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Lengel: Trashy Tabloid Can't Resist False Jimmy Hoffa Story

By Allan Lengel
allan@deadlinedetroit.com

January 5th, 2016, 7:24 AM

In a drugstore or grocery store line, tabloids are like fool's gold, eye-catching and enticing and capable of duping the naive. Some of the stories seem so outrageous, so far fetched. Yet, we often glance at them and read the headlines.

I was shopping in a suburb the other day and saw the Globe, a 62-year-old paper that's part of American Media, Inc. , a New York publisher of magazines, supermarket tabloids, including the National Enquirer, and books. The front page headline reads: “Search Ends After 40 years…Jimmy Hoffa’s Body Found! It has photos of Richard Nixon, mobster Carlo Gambino and Sen. Ted Kennedy with the subhead: “One of these three ordered him killed.”

I did stories on the Hoffa disappearance years after the 1975 abduction, first for The Detroit News and then the Washington Post. So I bought it for $4.99, just out of curiosity and amusement. My mother used to love to read the tabloids, and I’d buy them on occasion for her, even though I was often embarrassed to do so, and sometimes even told the clerk: “This isn’t for me, Really, it’s for my mother.”

I’ve had first-hand experience with tabloids. Starting in 2001, I was one of the lead reporters at the Washington Post on the case involving Chandra Levy, the D.C. intern who disappeared and was having an affair with Congressman Gary Condit. Condit was a “person of interest” in the case and made for good fodder in the tabloids, though he was never charged. At the Post, we were forced to run down the flashy tabloid stories about the case and Condit. More often than not, they were totally false...

read more: http://deadlinedetroit.com/articles/13988/lengel_trashy_tabloid_can_t_resist_publishing_untrue_story_about_jimmy_hoffa#.VowAGk9O-uK