Changing Standards

It seems sometimes almost quaint to tag gossip and gossiping as a bad thing. We live in the age of gossip. The proliferation of gossip about celebrities, from sports figures to movie stars to politicians, has increased by a startling degree in the past few decades, and I believe that has loosened the restraint on people’s tongues in many areas of life. The state of Princess Diana and Prince Charles’ marriage and her death, the drunk driving arrest of Mel Gibson, the page problem of former Florida U.S. Congressman Mark Foley, etc., etc.) – all have sparked obsessive media coverage.

Before the 1970s, almost none of this gossip would have been known by the public at large, let alone have graced the pages of a mainstream newspaper or magazine. The National Enquirer, among others, has changed the standards of journalism. Today, not only are we hit with gossip everywhere from the supermarket check-out line to the nightly news, we can almost count on it when we open our email.

Just how quickly have things changed about our attitudes toward gossip? If you go back not too very long ago, to the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, one thing stands out – his personal life was not a primary subject for the media. For example, a number of his biographers have written extensively about his relationship with the “tall, blonde secretary,” a relationship which seemingly continued sporadically in one fashion or another over several decades. But although the affair was hardly unknown around Washington and reported on occasionally in the media, it certainly never became the pulsating, 24-hour, seven-day-a-week news phenomenon seen in the case of President Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky. That relationship, though it had little to do with the genuine issues of the day, quickly dominated media airtime and pages and spawned endless political analysis.

Prominent presidential historian Doris Kerns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize winner in history, put it eloquently in a keynote lecture at Kansas State University in 1997:

"Just imagine what the modern media would have made of the Roosevelt White House. The secretary in love with her boss, a woman reporter in love with Eleanor…Prime Minister (Winston Churchill) drinking much of the day. And yet, fortunately, because there was an unwritten rule that the private lives of our public figures were relevant only if they had a direct impact on their leadership, these unconventional relationships were allowed to flourish. How I wish we could return to that standard today, for I have no doubt that many of our best people are unwilling to enter public life for fear of the unnecessary intrusion into their private lives."

Does gossip hurt? How many of us, seeing how the private lives of political figures are subject to the most intense scrutiny and the most insidious interpretations, are willing to run for public office?