“To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and those who edit and read it are old women over their tea.”

Henry David Thoreau

What goes best with a hot cup of tea? A heaping spoonful of gossip, of course.

Gossip is one stage nastier than chatter, one stage seedier than investigation. It’s poised between rumor and the real, between the stab in the back and the handshake, between tastelessness and the libel lawyer’s office.  Dan Rather once remarked that “the news is discovering something someone does not want known.” In recent years, the mainstream media seems to have evolved into various network-based, old woman, tea party gatherings with focus more on gossip than reporting just the facts.

For example, gossip known as leaks which takes over a large stretch of journalism.  I recall Bernie Sanders once commenting that “the media has become gossip, clickbait and punditry.”  I’m not a fan of Bernie but will admit he did have a point.  On any given day, the news media hops into the broadcasting driver’s seat to make us aware of political leaks, a serious form of gossip which seems to be taking over much of journalism.  Respectable journalism has been infected by much of this straight-up, no-apologies public gossip.  Read much from either the New York Times or Washington Post lately?  Seems both have succumbed to reporting items that are a tad more than gossipy in their intent.  Everywhere one looks in show business, politics, even business, gossip creeps more and more into the foreground. Once the freak show in journalism, gossip has now become center ring. 

I’m a realist.  Gossip plays a significant role in the reporting of news.  More with newspapers who have taken a back seat to television and radio, the preferred choice of many when a breaking story takes place.  But…gossip?  Well, both websites and tabloid journalists are terrific sources for sharing all the significant and juicy details surrounding some news tidbit.

Pass the tea, please.

From Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop...Share a favorite quote you came across this month.