Gossip (26 page)

An additional problem is that Seymour Hersh has a locked-in set of political views. They are left wing, welcoming to all conspiracy theories that make the American government in power look devious, skeptical only of the possibility of honorable motives, rarely considering that untoward events in politics are sometimes owing to simple ineptitude. This makes the leaks he retails seem rather prefabricated. Hersh stories, whatever their subject, have essentially the same theme: the sons of bitches are up to no good.

Bob Woodward, who, after his reporting days with Carl Bernstein went on to write his own books, has a far less obvious political slant than Hersh. I am less than certain of Woodward's politics; forced to guess, I would describe them as centrist, somewhat liberal. But Woodward is himself so nearly a man of the establishment, no matter which party is in power, that his leak-brokering scarcely has the element of mischievousness and malice that much stirring gossip has. But in the end, gossip it, too, is.

Woodward comes across as a reporter with serious connections conveying just the facts, ma'am. Yet his books, invariably bestsellers, made so by political and news junkies, have the cachet they do chiefly because he is able to obtain lengthy interviews with major political players. No "top-ranking CIA agent" or "senior Pentagon official" for Bob Woodward; he deals directly with secretaries of state, defense, treasury, vice presidents, Supreme Court justices, and the president himself, whoever he happens to be at the time.

Why they choose to talk with Woodward is fairly clear. What he is writing in his books is taken to be a form of contemporary history, and men and women in power do not wish to be painted as being on the wrong side, raising Woodward's ire by refusing to talk with him. He also offers them an excellent chance to state their own positions, which can sometimes entail undermining the positions of others. So a recently resigned secretary of state might tell Woodward that he was hoodwinked or blindsided by other cabinet members with hidden agendas in connection with, say, sending American troops to Iraq. A Supreme Court justice might take the occasion of a lengthy Woodward interview to unburden himself of subtle criticism of his fellow justices. These moments of revelation, of elevated gossip, are what eager readers look for in Bob Woodward's books, and he rarely fails to supply it.

The question of leaks has been made much more complicated, as has all the world of information, by the advent of the Internet, where leaks can threaten the security of nations. As it has with gossip generally, the Internet has raised the stakes of the political gossip that goes by the name of leaks. In 2009 a supposedly disaffected intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning leaked a video to a website called WikiLeaks showing an American raid on an Afghan village in which 140 civilians, women and children included, may have been killed. The raid really happened; an unknown yet far from small number of innocent people perished. The U.S. Army would never have released such a video, for the sensible reason that it could only lower the morale of American and other troops fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The leaker turned out to be a man said to have been under pressure as a homosexual under the military's "don't ask, don't tell" rule, and with a grievance against the army for demoting him in rank for assaulting another soldier. But the larger point is that the Internet, through the higher gossip of political leaks, makes possible a wide audience for anyone with a grievance in possession of classified information. And now, as we have come to know more about WikiLeaks and its head, Julian Assange, we begin to realize the serious, even deadly, consequences political leaks can have.

Perhaps the archperformer in the realm of political gossip and leaks has been Matt Drudge. Drudge's politics are libertarian-conservative. He prides himself on having been an uninterested student, a college dropout who went on to become a clerk at a Hollywood 7-Eleven and later at a CBS souvenir shop. In the latter job he kept on the qui vive for gossip, mainly about television and show business. As he told the story himself, in a talk to the National Press Club in 1998: "Overhearing, listening to careful conversations, intercepting the occasional memo—[I] would volunteer in the mail room from time to time—I hit pay dirt when I discovered that the trash cans in the Xerox room at Television City were stuffed each morning with overnight Nielsen ratings—information gold. I don't know what I did with it ... Me and my friends knew
Dallas
had got a 35-share over
Falcon Crest.
But we thought we were plugged in."

On a computer his father bought him, Drudge began sending out his scraps of such gossip to friends via e-mail. He broke the story that Jerry Seinfeld wanted a million dollars per episode for the
Seinfeld
show. His e-mail list grew; others wanted to be on it. He began to send it out under the name
The Drudge Report.
Soon he was sending thousands of e-mails, and so he set up a website. He extended the range of his gossip from Hollywood to Washington, the city of his birth. He broke the story about Bill Clinton's antics with Monica Lewinsky; he did so by reporting that
Newsweek
had such a story ready to run but at the last moment decided against going ahead with it. When the mainstream media decide to act responsibly, freebooters such as Drudge are always ready to step in and do the dirty work. Drudge soon became more interested in politics than in show business, though he tended to treat both alike. (After all, what is Washington, as has been said, but Hollywood for homely people?) Politics, show biz, to Drudge it's all the same—snooping and scooping.

His snooping and scooping has made Matt Drudge a nice living; some say more than a million dollars a year. Drudge sees himself as more than merely lucky, or being rewarded for hard work. He views himself as part of a trend, a movement, an irresistible wave—a tsunami is more like it. "What's going on here?" he asked in his National Press Club talk:

 

Well, clearly there is a hunger for unedited information, absent corporate considerations. As the first guy who has made a name for himself on the Internet, I've been invited to more and more high-toned gatherings such as this, the last being a conference on Internet & Society and some word I couldn't pronounce, up at Harvard a week ago. And I mention this not just to blow my own horn, but to make a point. Exalted minds—the panelists' and the audience's average IQ exceeds the Dow Jones—didn't appear to have a clue what this Internet's going to do; what we're going to make of it, what we're going to—what this is all going to turn into. But I have glimpses ...

We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be. The difference between the Internet, television and radio, magazines, newspapers is the two-way communication. The Net gives as much voice to a 13-year-old computer geek like me as to a CEO or speaker of the House. We all become equal. And you would be amazed what the ordinary guy knows.

 

Ah yes, that vibrating din of small voices. It will soon, if it hasn't already, replace the boom of larger voices: the shrill sounds of the Walter Winchells, Leonard Lyonses, Dorothy Kilgallens, and Liz Smiths, even those who attempt to replace them on
TMZ
and Page Six, not to speak of the aspiring investigative reporters at the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
the
Chicago Tribune,
the
Los Angeles Times,
and lesser papers. Nobody, including Matt Drudge, knows for certain, but it is beginning to look as if that vibrating din of small voices will one day make the information whores of old seem like upstanding Boston virgins.

"Unedited information," Matt Drudge calls it. Perhaps those two words might stand in as another definition of gossip. Whence derives this strong appetite for the unedited information now flooding the world? Just possibly from the fact that edited information—that is, information thoroughly checked, put through a filter of thoughtful discretion about its consequences, then rechecked—is simply too boring for a culture more and more attuned to the quick, the half-read, the incomplete. Unedited information serves as the hors d'oeuvre for grazing for the not deeply interested but merely curious generations brought up with computer information. This same culture, our culture, has become one of distractions, and gossip is nothing if not distracting.

Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Politico.com, and other of the investigative journalists and journalistic institutions of our day might be miffed—more than miffed, ticked to the max—to learn that they are mainly purveyors of gossip. Calling them such puts a dent in their pretensions, but not in those of Matt Drudge, who is without any pretensions whatsoever, but knows that gossip is what pays, especially gossip dressed up to look significant.

Not long after Tina Brown was appointed editor of
The New Yorker,
following a publicity-stirring if not financially successful run as editor of
Vanity Fair,
I was asked by the
London
Times Literary Supplement
to write a review of a book by the old-line
New Yorker
writer Joseph Mitchell. In the course of doing so, I noted that the times had so changed that the subjects Mitchell wrote best about—odd but fascinating unknown characters in and about New York—were no longer around, and even if they were, the magazine, under its current editorship, would have no room for Mitchell's interest in the merely delightfully unusual and idiosyncratic, but was solely interested in the celebrated and infamous. I went on to compare Tina Brown's
New Yorker
to "an elegant old friend who had discovered a novelty store on the way home from work and had taken to leaving plaster-of-paris dog droppings and rubber vomit on one's carpeting." A fairly rough insult, or so I thought at the time. I find it difficult to imagine that Brown did not see these words. Yet not much later I was invited, by one of her subeditors, to write for
The New Yorker,
and it was only under her editorship that my writing appeared there with any regularity. This woman, I concluded, is more complicated than I had thought.

Lady Evans, she is, CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire), if you can fancy that, dearie. But she will always be Tina to me, rather like the Miss Brown in the song Billie Holiday sang, the one about "lovable, huggable Emily Brown, Miss Brown to you." Except that Tina Brown, one of the great editorial entrepreneurs of our time and a
maestra
of modern gossip, is Tina not to me alone but to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people through creating her own insiderly, buzzy, gossipy journalism.

An editorial genius of a kind, her strength in this line could not have been employed had Tina Brown not also possessed many skills in the art of self-advancement. But all this would be as nothing if it had not been accompanied by her strong sense of what people want to know and her ability to produce it. What they want to know, according to the Gospel of Tina, is the lowdown on the rich and famous, the powerful and the beautiful, but they want it without feeling themselves in the least
National Enquirer
lower class. Tina's skill is to make essentially debased interest, misplaced curiosity, and voyeuristic emotion seem not tacky but perfectly all right, fun, smart.

Christina Brown was born in 1953, the daughter of an English movie producer named George Hambley Brown and Bettina Brown; the latter worked for the more successful movie producer Alexander Korda. From an early age Tina was surrounded by what the English call "namey" people, brought to their home through her father's work in the movies and her attractive mother's social climbing. Her mother was half-Jewish, and in the old rigid class system wasn't able to ascend very high up the social mountain. Such fantasies of advancement as she entertained she invested in her daughter.

A self-starter, the young Tina Brown was a woman who knew what she wanted and had a fairly precise notion of what it took to acquire it. She wanted above all to be an insider, rich and famous herself while reserving the right to mock the rich and famous and chronicle what life was like among those securely inside. She didn't get into a first-class women's college at Oxford, which was a setback. Still, Oxford is Oxford. As a child, Tina was pudgy and wore thick glasses. As a young woman, the pudginess turned into the zaftig; a young man she went out with at Oxford referred to her in retrospect in those days as "a blond Monica Lewinsky." Unlike Monica, she did not get to do a president or prime minister, but she apparently did all right, bonking her way up the food chain of Oxford celebrity. Another young man, mentioned in Judy Bachrach's book
Tina and Harry Come to America,
remembers her wearing sunglasses and having "a thrusting bosom" upon which, he added, she should have worn the sunglasses.

Tina had flings with young men thought to be going somewhere and with a few members of the British upper class, who were already there. At twenty, she broke up the marriage of a film director. She had a longish liaison with the writer Martin Amis, son of the novelist Kingsley Amis, who, as his son once put it, was "promiscuous at a time when it took real energy to be promiscuous." Auberon Waugh, son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh and a successful journalist of the day, was another gentleman friend, who did much to promote Tina's early journalistic talent with editors of smart English newspapers and magazines. If one can't be a bonker of true geniuses, one can at least give their sons a go.

Tina was a subtle and powerful networker well before the word "networking" had come into being. Given the least bit of a shove, Tina knew how to glide, then soar. As a working journalist, she came through with gossipy, glossy, bitchy, with-it articles comprising precisely the right combination of smartness, snobbery, and gossip. She might have had a successful career as a journalist, but must have sensed that writing, for someone with her ambition, wasn't where the action was.