Gossip Columns
As America shed its provincial nineteenth-century sensibilities and slowly entered the modern era, the media emerged as one of the twentieth century's most powerful forces. But until the early 1920s, journalism was still influenced by an older ethos of taste and goodbreeding—until Walter Winchell. An ambitious young New York newspaperman, Winchell brought gossip into the mainstream media, breaking longstanding taboos in favor of a press for whom nothing was sacred and no one was guaranteed privacy. During his heyday, two-thirds of the adult population of America listened to Winchell's radio broadcast or read his column, as America clamored to learn "the dirt" about the rich, the famous, and the powerful. The ultimate tool of a democracy, gossip became the great leveler, breaking down distinctions of class, race, and gender, in favor of a society where no one is above reproach and everyone is the subject of gossip. His influence was pervasive, spawning such hugely successful gossip mongers as Hollywood's Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, whose fame soon came to exceed even Winchell's. What once was shocking soon became expected and, over the course of the twentieth century, gossip has become an integral component of mainstream journalism from which no one has become exempt—not even, as the world found out in 1998, the President of the United States.
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