Freeborn, remember that the major media would get blacklisted for any Tom Cruise interviews. Pat Kingsley is Tom Cruise's ferociously protective publicist, and only allows interviews with obedient big media who are forbidden to ask certain questions about Scientology. Since the National Enquirer has nothing to lose (since Tom Cruise AIN'T gonna give it any interviews no matter what), they can splash lurid headlines.
What DOES bother me about the tabloids is that while their reporters do snoop around like reporters are supposed to do, the tabloids will pad the story with paid-for gossip. Yet much of the big media is too tangled up in deals, favors, and fear to report unflattering stories about Tom Cruise.
QUOTE:
As Jeannette Walls, the gossip columnist for the American MSNBC cable channel, reveals in her book,
Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip, it is just as likely to be the stars who have supplied the tittle-tattle themselves. Walls reports that when MTV was working on an expose of alternative religions Scientologist Lisa Marie Presley, called the station. She told them bluntly that if they were tough on scientology, they would lose access to Jackson's music.
"Pat Kingsley is the self-styled dominatrix of movie PR. Walls calls her the 'most loathed woman in Hollywood' and claims in her book that Kingsley not only gets to decide which journalists can interview her stars, but also controls what they can write about. With Cruise, for example, she has insisted that journalists sign contracts that he will not be presented 'in a negative or derogatory manner', which pretty much precludes anything interesting.
"Walls describes how, over the years, Kingsley has astutely used the press's desperation to get access to Cruise as a way of shielding him from unwanted questions about his membership of the Church of Scientology and false rumours about his sexual orientation. It is even suggested that Kingsley allowed false stories to circulate that portrayed the actor as a hero. At the time of the release of Mission: Impossible, it was reported that Cruise had saved the lives of a French family whose yacht had exploded off Capri. But according to the Italian coast guard, Cruise was not involved in the rescue at all - all he did was visit the family in hospital."
END QUOTE from
http://www.xenu.net/archive/WIR/wir5-5.html So, except for a few brave reporters like Jeannette Walls, the tabloids are the only place you can get some of the "real" gossip about the
Tom-Cruise-and-Scientology story,
John-Travolta-and-Scientology, and
Lisa-Marie Presley-and-Scientology.