Word: gossip
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...Gossip columns may even feature other gossip columnists. Although most practitioners are too competitive to mention one another, they all take frequent note of Claudia Cohen, who moved from "Page Six" at the Post to the I, Claudia column at the Daily News to her current bully pulpit, Live with Regis and Kathie Lee on ABC-TV. Along the way she vaulted into the ranks of privilege by marrying an A-list name, corporate raider Ron Perelman...
...Many gossip-column names, like the Trump clan, become famous primarily for being famous. Long before Trump ranked as one of the wealthiest Americans, he made himself one of the best known simply by trying. He followed a social path that one public relations counselor says is available to any Manhattan couple with about $100,000 to squander, "not counting the jewelry." He and his wife adopted the right charities, made sure they were photographed at the proper < benefits and balls, acquired well-publicized luxury possessions and set up holiday homes at fashionable times and places...
...sure, a lot of the gossip reported in Chicago and elsewhere is about people who are based in New York City or Los Angeles and who thereby attract national attention. "The people who crave the publicity in Chicago in the way the Trumps do," explains Zwecker, "aren't in his league financially. The people in his league financially go to bed at 9 p.m., lead a simpler life and don't care if they're in my column." Something of the same is true in the home of the bean and the cod, according to Boston Herald gossipist Norma Nathan...
Apart from the change in national morals, the power of any individual gossip is limited by the proliferation of competing media outlets. Liz Smith's distribution to about 60 newspapers, her local TV appearances in New York City, and her proposed syndicated TV series, for example, fall far short of the astounding ability Walter Winchell had to reach almost 90% of the adult U.S. population during the 1930s. His six-days-a-week column appeared in almost a thousand newspapers with total daily circulation of 50 million. His Sunday-night radio broadcast reached 21 million. Parsons and her rival, Hedda...
Some scholars argue that today's gossip columnists are more powerful than Winchell because audiences care more. American society has become so much more media conscious. While film and radio gave the public a sense of connection with stars, nothing compares with television for affording a false sense of intimacy. TV personalities become surrogate friends or family members, and faces glimpsed in the news or on talk shows become significant presences in the lives of many viewers. Their private lives thus seem a genuine public concern. This is reflected, according to Everette Dennis, executive director of the Gannett Center...