Word: gossipeer
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...accuracy of her items? So what if in her column she dispenses advice to Ivana and can't keep straight if she is friend or journalist? So what if Suzy claims to have attended a party when she did not? So what if in the nitwit pantheon of gossip Claus Von Bulow, Sydney Biddle Barrows and Jessica Hahn are celebrated in the same tones as people of genuine accomplishment...
Which gets to perhaps the central fact about today's excess of gossip and celebrity journalism: it is contemptuous of readers and viewers. It says they are incapable of dealing with real news and that they must be fed Pablum and given the illusion that they are vicariously participating in important stuff. It is also about class: a nouveau celebrity class applauded less for achievement than for the mere acquisition of money or the act of becoming famous. I suspect that the pre-eminence of this type of gossip and celebrity journalism is not unrelated to the private frustrations...
This, incidentally, is being written by someone who has done more than his share of time in Liz Smith's column and a few others. As I write this, "Page Six" of the New York Post and the gossip columnist of the Washington Times have called to ask for details about the piece you are now reading -- and "Is it true that it begins with a sentence about Liz Smith and the breakup of your marriage?" Who cares...
...phone calls, knocking on doors, spending hours with people who know the subject and, most important of all, giving credence to information that might be contrary to a reporter's preconceived notion of the story. Real life is about gray; it doesn't usually follow the trajectory of the gossip chroniclers: soaring careers one day, plummeting fortunes the next. Real life is about context, and so is real journalism...
There she was, blond and bedizened and bravely unbowed, pictured on the front page of the newspaper to which she had confided her most private conversations. No, not Ivana Trump. The woman standing next to her, the one commanding equal attention in that come-to-tell-all photo: syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith of the New York Daily News, the shoulder La Trump chose to cry on when she wanted to tell the whole world what she thought of the man who had left her. They stood side by side, equals and friends and newsmakers, the aspirant to a jumbo...