ARTS According to the poet Ogden Nash, the “good thing about gossip is that it is within everyone’s reach/ And it is much more interesting than any other form of speech.” Why? Because it is about other people’s private lives: that is, about things that those close to tantalising events (the family, teachers, colleagues of those involved) might characterise as “none of your business”.
But gossip is undergoing a transformation. It has long been sellable – in the form of fiction, newspaper columns or history (much of the earliest histories, as those of Herodotus, the “father of history”, could be called gossip). In the 20th century, Hollywood – with its press agents and gossip columnists – fashioned it into a way of keeping stars permanently in the public conversation.
A 2001 study by Kate Fox for the Social Issues Research Centre think-tank found that people spent most of their conversation time talking about the private lives of others (men 55 per cent, women 67 per cent). The opportunity to make money through providing content for that amount of conversation is immense.
We are encouraged to live, in part, in other people’s private lives and to regard them as models for our own. Jade Goody, a young woman famous for her flamboyance on reality TV shows, is dying of cancer in public, parcelled out in instalments by Max Clifford, her press agent, for the avid beaks of the news media. Goody’s story lifts the sales of tabloids and magazines, fulfilling their need for an emotionally rich, serial story.
In the past two weeks there’s also been a compelling tale of family dysfunction played out in the media in the wake of novelist Julie Myerson’s decision to publish a book that details her elder son’s drug abuse (see box below). Her son had plenty to say about it, too, and the ensuing fallout has exposed the underbelly of middle-class family life to the public gaze. These are stories that draw in their audience, inviting an opinion, a stance, a response.
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| Julie Myerson talking about her new book on ‘The Alan Titchmarsh Show’ |
Gossip does not need to be qualified as “malicious”. Indeed, some academic theories of gossip see it as benign. Writing in 2000, Emrys Westacott, an associate professor of philosophy at Alfred University in New York, questioned the traditional disapproval surrounding gossip – what makes it wrong for me to talk about something that is, for whatever reason, “not my business”?
And Ronald de Sousa of the University of Toronto wrote, in the book Good Gossip (1994), that “gossip is typically a subversive form of power: an attempt by the weak and often, though far from exclusively, by women to use the power of knowledge independently of those who primarily wield more conventional power”.
In this rendering, gossip, in its popular and journalistic forms, is the subversive revenge of the resentful over the resented, resulting in the apparently endlessly satisfying proof that celebrities, the wealthy, and the titled have lives replete with scandal, misfortune and misery. It is nearly always best done by those who feel marginalised. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies, the gossip about the bright young things is relayed to the lower classes via the popular press by penniless young aristocrats with no prospects.
A perfect media storm
Just occasionally, all the elements come together to create a perfect example of a media gossip frenzy, a self-contained case study for future media studies seminars, writes Isabel Berwick. These are rare moments, when the same human interest tale is splashed everywhere from red tops to Newsnight.
The past two weeks have seen such a moment, with an explosion of coverage around an unlikely candidate for a gossip-fest: a new book by the novelist Julie Myerson. Part of The Lost Child features her elder son Jake, a young man caught up in destructive “skunk” cannabis abuse, who in early 2006 was told to behave or leave home. He left.
Myerson, who is a television culture pundit and a former FT Weekend columnist, gave an interview in late February about the book to the trade magazine The Bookseller in which she said her son had not objected to its publication. On March 1, The Observer picked up the interview and ran it as a news story. Two days later, Jake had been tracked down and interviewed by the Evening Standard. “My novelist mother was insane to kick me out because of drugs,” went the headline. Jake, it seemed, was not “on message” about the book publication.
Things then really cranked up, with a book extract in The Daily Telegraph on March 7, an interview with Myerson in The Sunday Times the next day and more from Jake in The Mail on Sunday. “She’s been writing about me since I was two, and, quite frankly, I’m not surprised by anything she does any more,” he said.
On Monday the controversy jumped off the page and into the broadcast media. Myerson appeared on Radio 4’s Front Row and on BBC2’s Newsnight to defend her decision to write about her son. On Tuesday, Jake’s father Jonathan Myerson joined in, with a lengthy article in The Guardian outlining the drug abuse, the effect on the family, and the decision to go public with it.
Then a new mini-storm erupted. The Myersons gave another interview, this time for Wednesday’s Times, and Julie was asked directly if she was the author of a popular anonymous Guardian column, Living with Teenagers, which ran for two years until last June (when the teenagers being written about found out about it, and it abruptly stopped).
Myerson denied authorship to the interviewer, then called her later to admit it was true. Knowing that Myerson had, for two years, written a column about her family life (with pseudonyms but warts-and-all) opened up a whole new debate about what is – and isn’t – acceptable to make public about children.
The Lost Child was due to be published in May but such has been the coverage that the book is being rushed out this month. Its publishers, Bloomsbury, report on The Bookseller website that, because of “huge demand”, the book is already being reprinted. The story has gone full circle. A modern media storm, indeed.
One of the biggest beasts in the contemporary gossip world, and a practitioner of gossip as the art of pulling down the mighty, is a Brit in New York. Nick Denton, 42, started out as a conventional journalist, freelancing in central Europe for the Daily Telegraph. I first met him in Bucharest during the anti-Ceausescu coup at the end of 1989. Together we ran the gauntlet of a night-time firefight to interview one of the coup’s architects. Denton, who later worked for the Financial Times for some years, then made a small fortune in the dotcom boom. In 1998, he created, with others, the entrepreneurs’ networking forum First Tuesday. He moved to New York and founded Gawker.com in 2002.
Gawker pumps out vast amounts of gossip, insults, denunciations and malice: reading the home page is an exhausting and funny insight into the self-obsessed New York media and creative worlds. The family of Gawker sites has become at once a publishing success and part of the contemporary New York bohemian scene, like Andy Warhol’s factory in the 1960s.
When, in 2005, Denton started a micro-site called “Gawker Stalker” – inviting citizens to report sightings of celebrities – he was denounced in an e-mail sent to fans by the Hollywood actor George Clooney, who called on them “to render these guys useless ” by blogging false information. “A couple of hundred conflicting sightings and this website is worthless.” The e-mail was posted online by the delighted Gawker editors.
In this century and the past one, many of the masters of the ever-increasing number of outlets purveying gossip have been American – National Enquirer, People Magazine, Hollywood Reporter – but it is also true that the most expert, innovative gossips come from Britain. It is as if our class structure – complex, infinitely layered and time honoured – had prepared a small but profitable traditional trade: that of turning resentment to good use and good money, through the tearing down of the powerful through gossip.
Take, for example, the story of James Gordon Bennett, the son of a Scottish farmer who emigrated to the US, where he worked his way up the journalistic ladder. In 1835, aged 39, he, founded the New York Herald, one of the first of a new wave of what has become known as the “yellow press”. The next year, Bennett conducted what has been described as the first journalistic interview and put its results on the front page: he talked to a detective about the murder of a prostitute.
More recently, another Scot, Iain Calder, worked his way up through local papers and Glasgow tabloids to became executive editor of The National Enquirer in New York. In the 1970s and 1980s, he took the tabloid to a weekly circulation of 5m, seeing its scoops – such as getting the first picture of Elvis Presley’s grandchild – as the match of anything the mainstream media did. In a 1996 interview, Calder celebrated his paper’s journalists as “the best editorial investigative team of the 20th century”.
Modern gossip and celebrity journalism owe much to the style of the British tabloids in which Calder was schooled. Piers Morgan, 43, a former showbiz gossip columnist on The Sun, demonstrated the rise of gossip as the prime journalistic real estate by becoming editor of the News of the World at the age of 28. In 1996, he went on to become editor of the Daily Mirror but was forced to resign in May 2004 after publishing fake pictures purporting to show British soldiers torturing Iraqis. (He had survived a scandal in which he was shown to have bought £20,000 worth of shares in the computer company Viglen just before the Mirror’s City Slicker column tipped the company as a good buy.) Adept at translating obloquy into fame, Morgan has since launched a successful television career with a deal with ITV reported to be worth £2m a year. He appears as a judge on talent shows and hosts a celebrity interview show, Piers Morgan’s Life Stories.
In his memoir The Insider, Morgan says he is proudest of a story by the reporter Ryan Parry, who posed as a footman at Buckingham Palace to produce revelations about the Queen’s life. It won the best reporter award in the 2004 British Press Awards – a sign that his peers shared Morgan’s high opinion of this journalism. Investigative reporter Mazher Mahmood of the News of the World is so famous that he has written a book, Confessions of a Fake Sheik. He has investigated abusive child carers, terrorist gangs and a would-be murderer but usually reveals the embarrassing private behaviour of celebrities.
Yet much of the gossip we read in magazines and in the papers is still tightly controlled by a small cabal of celebrities, their agents, publicists, and the editors. Deals are done: sometimes a damaging story will be held back, and in return the paper will be given an “exclusive” less upsetting to the celebrity.
Online, things are more fluid. Camilla Wright, 38, a former freelance journalist, co-founded the gossip website Popbitch in 2000 with Neil Stevenson, who worked on celebrity magazine Heat. The founders intended it for friends as a way of getting behind the regulated world of celebrity gossip.
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| Jade Goody addresses a press conference in New Delhi after the ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ race row in 2007 |
Wright notes how our notions of celebrity, and of gossip, have evolved. “What we’ve had in the past few years is the growing mass phenomenon of people desperate to belong. You can see it in the big stories – Madeleine McCann, Baby P, now Jade [Goody]. In every case people want to have a part of it, to share the emotion, to emote with the characters at the centre of the stories.
“The demand is so great but there were too few celebs. So there had to be a kind of democratisation: ordinary people were brought in. So we have a new type of celeb – the famous for being famous. Their job is to have themselves photographed but also exploited and sometimes insulted. Of course, you have to have something going for you but it doesn’t have to be much: sleeping with a big celebrity can do it.”
Wright’s own big breakthrough, in 2004, involved exactly this sort of non-celebrity. Popbitch ran rumours that David Beckham was having an affair. Wright says: “It ran on News at Ten. The publicists stamped on it but it came out months later that it was Rebecca Loos.” Loos, who was an assistant to Beckham when he first went to play for Real Madrid, has since built a successful career as a glamour model and as someone who, as Wright says, “is famous for being famous”. She makes frequent appearances on celebrity reality shows. On The Farm in 2005, for instance, she was given the task of masturbating a pig to collect its semen.
Gossip and celebrity, as Wright makes clear, is an avid, gaping maw, requiring to be filled with old and new names, faces, events and scandals, every minute of every day. The ranks of the “famous for being famous” are now thick: Jade Goody is their highest expression.
Beyond this, gossip – through its deep connection with people’s emotional needs and grudges, and commodified into the vast business-cum-phenomenon it now is – has also become a considerable political force. Political because the mantle of celebrity does not drape itself only round the shoulders of entertainers: it acts as a strait-jacket on politicians, who must now command the techniques of actors, and have large teams of image makers.
The effects of this change, still poorly understood, may be very large indeed. British politicians are forced to play parts as entertainers, in order to be seen and heard. The most notable example of this was David Cameron’s insouciance in the face of a question from Jonathan Ross on the latter’s chat show in June 2006, as to whether or not he masturbated to fantasies of Margaret Thatcher. According to a BBC spokesman, “David Cameron said afterwards that he was pleased with [the show].”
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| David Cameron being interviewed by Jonathan Ross in 2006 |
Gossip is powerful because popular newspaper editors have learnt how to harness it to humble governments, forcing them on to the tabloids’ own territory, constructed on the firm bedrock of scandal, personality and sex.
And powerful newspaper editors claim that revelations are for the moral good of the country. None has made that case more ringingly than Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail’s editor. In a speech to the Society of Editors in November last year, he took up the case of Max Mosley, head of the organisation that runs Formula One racing. Mosley had won a court case against the News of the World, which had pictured him holding a sado-masochistic orgy with a number of women. He successfully argued that the report, and especially the photographs, were an invasion of his privacy. He received £60,000 in damages.
Dacre said: “Since time immemorial, public shaming has been a vital element in defending the parameters of what are considered acceptable standards of social behaviour, helping ensure that citizens – rich and poor – adhere to them for the good of the greater community. For hundreds of years, the press has played a role in that process. It has the freedom to identify those who have offended public standards of decency – the very standards its readers believe in – and hold the transgressors up to public condemnation. If their readers don’t agree with the defence of such values, they would not buy those papers in such huge numbers.
“Put another way, if mass-circulation newspapers, which also devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs, don’t have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations, with the obvious worrying implications for the democratic process.”
The stakes for gossip, as Dacre makes clear, are high: a moral and industrial order is held to hang on it. Gossip has entered the social and political bloodstream of Britain more completely than anywhere else. A sign of our democracy or of our degeneration?
John Lloyd is a contributing editor to the Financial Times and director of journalism at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
