COLUMN ONE : Into the Realm of Tabloids : Never before has tabloid journalism been such a growth industry. In an age of ‘infotainment,’ the line separating it from mainstream media often seems a blur.

Pete Rose was in the slammer and the warden was vehement: no journalists, no photos, no interviews. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

It was just the kind of challenge that starts the journalistic juices flowing at the National Enquirer. If you are not one of the 3.8 million Americans who buys the Enquirer every week--or one of the 22 million who reads it--there are a few things worth mentioning before you hear the Pete Rose story.

It may also be appropriate to recall that some celebrities, specifically actor Michael J. Fox, view the tabloid industry as “that mutation of reality that shows up in your local A&P.;”

The Enquirer--the oldest, largest and most prosperous of the six major tabloids--took them out of the closet in 1988 when it tracked down, purchased (for less than $100,000) and printed photos of Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart’s lap aboard a boat named Monkey Business. The photos contributed to Hart’s withdrawal as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination and earned the Enquirer something it had wanted for years--a little credibility.

“It’s not that journalists suddenly liked us,” said Iain Calder, the Enquirer’s president. “But I think there was at least a grudging acknowledgment: ‘Hey, you guys are pretty good at what you do and you’ve got some good people doing it.’ ”

Last month the Enquirer’s sister tabloid, the Star, scored another jolting exclusive when it paid for and printed an interview with cabaret singer Gennifer Flowers, who said that she had had a 12-year affair with Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democratic presidential hopeful. Journalists pooh-poohed the story because, after all, aren’t tabloids just trash?

But 300 of them showed up at a Star press conference to introduce Flowers; scores more converged on Little Rock, Ark., to check out the story. Rumors of Clinton’s indiscretions were not new. As far back as 1988, Xan Smiley, Washington bureau chief for the Sunday Telegraph of London, had written that Clinton “will never get away from the zipper problem.” And last September Clinton and his wife, Hillary, called a select group of reporters to a “preemptive” breakfast in Washington, D.C., to say that they had had problems in their marriage but that everything is fine now.

So when the Star story broke, three issues emerged: the substance and the source of the allegation and, perhaps most important, the candidate’s credibility.

“My colleague Margaret Carlson calls it tabloid laundering,” said Dan Goodgame, White House correspondent for Time. “You let the tabloids go out and pay people for stories and do the dirty things Establishment journalists hold themselves above. Then you pick up and cover the controversy, either directly or as a press story. You write: ‘Oh, how horrible the press is.’ Then you go into the details.”

If the national media had any inclination to snub the story, those reservations were removed when Clinton went on “60 Minutes” to deny Flowers’ charge. “At that point, you can’t ignore it,” Goodgame said.

Clinton, in effect, had taken the charges out of the realm of tabloid journalism and given the story--if not the allegations--legitimacy. The scandal had been laundered and the media did much hand-wringing, being at basic odds with a premise that the tabloids have borrowed from England: Scandal is a form of high entertainment.

Had the Washington Post tracked down Flowers--and not paid her for the interview--the paper would have won praise for journalistic enterprise. But tabloids suffer (not unfairly) from the perception that they stretch the truth like taffy, although what many Americans fail to acknowledge is that tabloid publications--and to a lesser degree tabloid television shows--are as different individually as the New York Times is from the New York Post.

The National Enquirer, for instance, has a 13-person fact-checking staff--yup, that “swinging grandma” in Illinois, Linda Essex, really did just wed again for the 22nd time--headed by a former researcher for Time magazine. And the 48-page weekly does not print stories about pigs who give birth to humans or any such nonsense, although its sister publication, Weekly World News, clearly might.

(Sample Weekly World headline: Columbus was Gay; Sneering sailors call the limp-wristed explorer Chrissy.)

The Enquirer is traded on the New York Stock Exchange as the Enquirer/Star (and is up nearly 50% since the initial offering at $14 a share last year).

Its reporters (some at $90,000 a year) and editors (over $100,000) are among the highest paid in the newspaper business and, short of breaking the law, are expected to go to almost any length to get a story, whether that entails dressing up as a llama to crash Fox’s wedding (a scheme discussed, then dismissed) or pawing through trash cans outside the Washington home of then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger (they found so much good stuff that Beverly Hills passed an ordinance forbidding such shenanigans) or just knocking on doors as old-fashioned press types used to do.

In the highly competitive business of journalistic espionage--infiltration and revelation--the Enquirer has few peers. To Enquirer Editor Dan Schwartz, who holds a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, getting a Pete Rose exclusive seemed almost as challenging as pursuing the Donna Rice photos.

He assigned the story to Doug Mays and his wife, Sammie. What’s important to know here is that the Mayses play a mean guitar and when they called the correctional facility in Marion, Ill., identifying themselves as musicians and offering to give a free concert, well, of course, the warden said: “Great! Come on up.”

The Mayses got there lickety-split, a camera hidden inside one of their speakers. Finding Rose before their concert proved something of a problem, but a few dollars changed hands and someone directed them to the proper cell. Baseball’s fallen idol sat there behind an open door, talking sports with two guards, who quickly turned their attention from the hairy-chested Rose to the blonde-haired Sammie. Sure, they said, they’d be happy to give her a tour of the facility.

Finally alone with the prey, Doug Mays whipped out the camera now hidden under his jacket and whispered, “Psssst, Pete. The Enquirer.”

Rose’s face lit up as though he’d just gained his freedom. “I wondered who’d be the first to figure out how to get to me,” he said. “I was betting it’d be the National Enquirer.”

The man known as “Charlie Hustle” never did blow the whistle on his scoopsters and the inmates got their concert, although the speaker where the camera was again stashed produced strange sounds during the performance that almost blew the reporters’ cover.

Headed home that evening, their car was stolen when they stopped at a cafe to call the Enquirer, but the thief got stuck in a traffic jam a few blocks away and Mays--concerned about his roll of film, not the Ford Pinto--managed to wrestle him to the ground. All in all just a normal working day in the making of another Enquirer exclusive.

Mastering the craft of the star scoop goes back to the 1940s when Confidential magazine thrived on Hollywood exposes and had the power to make or break careers. But never before has tabloid journalism been the growth industry it is today. And--from the newsstand to the TV screen--gossip, celebrity revelation and deviant sex shout for our attention.

In the process it has become difficult to know where tabloid journalism ends and traditional journalism begins. On the cover of this month’s Washingtonian magazine we are teased with “SEX: The New Rules.” In the Washington Post we can read a new daily gossip column, “Reliable Source.” Life magazine gives us an intimate look at Elizabeth Taylor and shows her new husband, Larry Fortensky, headed off for his lunch-pail construction job just like any other 9-to-5 laborer.

Then there’s Oprah, Geraldo, Donahue, “Hard Copy,” “A Current Affair” and “Entertainment Tonight” to sustain us with their insider look at faces and trends and kinky lifestyles. Last year People magazine passed Time as the nation’s top advertising revenue producing magazine.

People (circulation 3.1 million, with 28 million readers) is said to be the most profitable magazine in the world. Pick up Vanity Fair, Esquire or a woman’s magazine today: The face of a marketable celebrity on the cover is evidence of People’s success. (People’s Richard Dreyfuss cover bombed in street sales while Michael Landon was a blockbuster.)

“We’ve tapped into a universal interest--that people are interested in people,” said People’s managing editor, Landon Jones. “It’s so basic and fundamental that the appetite for it is enormous. I don’t want to put down my sister publication, Time, at all. But suffice it to say that I think there are probably more people interested in personalities than in issues.”

If we have entered the age of “infotainment,” as ABC’s “Nightline” correspondent Jeff Greenfield calls it, if it really is “difficult to have a serious agenda in the age of TV,” as author David Halberstam believes, then perhaps fundamental changes are taking place in the way we gather and evaluate information.

No longer is “serious” news the exclusive domain of so-called serious papers. Today Magic Johnson is just as likely to make news discussing AIDS with Arsenio Hall as he is in an interview with a New York Times medical writer.

The Star (circulation 3.5 million and published by the company that owns the National Enquirer) paid Gennifer Flowers somewhere around $150,000 for her story, which editors there say they had confirmed independently and would have run with or without her first-person account. Is that, they ask, any different than David Frost paying ex-President Richard M. Nixon over $500,000 for an interview in 1977? Or Kissinger, H.R. (Bob) Halderman, William Calley (of My Lai massacre repute) and Sirhan Sirhan (Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin) all selling interviews to networks at various times? Or a book publisher paying a celebrity for exclusive rights?

“When Gennifer found out the cat was out of the bag, she came to us and said she wanted her story out (in public),” said Star Editor Richard Kaplan, former executive editor of the Ladies Home Journal. “We flew her to New York with her lawyer. There were negotiations. I suppose it’s no different than Bobby Bonilla wanting $5 million to play for the Yankees. That’s where we’re at in America, 1992.”

Just the same, not everyone was comfortable with the idea that a tabloid story could influence presidential politics. Said Paul Reynolds, managing editor of the Bangor, Me., Daily News (circulation 75,000): “We didn’t give the Clinton-Flowers story as prominent a play as many papers. But still we kept asking ourselves: ‘Why are we doing this? What the hell has happened to journalism?’ ”

What has happened, of course, is that ratings and circulation--read that money--power the engine and that politicians have become celebrities, making Hollywood and Washington, D.C., much closer in spirit than most people on Capitol Hill feel comfortable admitting.

Today everyone often pursues elements of the same story. And whether the subject is Donald Trump’s divorce or Bill Clinton’s sex life or a breakthrough in cancer research, you’ll find both traditional newspapers and the National Enquirer sniffing around for an angle. “Basically, tabloid journalism has lowered the level of popular debate,” said William Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. “Oprah and Donahue don’t really press people to think about what they’re saying. They play with emotional prejudice and reaction. In tabloid journalism there’s no attempt to judge the quality of the information or to balance it with other points of view.”

Calder, the Enquirer’s Scottish-born, $600,000-a-year president, is taken aback by such condemnation. He believes that his paper is in touch with Middle America while the mainstream media is isolated from it. To find out what’s on America’s mind--and what sells--he studies the Nielsen ratings religiously and his editors all read transcripts of the daytime television talk shows.

Having a beer after work, Calder doesn’t watch the television set behind the bar; he watches the customers reaction to what they see. Life is a focus group.

“My job is not to please myself; it’s to please Middle America,” said Calder, who has an editorial staff of 100 and an editorial budget of $16 million. “We have to blend in with what society wants. In that sense we’re a little like chameleons. If we find people are upset with government waste, government spending, then that’s the Enquirer, too. If there’s growing interest in the environment, then we’re interested in the environment.”

To meet society’s appetite for celebrity revelations, the Enquirer has a network of several thousand tipsters worldwide--journalists, hairdressers, cameramen, limo drivers, producers, sometimes even stars. For a long time, the paper’s tipster on the Roseanne Barr show was Tom Arnold, the man she eventually married. “We knew Roseanne was going to get divorced before her husband did,” Calder said.

Not uncommonly, celebrities themselves are sources for stories intended to advance their careers or their projects, although readers would think that the information had been supplied by a third party. “Stars rarely admit it in public,” said Enquirer articles editor Dianne Albright, “but in private they’ll tell you: ‘When I stop appearing in the National Enquirer I know my career is on the skids.’ And when they start to slide, they’ll pick up the phone and call us with a story idea.”

The Enquirer started as a New York crime weekly. Generoso Pope Jr., a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate with an engineering degree, bought it in 1952 for $75,000 (the paper sold for $400 million after his death in 1988) and filled it with such gore and so many bizarre tales that when a woman suffered a mild stroke in the Enquirer’s office and was removed by ambulance, an editor casually remarked: “She must have seen next week’s edition.”

In 1968, Pope planted the seeds of today’s tabloid journalism. He eliminated the blood and guts, started concentrating on celebrities and human-interest yarns and began selling his paper alongside TV Guide at the supermarket check-out counters. Circulation soared. (Subscriptions account for only 10% of the Enquirer’s sales.)

“Don’t bore the reader,” he used to tell editors, most of whom were then British imports from Fleet Street. “Be brief.” His advice is still taken seriously. (Recent headline: She’s a virgin at 33--and gets a doctor’s certificate to prove it.)

Every Sunday night lawyers from Williams & Connolly, one of Washington’s most prestigious firms, fly to Lantana and spend two days scrutinizing every word of every story (3,600 of them a year) that will appear in that week’s edition. Although a dozen or so complaints have been settled out of court, the Enquirer has not lost a lawsuit in the 10 years the firm has represented it.

So the hunt goes on. The tabloids are where Fleet Street and Sunset Boulevard meet. Where politics is only as significant as the personalities themselves. They’re a way of looking at the world as a kind of fun and fantasy-filled place. And they’re proof that there are no secrets in stardom.

Someone--for either the thrill of the chase or the pleasure of dollars--is always willing to tell. When actor John Goodman flew to New Orleans last year for a hush-hush wedding, he and his bride, Annabeth Hartzog, ended up at Pat O’Brien’s on Bourbon Street for a late-night, pre-ceremony party.

The celebrity-filled room was packed with friends and well-wishers and amid the toasts and laughter, Hartzog rose, glass in hand, and said: “Wouldn’t the National Enquirer love to be here!” The two Enquirer photographers and three Enquirer reporters at the table next to hers caught each other’s eyes and winked.