that a 101 year old woman, Nellie Mitchell, was pregnant, said in sworn testimony in an Arkansas court in 1992: "I'd say about 90 percent of my stories are off the top of my head."
U.S. News & World Report in 1992 described the contents of a typical edition of The Enquirer, as follows: "celebrity gossip mixed with quacky diets and bizarre twists on current events" with headlines like "JFK was killed by a Russian agent . . . Posing as Lee Harvey Oswald." The Enquirer gave the O.J. Simpson trial intensive coverage, was on the scene before the coroner, assigned 20 reporters to the case and scooped the major newspapers with tidbits such as O.J.'s purchase of a knife. That case increased its circulation in 1995 by 500,000 per week.
The Enquirer was involved as a defendant in the late 1970s and 1980s in a number of civil law suits which alleged it was liable for defamation or invasion of character. Libel is defamation in written form. The number of libel suits rose precipitously in the early 1980s, led by "a proliferation of multi-million libel judgments and highly publicized suits brought by political figures which raised fears that the media would be intimidated into abandoning its adversarial position toward the government."
By the end of the decade, the number of such suits had dropped and the media was winning more of them, 40 percent in 1987-1988 versus 28 percent in the preceding eight years. The industry geared up to deal with the threat. The Enquirer, which lost no suits during that period, except for the Burnett case which it appealed and which is discussed below, had by 1995 a war chest of $16 million to deal with them. The Enquirer hired one of the best firms in the field, Williams and Connolly, in Washington, D.C. to defend it. The Enquirer adopted a policy of contesting only less difficult those suits and settling the others. As Ian Calder, Editor-in-Chief explained in 1995, "Sure we settle law suits rather t...