Gossip is dead. Long live gossip

Does the relentless exposure of the worst practices of journalism at the Leveson Inquiry mark a turning point in the culture of scuttlebutt?

‘THE PARAGRAPHS, you say, Mr Snake, were all inserted.” This is the opening line of a sensational drama. It is spoken by Lady Sneerwell to Snake, a tabloid hack, with whom she is conspiring to place malicious gossip in a scandal sheet. She then asks him, “Did you circulate the report of Lady Brittle’s intrigue with Captain Boastall?”

A little later, they remark on their ability to get the newspapers to report on affairs between members of the glitterati even “when the parties never saw one another before in their lives”. Snake is the archetypal reptilian journalist. Through him, Sneerwell feeds the ravenous public appetite for what we would now call celebrity gossip.

The play is The School for Scandal, by the Irish dramatist and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan. It opened in London in 1777, long before there were phones or computers to be hacked or cameras to thrust in the faces of grieving mothers. The technology has changed and the scale of the operations is immensely greater, but all the witnesses at the Leveson Inquiry into the British media, from the harassed movie stars to the bereaved families, would recognise Snake in an instant. He and his masters may be in the dock now, but they've been with us for centuries.

Sheridan was writing about a world he knew. Snake was based (as the actor made clear in performance) on a well-known London hack, William Jackson – also, as it happens, an Irishman. And Sheridan himself was one of the first examples of what we tend to think of as a uniquely contemporary phenomenon: the tabloid celeb. He was enormously famous before he had written anything of note – because he eloped with the 18th-century equivalent of Charlotte Church, the beautiful young singer Elizabeth Linley. The story was tabloid catnip, with an evil seducer, elaborate disguises, a secret marriage and two duels.

The era of media fascination with the private lives of “society” people (Lady Brittle and Captain Boastall or Diana and Dodi) and performers (Elizabeth Linley or Charlotte Church) has lasted from the 18th century to the 21st. But is it now coming to an end?

Does the relentless exposure of the worst practices of gutter journalism at the Leveson Inquiry mark a turning point in the culture of gossip? Is the trade of scandalmongering to be killed off in the most ironic way – by becoming too sensationally scandalous? And if it is on the way out, what will take its place?

The images that stick in the mind from the evidence to Leveson are not the big political ones (such as the possible hacking of the Northern Ireland Office). They are precisely the kind of small, human details that, as every good hack knows, make a story memorable and potent.

Mostly, they involve children: some creep putting a note in the schoolbag of the five-year-old daughter of JK Rowling; the picture of Sienna Miller playing on the floor with a child, cropped to make it look like she was crawling around in a drunken stupor; the Suncounting down the days to when Charlotte Church, still a child, would be 16 and then, by implication, available for sex; the decision by the Sunto publish a picture of Anne Diamond and her husband with the coffin of their baby son, in spite of her explicit pleas that they not do so.

This is pretty vile stuff, perpetrated by people with no obvious sense of morality or humanity and no genuine justification in the “public interest”.

For those who consume these stories, it is the equivalent of the sausage-eater’s visit to the sausage factory or of taking those who buy cheap, disposable clothes to an Asian sweatshop. The public is seeing, in a more concentrated way than ever, the level of nastiness that goes into the manufacture of the tasty scandals that feed its water-cooler habit. This exposure to the reality behind the exposé is bound to have an effect. What is not clear is how deep it will go.

THE URGE TOgossip, after all, is as old as human society. The prevalence of scandalmongering can be judged by the number and vehemence of complaints against it. The ancient Egyptian sage Amen-Em-Apt, writing more than 3,000 years ago, compares the scandalmonger to "the blast of the desert sandstorm".

The Old Testament forbids Jews to “go up and down as a slanderer among your people”. In the Christian and Jewish traditions, the ultimate scandalmonger is Satan, the “father of lies” – not the best poster child to have. The Koran promises “woe to every kind of scandal-monger and backbiter”. Shakespeare’s Hamlet tells Ophelia: “Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.” The question asked economically in Cork – “any sca’?” – and in Dublin – “story?” – has always been on people’s lips.

And although serious journalists like to think there's a clear distinction between gossip (trivial) and news (serious), it's not at all obvious that this is the way most people have seen things for most of history. The Survey of English Dialectsgives as traditional synonyms for a gossip such terms as "news-agent, news-bag, news-canter, newser, news-gag, newsmonger".

The tabloids didn’t invent the notion that news is an uncomfortably baggy category containing everything from reports of momentous battles to juicy titbits about the sex lives of famous people.

And it would be naive to think that old-fashioned gossiping, before paparazzi and phone hacking, was somehow more innocent and less harmful.

The religious injunctions against scandal-mongering reflect the reality that gossip has an innate tendency to be cruel and nasty. Why? Because it’s more entertaining that way. The more salacious the tale becomes in the telling, the more thrilling and titillating it will be. And the more imaginatively satisfying.

An essay of 1832, from a London gossip magazine that promises "records of the beau-monde" (an early version of Hello!) captures nicely the inflation of gossip into scandal as a kind of art form: "The gossip lives solely for the sake of news; news he must have or he dies . . . The scandal-monger, on the other hand, is not so destitute. He is not so much dependent on the everyday occurrences of life. If there be no news stirring, he can create news of his own, and delight in news imaginary. He soars above sober reality.

“Enough for him a trifling incident; he can swell, enlarge and amplify it, until it becomes an important circumstance. There is in him a sort of depraved poetic spirit, a taste for the marvellous.” There could hardly be a better description of what we think of as the modern tabloid hack and his ability to “create news of his own” from a “trifling incident”. The “depraved poetic spirit” is there in the tabloids’ more fantastic headlines: “Freddie Star Ate My Hamster” or “Tara Raw Bum Display”.

THE ORGANISEDscandalmongering of the tabloid press was both a continuation of and a break from the age-old habit of gossiping, backbiting and exaggerating. It meets the same needs but does so in a radically different context. The context is urbanisation. Rural societies are relatively transparent: the nosy parker can sniff out all the gossip after Mass or in the pub. "Common knowledge", even when it is wrong, is common property. Tight-knit urban communities can reproduce the same effects: every Seán O'Casey play has a local "news-bag" to watch the neighbours and spread the word.

But as cities become bigger, more diffuse and less community-centred, gossip is less easily available as a free social exchange. It becomes a commodity to be mass-produced, packaged and purchased.

And in this process it becomes unlimited. Social gossip and scandalmongering are limited by reality checks. You may delight in their malicious cruelties, but you also measure them against your knowledge of the people involved. The subjects are still human beings. You can ask yourself how likely it is that Mrs X is really a witch or that the local grocer has a different lover every night.

Once it becomes a commodity, though, gossip is dehumanised and freed from any relationship to lived reality. Its subjects are ciphers, products, images. The shock of the testimony at the Leveson Inquiry is the rehumanisation of these ciphers, the vivid sense of what it’s actually like to be on the receiving end of feral journalism. That this should be shocking is itself the mark of how removed we are from the people who are the subjects of commodified gossip. The fictional and imaginative elements of scandalmongering noted by the 1832 essayist have taken over entirely.

“Charlotte Church” or “Sienna Miller” or “Kate McCann” occupy the same never-never land as long-running characters in TV soaps, floating between invention and reality. When they become real, as they did in their evidence to Leveson, the effect is like figures stepping through the TV screen.

In this sense, there’s something decidedly old-fashioned about the way the Murdoch tabloids ran their vast surveillance and gossip-gathering operations. Bizarrely, it reminds us that Murdoch is a deeply traditional newspaperman. The phone and computer hacking, the employment of private detectives, the relentless trawling for the “trifling incident” that can be transformed into an “important circumstance” was all based on a desire to root the celebrity fantasies in “reality” – as if reality is really where 21st-century gossip is at.

Even the underlying pretence of this kind of journalism is almost touchingly naive. Implicit in the whole genre is the idea that the person being exposed is immoral and that the journalist doing the exposing is restoring or protecting the moral order. The ghost of Puritanism lurks somewhere in these bushes. But whereas Puritan scandalmongering once functioned as tragedy (classically, in Nathaniel Hawthorn's The Scarlet Letter), now it is pure farce. The idea that the Snakes of this world are moral arbiters would be risible enough even if the papers they work for were not themselves selling cheap sex on one page and prim outrage at adultery on the next.

IT IS THISsense of being out of time rather than the outrage prompted by evidence given at the Leveson Inquiry that make this moment a watershed. The golden (or rather brass) age of the tabloid scandalmonger is passing, but not because we've all become remorseful about our appetite for prurient revelations. Anyone who thinks we are moving into a new era of concern for personal privacy has never looked at a teenager's Facebook page. The tabloid era is passing, rather, because scandal is migrating into two other forms: virtual gossip and auto-gossip.

Virtual gossip is a self-contained process. It cuts out the awkward stage in the process, the one that has got poor Rupert Murdoch into such trouble, the bit where you have to discover something that someone else would prefer to hide.

Now, entire personae are created and sustained purely for the purpose of being processed into gossip. What would be the point of hacking Jordan’s phone? Could there possibly be anything in her world that she has not already turned into saleable product? Instead of spending all that money on private detectives, Murdoch would have been much more in tune with the zeitgeist if he had spent it on the invention of a few more Jordans.

And then there’s auto-gossip, the practice of gossiping about oneself. Ours is the ultimate confessional age, when the prime value is to “be who you really are” – in public. The old culture of gossip depended on two things: an enormous interest in other people and the belief that those people had secrets. Each of them is trumped by the narcissism of the 21st century. When everybody wants to tell you everything about themselves and nobody is ashamed, the thrill of the scandal will be gone for good.

‘Privacy is for paedos’ This week at the Leveson Inquiry

The singer Charlotte Church gave evidence that as a 13-year-old, she was advised to waive a fee at Rupert Murdoch’s wedding in exchange for being treated favourably by Murdoch’s newspapers.

“I remember being told that Rupert Murdoch had asked me to sing at his wedding to Wendi Deng and it would take place on his yacht in New York,” she told the inquiry. “I remember being told the offer of money or the offer of the favour, in order to basically get good press, to be looked upon favourably,” she said. “I also remember being 13 and thinking, why on earth would anybody take a favour over £100,000?”

Perhaps the oddest evidence of the week was that given by Paul McMullan, the former deputy features editor at the News of the World, who unashamedly exposed the viciousness of British tabloid culture. On chasing celebrities, he remarked, "Before Diana died, it was such good fun. How many jobs can you have car chases in? It was great."

He defended the hacking of the phone belonging to the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

“The hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone was not a bad thing for a well-meaning journalist who is only trying to find the girl . . . Our intentions were good; our intentions were honourable.”

When he commented that after invading people’s privacy for 21 years and never finding anyone up to any good he declared, “Privacy is for paedos.”

Tony Blair's former director of communications, Alastair Campbell, told the inquiry that the hacking of Cherie Blair's phone was "at least possible" after the Daily Mirrorpublished a story about her pregnancy, "I never really understood how the Daily Mirrorlearned of Cherie's pregnancy," he said. "As I recall it, at the time only a tiny number of people in Downing Street knew that she was pregnant. I have heard all sorts of stories as to how the information got out, but none of them strike me as credible."

In 1991, the baby son of British TV presenter, broadcaster and journalist Anne Diamond died of sudden infant death syndrome. She gave evidence about how quickly her family home was overrun with reporters and photographers, “Within an hour of my finding Sebastian, I think my husband had very quickly rung the police, as you would,” she said. “However it happened, we were besieged by reporters and photographers outside the door. I actually don’t know whether they came before the policemen did or whether the policemen came first.”

UNA MULLALLY