It was accepted that he was "the country's best-known and most widely read journalist as well as among its most influential," as The New York Times eulogized him in a front-page obituary. It was accepted that he had made the journalistic discovery, in Leonard Lyons's words, that "people were interested in people" and that he was credited consequently with the rise of a more lively, personal, and personality-oriented media. It was Walter Winchell who rewrote the rules for what was permissible in a major daily newspaper; it was Walter Winchell who first created a demand for juicy tidbits about celebrities and then spent more than forty years attempting to satisfy it. . . .

But that was precisely the problem and the cultural tragedy. If Winchell was responsible for having enlivened journalism, he was also responsible in the eyes of many for having debased it. Once loosed, gossip refused to confine itself to columns. Once loosed, it danced all over the paper, sometimes seizing headlines, sometimes spawning whole publications and television programs, sometimes, and more insidiously, infecting reportage of so-called straight news by emphasizing voice and personalities at the expense of objectivity and duller facts. . . .

Long after the gossip column itself had yielded to other, larger and more pervasive vehicles of celebrity, this legacy remained. We would believe in our entitlement to know everything about our public figures. We would believe that fame is an exalted state but suspect that the famous always have something to hide. Above all, we would believe in a culture of gossip and celebrity where entertainment takes primacy over every other value. We would believe long after Walter Winchell, the man who had helped start it all, had been forgotten, another name on the ash heap of celebrity.

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