Mark Landsman’s sensationalist documentary about a sensationalist tabloid occasionally informs but ultimately over exaggerates its subject’s historic importance, becoming an almost parodic mirror-image of the very subject it documents. The film tracks the rise of the infamous National Enquirer, from its early days as a spinoff hustle project for a mob-connected entrepreneur to its modern, salacious incarnation of celebrity scandal gossip.

The biggest takeaway from the documentary is that the Enquirer is exactly what everyone has long known it to be, media that makes TMZ look like respectable journalism. This begs the question of why a 96-minute documentary, executive produced by CNN, on something as banal, predictable, and utterly insipid as a third-rate supermarket newspaper needed to be made in the first place. After all, yellow journalism has been around since the late 19th century and populist fascination for the lurid and profane since the dawn of man. Yet, Scandalous presents the National Enquirer as a maverick, albeit problematic (which is an understatement), innovator of all that is lewd, and by the end, the film feels like a massive PR project designed to reinvent the paper’s crude image into something more palpably important.

The publication’s veteran “reporters” are our main voices here, and many of them are absolutely unapologetic about what they did. There’s a feeling of crass nostalgia emanating from them as they recollect their amoral ventures. We get long rousing tales of sky-high budgets for stories, some of which include private jets for reporters; gaudy company celebrations; and cartoonish attempts to paint the Enquirer’s austere boss, Generoso Pope Jr., as mythical in stature: he wouldn’t “look anyone in the eye” and always kept his employees “on their toes”; “You could be fired at any minute!”

From the coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial, the death of Princess Diana, and the popularity of Oprah, to Trump’s rise to reality TV stardom and the Stormy Daniels leaks, Scandalous attempts to connect the history of one newspaper to our current epoch of “fake news” and Trumpism. There’s certainly potential for substance here. But instead, the film weaves toward long-known clichés about the macabre degeneracy of the American Id, instead of, say, delving deeper into the systemic spread of sensationalism into what’s supposed to be respectable journalistic institutions. Overall, Scandalous ends up being myopic. Its shallow focus and lack of academic critique feels like a missed opportunity to say something about corporate media concentration and the impact of ad-driven news on political discourse in the 21st century.