Behind The Star's Headlines

The Star prides itself on being the class act among supermarket tabloids. "We never run stories on two-headed monsters," says editor Richard Kaplan. "We are a juicy celebrity-journalism publication."

For a weekly whose parent company also owns the National Enquirer and Weekly World News, that may be a distinction akin to being the grande dame of the whorehouse. In this week's issue, the Star (circ. 3.2 million) purports to describe the bedroom romps of Kirstie Alley ("Kirstie Alley: I Lured Men by Promising 3-in-a-Bed with Mimi Rogers") and the psychological torments of Julie Andrews ("Julie Andrews: Sound of Music Drove Me to Shrink"). For many readers, tabloids are nothing more than the print equivalent of candy bars -- fun but insubstantial. But when it comes to his cover story on the alleged 12-year affair between Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers, Kaplan asserts that the tabloid, based in Tarrytown, N.Y., is on a loftier mission. "This isn't Martians walking the earth," he says. "This is a very, very real inquiry into the integrity of a major presidential candidate."

But in the course of defending the story, Kaplan insists on bucking the rules of both the tabloid and the mainstream press. The 1951 graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, who was an editor with both the Ladies' Home Journal and US magazine, admits that he paid Flowers for her story (though he will not say how much). But instead of proudly wallowing in the tabloid tradition of checkbook journalism, he sounds defensive about it. "We are not the first news-gathering organization to pay for interviews," he says. He claims the story is true because the Star has obtained tapes of telephone conversations between Flowers and the Arkansas Governor, but then refuses to have them verified independently by releasing them to other news organizations. The brief excerpts of the tape that reporters were permitted to listen to last week establish nothing by themselves.

In the meantime, Kaplan insists he is not being manipulated by the Republican Party, breaking another journalistic rule by announcing that he's a Democrat. Above all, he argues for credibility by pointing to his credentials and intuition: "I think I know a story that has the ring of truth, the smell of truth, and I tell you this story has both."

If the past is any indication, Kaplan's ability to sniff out the truth has not been infallible. Two years ago, the Star ran a story about the slide into homelessness of Peter Criss, the former drummer for the rock band Kiss. It turned out to be a hoax.