaper three weeks after his election victory. But it was not prominently displayed, running on Page 24.

The phrase "catch and kill" is not used in that 2005 article, so the term-phrase may be newer than the practice. (N.B. there's a much more widely used term "kill fee" which refers to a freelancer getting only a small payment for a non-published story.)

And in 2009, the Guardian reported [in a headline] that

US golfer gave exclusive interview to sister paper of National Enquirer in return for tabloid's silence

This story doesn't clearly involve outright buying anything because it's not made clear where photos originated from (National Enquirer's own photographers or bought from freelance paparazzis). Although Woods denied any blackmail, there was again a source inside National Enquirer claiming otherwise:

Representatives acting on behalf of Tiger Woods brokered a deal two years ago to bury a tabloid story of an extramarital affair, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. It said representatives for the golfer acted after the National Enquirer threatened to publish pictures of Woods taken in a parked car with Mindy Lawton, a Florida waitress.

The alleged deal, which the Wall Street Journal claims was made in August 2007, saw Woods give an exclusive cover interview and photo spread to a sister magazine of the Enquirer, Men's Fitness.

It is the second such claim to be made after the publication of a similar story in the New York Post earlier this month.

American Media, owner of the Enquirer and Men's Fitness, said descriptions of such a deal were "inaccurate, false" and "misinformed". It claimed the interview, headlined Tiger!, and in which a beaming Woods appeared on the cover, was a result of the golfer's previous link with the interviewer, Roy Johnson.

But Neal Boulton, former editor in chief of Men's Fitness at the time of the alleged deal, fuelled further speculation after claiming that he left his post because of the incident. "[American Media CEO] David Pecker knew about Tiger Woods' infidelity a long time ago … He traded silence for a Men's Fitness cover," Boulton told the New York Post.

Also, An AP story has a bit more background on NE's interesting approach to journalism:

Though sometimes dismissed by mainstream publications, the Enquirer’s history of breaking legitimate scoops about politicians’ personal lives — including its months-long Pulitzer Prize-contending coverage of presidential candidate Edwards’ affair — is a point of pride in its newsroom.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Enquirer published a string of allegations against Trump’s rivals, such as stories claiming Democratic rival Hillary Clinton was a bisexual “secret sex freak” and was kept alive only by a “narcotics cocktail.”

Stories attacking Trump rivals or promoting Trump’s campaign often bypassed the paper’s normal fact-checking process, according to two people familiar with campaign-era copy.

The tabloid made its first-ever endorsement by officially backing Trump for the White House. With just over a week before Election Day, Howard, the top editor, appeared on Alex Jones’ InfoWars program by phone, telling listeners that the choice at the ballot box was between “the Clinton crime family” or someone who will “break down the borders of the establishment.” Howard said the paper’s coverage was bipartisan, citing negative stories it published about Ben Carson during the Republican presidential primaries.

---

Simply offering hush money for silence, legalized as an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) is a much wider practice. The usual way this is done is through lawyers. "Catch and kill" is basically the same thing done by a media organization, possibly with the addition of a duplicity element, if the source does not suspect the story is being bought just to be buried. As people are often enough represented by lawyers in such dealings with the tabloid media, it comes with little suprrise that the duplicity element apparently extended to the lawyer representing one of the sources in Trump story, but the duplicity was not maintained all the way through, either by the laywer or by AMI (in this case):

Ms. McDougal maintains that she was duped by a “catch-and-kill” scheme in which Davidson, ostensibly her lawyer, colluded with Cohen and American Media Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer. In such a scheme, a media company buys the exclusive rights to a story but then buries it, rather than publish it. AMI’s chief executive, David J. Pecker, is reputed to use the catch-and-kill tactic on behalf of allies, and is said to be a friend of Trump’s.

McDougal decided to tell her story in May 2016 — when Trump was plowing through the GOP primaries. Through a mutual friend, she found Davidson, who told her that a deal with AMI could result in a “seven-figure publishing contract” with an initial $500,000 payment in an escrow account. But after an AMI official interviewed her extensively, the company initially declined to buy the story and Davidson confessed that there was no escrow money. AMI explains that it chose not to publish the story because it could not be verified, but concedes discussing McDougal’s allegations with Cohen “as part of its reporting process.”

Weeks later, though, when McDougal was in negotiations with ABC News, Davidson informed her that AMI had a new proposal: AMI would buy her story but not publish it owing to Pecker’s relationship with Trump. The company would pay $150,000 (a sizable chunk of which went to Davidson). The deal was especially attractive to the model-turned-fitness-instructor because she was additionally promised that AMI would run her fitness columns and feature her on at least two publication covers. As the details were being ironed out on August 5, 2016, Davidson was in email and phone contact with Cohen, assuring him the deal was done. McDougal signed it the next day. The story was buried but the fitness columns and covers never materialized.

So at least this "catch and kill" affair devolved simply into a somewhat elaborate hush money/benefits in return for silence; of course, then there was a non-fulfillment (even potential fraud) of the contract by AMI. But my point with this last snippet is that the line between "catch and kill" and just hush money (promises) can sometimes be blurry.

Answer 2

Not a complete answer, but certainly an earlier example from Pittsburgh, circa 1909, which establishes that journalistic catch and kill is not a recent innovation:

When he was 19, Seldes went to work at the Pittsburgh Leader. ... He also interviewed a saleswoman who had filed a rape complaint against the son of the owner on a large department store, but the story was not published, and Seldes became outraged when the advertising department of the newspaper blackmailed the owner into buying more advertising.[1][2] ...
-- George Seldes: Early Life, Wikipedia

Seldes' own account offers more detail, (from Chapter 2 of his 1987 autobiography Witness to a Century):

The son of the owner of one of the largest department stores believed that, like medieval lords who had "the right of the first night" with the bride of every one of his serfs, he had the right to rape every pretty salesgirl. When I reported his court hearing, my city editor for the first time in my life gave me a sheet of carbon paper and said to make a copy. I made it. It was sent immediately to the business department. It was not printed. However, within a few days the Leader, along with all other papers, printed double that department store's advertising every Sunday. The price per page, so we were told, had also gone up. Not one Pittsburgh newspaper ever mentioned this rape story.

Even in the 1980s, more than sixty years later, Seldes, or his publisher's editor, was apparently still wary of providing the name of that alleged rapist, or the name of the large department store, which suggests various things:

• the large department store, or the alleged rapist's powerful family, were probably still capable of various reprisals formidable and petty.
• the practice of catch and kill was at that time city wide, and probably extant in all large American cities; the elderly and well-traveled Seldes did not specifically recollect that Pittsburgh was exceptionally corrupt, which is the sort of thing he would have noted if it was exceptional.

Certain necessary conditions in 1909 prevented due coverage of the newsworthy alleged rapist: large cities with large media outlets sponsored by advertisements of big businesses owned by protective wealthy families. These conditions have existed continually since then, and it's unlikely protective wealthy families will ever neglect those means available for preserving their overvalued and hard-won reputations.

---

Note: User Fizz advances a possible confusion -- that the Pittsburgh Leader was not practicing catch and kill so much as it was blackmailing an advertiser. Blackmail and catch and kill have certain features in common:

• usually a crime or fault is perpetrated by a guilty party.
• a second party who knows of the crime is rewarded by the guilty for not disclosing the secret.

But there are substantial differences:

• Current US law, which we'll assume is not very unlike US law in 1909, describes the crime of blackmail as follows:

  "Whoever, under a threat of informing, or as a consideration for not informing, against any violation of any law of the United States, demands or receives any money or other valuable thing, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both." -- 18 U.S.C. § 873

  The rape charge had already received a court hearing, the crime had been reported.

• The blackmailer does not sell their own virtue as a good citizen, usually the blackmailer is himself another criminal, offering to commit a crime (of not reporting one) for money. Catch and kill is not generally a crime, it's just a sleazy journalism -- or perhaps how ad sponsored journalism survives in a sleazy and punitive environment.

• Typically an unpaid blackmailer goes out of their way to publicize something they would otherwise not report. Here the paper certainly would have reported it as a matter of course, doing the job readers expected of it.

  An advertising sponsored paper however serves two masters -- foremost are its sponsors, who enable it to sell the newspaper at a loss, and its readers whose attention the advertiser is in effect buying. Catch and kill here would have been the cynical editor's #1 job -- the increased ad rates being more in the way of a bonus, for continued good service in only reporting good things, (its "be nice" policy, as it were), about its sponsor.