July/August 2000 | Contents

THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE:
Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

BY ANDIE TUCHER

Yes, of course, any review in the gossip genre will inevitably contain the phrase "guilty pleasure," and yes, of course, there is some of that in Dish. So let's get that over with at the top. I acknowledge, frankly and heartily, that I was delighted to learn Donald Trump once phoned a People reporter himself, identified himself as a "John Miller" who was helping Trump with p.r., and fed the fascinated scribe a long yarn about all the female celebrities who were calling and pestering the poor mogul in the hopes of dating him. I was also enchanted to read that the résumé of the New York Post's Cindy Adams includes a long list of 1940s-era beauty titles ranging from Miss Coaxial Cable to Miss Bazooka Bubble Gum.

But silly stories about silly people are one thing, and a hefty book like this, with its thirty-one pages of notes and sources, its chapters devoted to Roone Arledge as well as to Donald Trump, and its general air of seriousness, is quite another.

In fact, dear reader, this is, instead, metagossip. Dish, by MSNBC's gossip columnist, does indeed give you the "inside story" on how the world of gossip and tabloid news works, but it does so by indulging in some of the tabloids' own shabbiest tactics to make its points. And the main point, apparently, is that serious news and tabloid news (or gossip -- often Walls seems to consider them one and the same) have grown more and more alike over the years, which is dangerous, trivializing, and insulting -- to the tabloids.

That's not how it was in the good old days. Back in the 1930s and '40s, gossip got the respect it deserved. Walls's first fifty-odd pages sometimes read like a paean to those palmy days when ur-gossipmonger Walter Winchell "was said to be, outside politics and religion, the most powerful man in the world." When gossip columnists were "valued by their papers," when they were "loved and even respected by the public," when they numbered "among the best read and most influential journalists in the country."

The mainstream media, however, have been horning in on the tabs' turf ever since, and they've made a mess of everything. Mixed in with dishy chapters on Gene Pope's National Enquirer, the Elvis industry, and the junket racket are breathless exposés of all those hypocritical "mainstream" institutions that denounce the tabloids even as they use their tactics. 60 Minutes demonstrated "how television adopted the techniques pioneered by the Enquirer." The hiring of Geraldo Rivera made ABC News "an aggressive pioneer in the tabloidization of network news." Tina Brown's Vanity Fair single-handedly destroyed the idea that mainstream magazines at least "had pretenses of journalistic integrity and concern for the good of society." The O.J. story made "tabloid values, tabloid techniques, and tabloid standards . . . become the values, techniques, and standards accepted by the mainstream media."

There is, of course, a lot of truth, though not much news, in Walls's argument that many respectable news organizations often embrace tabloid values. But in her effort to make this news, she doesn't scruple to bend, even to break the truth. Deconstruct her exposés of the mainstream uses of tabloid tactics, and you'll find the tabloid columnist using tabloid tactics to make her exposé of mainstream media look mainstream. It's either a fiendishly clever postmodern conceit or the unutterably depressing failure of a writer who consistently refers to gossip columnists as "journalists" (all except for Miss Coaxial Cable, who "wasn't really a journalist -- she was a character" -- whew!) to see any remaining differences at all between www.msnbc.com/news/gossip and, say, The New York Times.

Those tabloid tactics include:

The write-around. This is the practice of publishing a story "done without the cooperation of the subject," clearly a trick frowned upon in Gossipworld. People's write-around on Goldie Hawn "infuriated" her publicist, the powerful Pat Kingsley, who blasted the magazine for "'subterfuge' and 'misrepresentation' by using quotes that had appeared elsewhere."

Now I certainly wouldn't accuse Walls herself of subterfuge. The careful reader will notice she never actually claims to have interviewed Matt Drudge, Anthony Pellicano, Rona Barrett, Liz Smith, Carol Burnett, Steve Dunleavy, or many of the other celebrities so lavishly quoted in her chapters. And the scrupulous reader is free to turn to the source notes in the back and discover the long lists of articles, books, and broadcasts Walls does cite instead. The fanatically meticulous reader with access to Nexis could even search out and find the "elsewhere" where most of those quotes did appear, some of them years ago. "Subterfuge" -- no, not exactly.

The anonymous source. When Fox Butterfield of The New York Times uses them in his story about the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape, he's operating "in true tabloid fashion." That must be why Walls's source notes include references to "interviews with a number of people who work for [Mike Wallace], many of whom asked not to be identified." And "interviews with current and former National Enquirer employees who wish to remain anonymous." And "interviews with current and former employees of ABC, including Barbara Walters . . . and others who wished to remain anonymous." And "a number of former staffers [of Vanity Fair who] spoke on the condition of anonymity." And so on.

The innuendo and the half-truth. For innuendo, one example of many will suffice -- the gratuitous resurrection of Dorothy Dandridge's humiliation at the libel trial of the sleazy keyhole magazine Confidential in 1957. Walls casually describes the magazine's charges that "the elegantly beautiful" black singer/actress had had a passionate outdoor encounter with a bandleader at a Lake Tahoe resort, and then moves on to Clark Gable's affairs. What Walls doesn't say is that Dandridge refuted the story in terms that are as poignant today as they must have been convincing to 1957 readers. The singer pointed out that she couldn't even have gone walking in public with a white man, let alone romping with him. "Lake Tahoe at that time was very prejudiced," she told the court. "Negroes were not permitted that freedom . . . . I couldn't have been seen with Mr. Terry in a prejudiced place like Lake Tahoe."

As for half-truths, again, one example will give the flavor: in her chapter on John F. Kennedy's manipulation of the press, Walls repeats the tale of young Jack's alleged secret first marriage to a Florida socialite that was allegedly annulled and covered up by his furious father, and notes that Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot "resurrected" the story and "declared it true." Not mentioned: the various reviewers who also looked into the story and declared Hersh wrong.

The book is littered throughout with careless slips: the tobacco whistleblower was Jeffrey Wigand, not Wigland; the late columnist was Sheilah Graham, not Sheila; the surrogate mother was Mary Beth Whitehead, not Mary Joe; the editor Iain Calder did not have a wife of forty-one years when he was only fifty-six years old; and if that poor woman killed over a game of dominoes had really been found "crumbled" on the floor of her mobile home, then I say the National Enquirer had every right to make a story of it.

As a dishy book full of gossip about Elvis or The Donald, this could have been an entertaining beach companion. But Dish, masquerading as a serious look at what is indeed a serious problem for journalists and their public, undermines any impulse toward reform or even rational discussion with its implicit argument that the tabloid press can't really be so bad because the mainstream press is worse. That kind of argument may be depressingly familiar in public discourse these days (as in "Yeah, but at least when Giuliani committed adultery it was with someone his own age") -- but in this case it's worse than specious. It's dishonest. And you can quote me by name.

Andie Tucher is an assistant professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.