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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

In the tabloid tradition, a good headline must do three things: it must communicate the news; it must commit some act of wordplay; and it must trigger a certain popping of the eyes in its reader, ideally accompanied by some kind of involuntary subverbal response—a squawk, a snort, a guffaw, a gasp. On Thursday, just minutes after Jeff Bezos revealed that American Media, Inc., had threatened to publish explicit photographs of him unless he acquiesced to certain demands, tabloid-headline excellence was achieved, when HuffPost declared, on its home page, "Bezos Exposes Pecker." "Pecker," of course, referred to David Pecker, the chairman and C.E.O. of A.M.I.—the same Pecker who, during the 2016 Presidential election, facilitated a payment to a woman who had a story to tell about an affair with Donald Trump.

[...] The headline was the work of Hayley Miller, a HuffPost reporter in New York whose workday had already ended when the Bezos news came out. [...] The idea for "Bezos Exposes Pecker" came to her quickly, but she hesitated before sharing it. On one hand, she said, "I was just, like, Oh, my gosh, this is gold—got to do this." On the other hand, she considered, "Do I want to bother my colleagues with another dick pun?" In the end, she went for it. "Trusted my gut, I guess," she said.

Whitney Snyder, a HuffPost deputy editor [...] explained that this wasn't the first time the Web site's Slack channels had been peppered with Pecker puns. "We did have a bit of a rehearsal in August," he said, referring to the day that Pecker's immunity deal with federal prosecutors was reported. "We ran a headline that was 'Report: Trump Loses Pecker.' "

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/news/current/the-story-behind-the-instant-classic-bezos-exposes-pecker-headline

Previously: Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer of Blackmail

Original Submission