BROOKE GLADSTONE: Even before the facts are in, few media watchers were shocked by the notion that journalistic ethics might be an afterthought when dishing dirt about the famous. But it wasn't always so. The beginnings of the gossip industry had two opposing schools. One school was led by Walter Winchell, considered by many to be the architect of gossip served buffet style.

WALTER WINCHELL: [CLICKING SOUNDS] Attention, Miami Herald. Van Johnson, the moving-picture star, after a two-day visit to New Orleans, will arrive in Miami, Florida Tuesday next. An actress named Jacqueline Dahlia is flying from New York City to visit the star in Florida. She is due there tomorrow. One and one make three. [CLICKING SOUNDS] Washington, DC.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: According to Neal Gabler, author of “Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity”, Winchell may have fed his audience unrelenting dish, but he always did it with a keen, if unique, sense of principle. However, there was another school of gossip-mongers that would dig the dirt less deeply for a little filthy lucre.

NEAL GABLER: Back in 1925, a fellow by the name of Stephen Clow ran a newspaper he called Broadway Brevities. It had a relatively small circulation, in the low thousands, but he operated on the principle that if you paid him or took out an advertisement, he would not write derogatory information about you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

NEAL GABLER: Now, that went on for several years, until finally someone blew the whistle on him, somebody who was tired of being extorted in this fashion. And Clow and three associates were actually brought to trial, and Clow was sentenced to six years in federal prison. He wasn't sentenced for blackmail because none of the people about whom he had talked wanted to go into court and have to fend off the charges, and that way they'd almost be giving credence to the charges. So, instead of doing that, they tried him for conspiracy to defraud people through the mail.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, this was a pretty high-profile arrest and conviction, but you say that it didn't slow down the march of gossip at all.

NEAL GABLER: Oh, no. If anything, it seemed to accelerate it. Let's face it, there's an enormous taste for gossip. Walter Winchell was really the first to institutionalize that in the gossip column back in the mid-1920s, roughly at the same time that Broadway Brevities was being published. Gossip happened to fit a national temper and a national mood. The 1920s were full of arguments over democracy and what democracy meant. And if you look at gossip and if you really examine the subtext of gossip, gossip is about democratization, it's about egalitarianism. It's a form of empowerment for the outsiders. Walter Winchell identified himself very, very closely with his readers. He did not identify himself with the people about whom he gossiped. And, in fact, the readers felt that Winchell was kind of their tribune. He was their scourge against the powerful.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And he's responsible for pushing gossip, which was once the province of specialty magazines, into the mainstream media.

NEAL GABLER: Yes, he did, because he understood what gossip was about. Now, a lot of people don't realize that Walter Winchell gained an enormous amount of popularity in the 1930s by allying himself with Franklin Roosevelt and essentially becoming a political commentator. So if you read Winchell's column or if you listened to Winchell's radio broadcast, which was, by the way, the number one-rated informational broadcast on radio, you would hear him gossip about somebody's divorce or romance or whatever with one item, and the very next item would be about Franklin Roosevelt or Adolf Hitler.

WALTER WINCHELL: [BEEPING SOUNDS] Alexandria – it will be denied. It always is. But the evidence is mounting that the Kremlin and the Moslem leaders are working out a grand alliance. If this is true, then it would mean that so far as Joe Stalin is concerned, so long, bye-bye and ta-ta to a free Palestine. [BEEPS] Arabia. Arabian oil production is expected to reach an all-time high. And in power politics, an oil field is what a water hole is in a jungle or a desert. Look for plenty of trouble, then, east of Suez and west of Bombay, and tell Mr. Molotov that he can't stop Winchell from reporting in advance what some diplomats are trying to scoop me on, a third world war!

NEAL GABLER: Now, Winchell thought of himself as a journalist, but readers didn't think of him as a journalist.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did they not think of him as a journalist because he didn't actually practice journalism? Did he employ the sorts of rules, the sourcing that we expect and trust in journalism?

NEAL GABLER: There was some reporting. I mean, he did things that most gossip columnists today did not do. For example, he covered the war and got inside information from the Roosevelt Administration about war planning. He was very close to J. Edgar Hoover, so he got a lot of items from the FBI, although truth be told, he gave more items to the FBI than he got from the FBI. But because there was this kind of transaction between Winchell and government, there was a certain degree of sourcing that even so-called reputable reporters didn't have access to.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Because he had changed the balance of power among the famous, He was more powerful than they were; he needed them but they needed him even more.

NEAL GABLER: What you've described was unquestionably true, but that balance of power has changed unquestionably over the last, I would say, you know, 30 years or so. The media once held the power. You needed the media. Now, the celebrity has the power. The world came to Walter Winchell. What we've learned about Richard Johnson and about Jared Stern, the two people who were involved on Page Six, is that they sought to cozy up to power, that they wanted to be among the wealthy, the elite. That changes the relationship of the gossip columnist to his subject and, frankly, it changes the relationship of the reader to the gossip column. And it's one of the reasons, among many others, that the gossip column doesn't have the same kind of clout, because people reading the gossip column now are seeing the gossip columnist as a tribune from the powerful to them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what ultimately brought Winchell's career to an end? When he became less the FDR Democrat and more the McCarthyite acolyte?

NEAL GABLER: Well, that happened. He did move from championing FDR to championing Joseph McCarthy, although he saw it as another seamless transition, because, as he saw it, he was against the elites. FDR was, and so was Joseph McCarthy. If there was any incident, it was when the singer Josephine Baker, black singer, felt she was being stiffed at the Stork Club, which was Winchell's hangout. And Winchell ultimately came to the defense of the Stork Club, not to the defense of Josephine Baker. And since Winchell had always been identified with minorities, with the disenfranchised, with the poor, this began a salient for opponents of Walter Winchell to attack him. And indeed, The New York Post ran a long series of articles attacking Walter Winchell, and that certainly hurt him.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: We stopped liking him. We could stop forgiving him for entertaining us so well.

NEAL GABLER: That's absolutely true.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right, Neal. Thank you very much.

NEAL GABLER: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Neal Gabler is a senior fellow at the University of Southern California and author of “Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity.”

WALTER WINCHELL: [CLICKING SOUNDS] Attention, Mr. and Mrs. United States. In the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln fought for the principle that no man had the right to live by another man's sweat. In the 20th century, Abraham Lincoln would have fought twice as hard for the right of a man to say what he thinks, whether that man is speaking in a corner drugstore or over a national radio hookup. If Abraham Lincoln were with us today, he would be denouncing power politics over a microphone and probably be leading the latest Crossley, Hooper or Nielsen radio rating. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York and Mike Vuolo, and edited - by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Mark Phillips and Andy Lanset. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [MUSIC TAG] (FUNDING CREDITS)