Word: gossiped
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...veteran film publicist terms today's gossip columnists "more professional than they used to be, more fact oriented, less careless, less reliant on hearsay." In Winchell's day, he notes, columnists ran more blind items in which no names were used, and thus were more apt to take a chance on a tip. Today's scribes are more likely to seek confirmation, though they will still rely on a hunch. Last fall Washington Times gossip writer Charlotte Hays heard that actress Kelly McGillis, who had signed for the season at the Shakespeare Theater at the Folger, was pregnant and would...
...Gossip columnists admit they will haggle for a story. According to Mitchell Fink, a PEOPLE magazine columnist and Fox Entertainment News commentator, a smart flack will serve up several good items having nothing to do with his clients -- though maybe a juicy expose about someone else's -- before offering a tidbit designed to make a client look good. "How can I say no," Fink asks, "when they have sent me other blockbuster items?" Smart press agents know how to manipulate a client's image by choosing what charities and causes to support. However inconvenient the information that is circulating about...
Admit it. No matter how interested you are in serious news, every so often you glance at a gossip column, scanning its staccato list of items and bold- faced names to see if there is anything of interest . . . Yet, is American society becoming too obsessed with gossip, too absorbed with the private lives of public people? . . . For Naushad Mehta, interviewing columnist Liz Smith and her brethren for this week's cover stories was an amusing change of pace . . . Though Mehta kept asking about the troublesome issues raised by our national infatuation with the trivial, her subjects kept changing the topic...
Mary Cronin probed the public relations trade . . . "Flacks guiding clients up the social ladder," she says, "protect them as if they were atomic secrets" . . . In Washington, Michael Riley rang up Diana McLellan, the doyen of D.C. gossips . . . "She breathlessly picked up the receiver and talked without stopping. And she was doing her nails, causing her to lose her train of thought several times" . . . In Los Angeles, Jeanne McDowell concluded that gossip levels there approach the toxic because so many people have car phones . . . Stuck in traffic? Call a friend and talk about Cher...