LIMP PECKER BID
Tabloid king had no $hot with Meredith: source
Meredith Corp. had no time for tabloid king David Pecker.
Pecker, who for months reportedly pined to purchase Time magazine and other Time Inc. titles from Meredith — even aggressively courting a Saudi prince to invest in his American Media Inc. — never stood a shot at getting his hands on the esteemed weekly, The Post has learned.
“Meredith would never sell it to him,” said one well-placed source inside the Des Moines, Iowa, publisher.
But Pecker, long on hope but short of cash, continued to court the Saudis through 2017 in hopes of having them invest in AMI.
Pecker even befriended a French businessman who advises Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on investments, to help his effort, according to a report on Friday.
Pecker invited that friend, Kacy Grine, to attend a White House visit with President Trump last July, the New York Times reported.
But the AMI boss’ efforts came to an abrupt end in February when, as The Post first reported, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund chose to invest $200 million in Jay Penske’s Penske Media Corp.
PMC, which owns Rolling Stone, Variety and WWD, is very much in the hunt to buy the Meredith titles.
Cash-strapped AMI — which stretched to the limit to buy Us Weekly and Men’s Journal from Wenner Media last year for more than $110 million — has no spare cash to finance another buyout.
In a statement issued just after the Saudi deal with Penske, the company was forced to acknowledge it was out of the Time magazine hunt: “American Media Inc. no longer has any interest in acquiring any of the former Time Inc. brands being made available for sale by Meredith Corporation and remains focused on continuing to grow its recent acquisitions of Us Weekly and Men’s Journal as well as its current roster of celebrity and lifestyle media brands.”
The statement brought to an end Pecker’s years-long pursuit of Time.
In fact, when Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes still controlled the magazines, he interviewed Pecker as a potential CEO of the embattled publisher.
Shortly after The Post broke the news about the interview, a now-infamous tweet was published by then-private citizen Donald Trump: “David Pecker would be brilliant choice as CEO of TIME magazine...”
Of course, Trump missed that Pecker was interviewing for a job that would put him atop all of Time Inc. magazines — not just the prestigious but slumping newsweekly.
Pecker did not get the job — but that didn’t cool his interest in Time.
After the summer White House visit, Pecker led AMI on the production of a 100page special interest magazine that appears to be a giant advertorial extolling the virtues of bin Salman, industry observers said.
During production of the magazine, Pecker traveled to Saudi Arabia to hold business discussions.
An AMI spokesman insisted the $13.99 magazine was just one of 52 special issues that AMI will produce and that the company is “absolutely not” courting the prince for an investment.
Nice try, David AMI boss David Pecker courted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the hope that he would invest in his company to finance the purchase of Time. But Meredith had no intention of selling the title to Pecker, The Post reports.