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.
Diary
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 idiosyncrati
c, 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.
Great Gossips of the Western World, IV
Ms. Zeitgeist
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.
Tina Brown came into the world when the English aristocracy was still in existence, envied if no longer much admired, still holding a snobbish card or two, but no longer in possession of the kind of power to squash a Becky Sharp–like career of the kind she had set upon. As a testament to the breakup of the old English class system, the man Tina married, Harold Evans, twenty-five years older than she, though working class, rose to the pinnacle of English newspaper journalism, first as editor in chief of the London Sunday Times and then of the Times itself. He was installed in the latter job, from which he would soon be humiliatingly fired, by no less than an Australian, Rupert Murdoch. Working-class editors, Australian press lords, pushy young female journalists with thrusting bosoms ... ah, England, it long ago began to look as if there may not always be an England after all—it was, in any event, Mick Jagger's country now.
Further evidence that the old class system was breaking up was apparent in the hiring of Tina Brown to edit Tatler, a magazine founded in the early eighteenth century by Richard Steele, the editor, with Joseph Addison, of the Spectator, which in more recent years had been devoted to chronicling the social lives of what was left of the British aristocracy. Rather than continuing worshipfully to chronicle these people, Tina turned the magazine into an organ of sly mockery of them. She invited her old Oxford pals—Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, among others—to join her in the venture.
Tina remained three and a half years at Tatler. During this time, she raised both the circulation of the magazine and her own visibility, but did rather less for the financial health of the magazine, which lost money. This would be a repeating pattern in Tina Brown's career: she enlivens the institutions she works for, adding greatly to their circulation, and while they lose money, she gains reputation. Reputation, please note, not prestige, for prestige was not a chip at the poker game that Tina saw herself playing. "Prestige is dead," she once told someone who spoke to her of the reverence in which The New Yorker had long been held.
In 1983, Samuel I. Newhouse, the owner of Condé Nast magazines and, with his family, of many newspapers, acquired Tatler. He had earlier bought, and had plans for revamping, the old Vanity Fair, a slick magazine of the 1920s, edited by Frank Crowninshield, a renowned editor of his day. Newhouse had quickly run through two editors for the new Vanity Fair—the first, a man named Richard Locke, lasted all of three issues; the second was Leo Lerman, whom we encountered earlier and who had been a free-ranging editorial adviser for Condé Nast. A Newhouse lieutenant suggested Tina Brown for the job. The timing could not have been better. With Harry Evans a few years before fired by Rupert Murdoch from the London Times, and Tina beginning to grow bored with Tatler and its rather circumscribed readership, life in America must have seemed a smashing idea. Though only thirty-one in 1984, Tina was too savvy not to realize that, as a theater of operations for anyone with her ambition, England was now second rate, if not utterly finished. America was the place to be.
She began work at Vanity Fair surrounded by enemies, chiefly those who felt a lingering loyalty to Leo Lerman, whom they believed had been ditched in favor of this young English upstart. How could Newhouse put a big-budget American magazine in the hands of a woman who had no firsthand experience of the country? Tina's want of American experience would remain a criticism of her when she later took over the editorship of The New Yorker. What did she know of America, having seen it only from the inside of Newhouse-paid-for limousines or from the private jets or in the homes of the superwealthy of New York, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C.?
Richard Locke, during his brief tenure at Vanity Fair, had tried to take the magazine in a serious direction. Then Leo Lerman headed it in a metropolitan direction: sophist
icated, urban, yet somehow intellectual. Tina had other ideas. She intended to bring a new element to slick-magazine journalism, to cause continual buzz and constant stir, to ride the wind of the with-it. The famous, the rich, the powerful, these were to be the subjects at the heart of Vanity Fair under its new British editor. Celebrity journalism is the name given to the direction in which she took the magazine.
Editing a magazine seems simple enough. An editor decides what she wants in it; she assigns writers to produce articles on these subjects; she uses other editors to get the articles in the most presentable form, with photographers and art directors to make the presentation of the articles as appealing as possible. If an editor has a good sense of the whole, of the forest in which she plants her trees, the mix of articles will make for a strong issue, something in it for everyone and lots in it for most of the magazine's regular readers.
Simple enough—but if you are Tina Brown, it is imperative that your articles cause buzz, which may be defined as the excitement of being on the inside, up to the moment, in the know, at least as voyeuristically as reading can make it. Buzz is created by discovering and writing about those people who, owing to their money, power, talent, or good looks, seem admirably, enviably well ahead of the rest of us in the always precarious game of leading the great good glamorous life. Buzz is the sizzle—hold the steak, which may or may not be served later. In the world of buzz, the names of these people are always changing: people once so of the moment suddenly seem so out of it, themselves no longer of the least moment, but dull, dreary—buzzless.
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