Did You Hear That, Like, Gossip is Everywhere in Journalism These Days?

Salacious reporting used to be the freak show of journalism. Now it's everywhere. How did this happen?

From a piece on Salon...

“Sometimes, there’s news in the gutter” was the condescending headline of the public editor’s piece on the New York Times’ failure to pick up the adultery story of John Edwards. I write “condescending” because, as anyone who reads the daily press and watches television cannot fail to recognize, journalism, electronic and print, is itself everywhere more and more in the gutter. The day on which I write this, the Times has a small item in its Arts section about the actor Richard Dreyfuss suing his father and uncle for return of an $870,000 loan he made them in 1984. Why is that, in a serious newspaper, news, and what does it have to do with the arts? Isn’t this a matter among Dreyfuss, his family and the law courts, and distinctly not that of the New York Times?

Apparently not, at least not so long as Richard Dreyfuss has achieved modest celebrity in his career as a movie actor. Because of the way we now live, Dreyfuss is probably better known to lots of Americans than people who live down the block from them in the suburbs or one floor below them in an urban high-rise. One of the dubious rewards of celebrity is that strangers become interested in aspects of your private life that, strictly speaking, are none of their business.

How this came about is a long and complicated story.