I was writing a book on gossip when I read Dan Rather’s remark that the news is discovering something someone doesn’t want known. I was struck by how close this definition was to my definition of gossip: people saying things about another person that he would prefer not to have known. In recent years, gossip and the news have come to seem more and more similar, if not one and the same.
Consider these hot national stories of the past year: the Dominique Strauss-Kahn story, the Herman Cain sexual harassment allegations, the Penn State and Syracuse University child molestation scandals, the Bill Richardson love affair with a former campaign staff member. In an earlier day, such stories would have remained in the subterranean world of gossip, shared by insiders, blithely ignored by all others. Today, they get major play, on the front page above the fold of newspapers, leading off national network news.
A radical change in recent decades of social decorum, one that feeds the gossip instinct, has brought this about. Interest in sexcapades has always been there, but in former times there seemed no need to drag it out before the public. Everyone in the know in Washington was aware that President Franklin Roosevelt had had a liaison with Lucy Rutherford as did, later, Dwight D. Eisenhower with Kay Summersby, but it stayed with people in the know and got no play in the press. John F. Kennedy was the last president whose personal conduct — which was impressively gaudy — was given a pass.
All this changed with Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon. Perhaps it did so because the press felt deceived, and consequently aggrieved, by their conduct during the war in Vietnam. Stories about Johnson’s vulgarity were at a premium: his humiliating C. Douglas Dillon, his secretary of the Treasury, by having him report to him while Johnson sat on the toilet, or Johnson’s claim to have Hubert Humphrey’s testicles in his pocket. Nixon’s anti-Semitism was made public, though it was probably no worse than Harry Truman’s, which in an earlier time went without mention.
Oscar Wilde, who had a taste for paradox and didn’t mind a fine touch of exaggeration, called journalism “gossip organized.” Even he, though, would be surprised to discover how extensively gossip has come to swamp journalism. The “feature” story, once a staple of the middle or back pages of American newspapers, is now where the action is. And what is featured today, chiefly gossip about sex, would have been unthinkable at an earlier time.
Whatever else the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky anti-saga was, it was richly detailed gossip — blue dress from the Gap and all that — and very high in what, at the time, Cokie Roberts called “the yuck factor.” But now, because of the breakdown in decorum, the yuck factor is often what makes a story and keeps it alive. No longer is it quite sufficient to learn that a politician or other public figure is having a love affair, but the when, the where and the how of it are spelled out.
A pre-Dan Rather definition of journalism held that it entailed accurate reporting of important incidents and events in a way that conveys their significance. In respectable journalism, the actors involved tended to be demoted further to the background than they are now, with actions and policies brought to the fore. Many stories were thought unfit to print.
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The New York Times, for example, was criticized for not jumping on the John Edwards story. The story was that, while running for the presidency of the United States and with a wife dying of cancer, Edwards had a mistress whom he had made pregnant. (Gossip is often true, as it turned out to be in this instance, which is what makes it so tantalizing.) The paper that was on the story, and in a full-court press way, was the National Enquirer. Some claimed the Times was ignoring the story because of liberal bias. More likely, the paper was wary of taking it up, having been burned not long before by running a mistaken piece about Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., implying that he had had an affair with a lobbyist.
Gossip has its own built-in bias. The late gossip columnist Earl Wilson captured this point concisely when he defined gossip as “hearing something you like about someone you don’t like.”
Gossip can be artful, charming and pertinent. When it is also true, it can supply crucial information. Nor is all of it lowbrow. The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin allowed that he couldn’t live without gossip. Gossip was the basis of the friendship between the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and the art connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Even Louis XIV relied upon it, if only to find out what the courtiers at Versailles were saying about him.
Like sex, gossip is a great indoor sport, but, like sex, best not overdone. Currently, gossip is vastly overdone, driving much of our politics through the serious form of gossip known as leaks, taking over larger and larger stretches of journalism and making us all potential victims on the Internet. Allowed to become too widespread, gossip can lower the tone of the country, vulgarizing and dumbing us all down. Journalism does better to eschew it and, like Sgt. Friday of “Dragnet,” pursue “just the facts, Ma’am.”
Joseph Epstein is an essayist, short story writer and a former lecturer at Northwestern University. “Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit” is his latest book.