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PECKER CUT

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David Pecker — a man whose name has launched a thousand tasteless, crass headlines (see above) — has been axed from his longtime position as American Media Inc.’s CEO and Chief Executive. The company has been most famous for The National Enquirer, the supermarket tabloid magazine known for its screaming headlines in 60s, a photo of Elvis Presley in his open coffin in the 70s, rise to journalistic respectability in the 1980s and its 2016 transformation into a vehicle for stories to promote the campaign of best bud Donald Trump and attack Trump’s enemies.

It never recovered from the sharp decline after it rebranded itself as a Trump propaganda vehicle in 2016. Sales nosedived. The Daily Beast:

American Media Inc.’s longtime chairman and chief executive David Pecker has been put out to pasture, and AMI, the parent company of The National Enquirer, will soon cease to exist and merge with a company that markets face masks, hand sanitizer, gloves, disinfectant wipes, and vitamin supplements.

“This is a transformative event that significantly reshapes Accelerate and American Media into a new type of media and marketing company with an unprecedented reach all the way to the sales floor,” claimed a press release issued late Friday by Georgia-based marketing executive David Parry, the CEO of Accelerate360, LLC.

Parry added that longtime AMI exec Chris Scardino has been named president of the new hybrid tabloid journalism-marketing enterprise, which, months before the scheduled Oct. 1 merger, has already been trying to execute one of its vaunted corporate synergies: According to people familiar with the situation, AMI magazines have been running photos of celebrities sporting face masks, opposite display ads for COVID masks that are marketed and distributed by Accelerate360.

Friday’s announcement—which noted that AMI will change its name to A360 Media, a subsidiary of an enterprise that claims to be the nation’s largest distributor of periodicals, among other products, and boasts “3 million square of feet of warehouse space fully equipped with state-of-the-art warehouse technology”—came as yet another unpleasant surprise for hundreds of AMI staffers.

In March, staffers were forced to take a 23 percent pay cut as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, and they now must suffer a downgrade in their health insurance coverage, according to employees interviewed by The Daily Beast, while their job security is increasingly uncertain.

The nearly 69-year-old Pecker, who during the last presidential campaign weaponized the Enquirer and other AMI publications to help his then-pal Donald Trump and attack Trump’s opponents, has been demoted “effective immediately” to the role of executive adviser, a fancy corporate name for kibitzer.

As federal prosecutors investigated felony violations of campaign finance laws arising from AMI’s payment of $150,000 in 2016 to a former Playboy model to buy the rights to but never publish her claim that she’d had an affair with Trump, Pecker and his sidekick, Australian import Dylan Howard, signed an immunity deal that required them to cooperate with the feds. A woman answering the phone at Pecker’s Greenwich, Connecticut, estate on Friday claimed not to know who he is.

“It’s unbelievable. What a grisly end,” one former AMI staffer told The Daily Beast. “It’s a long sad history of mismanagement from the top from somebody who never understood what these magazines were about. Pecker’s so-called friendship with Trump turned out to be the kiss of death.”