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Whether today's gossips are more or less powerful than those of the past, they certainly operate by a different set of ethical rules. For one thing, they can rarely be bought for a straight cash subsidy, as their forebears often were. The combination of greater financial sophistication and less puritanical attitudes among readers has led to increased emphasis on items about power and deals and a downplaying of items about love affairs and illegitimate babies. At the same time, contemporary society's heightened candor about sex has tended to make possible publication of items that were once unthinkable, such as hints of extramarital dalliance or homosexual affairs. Says Daily Variety's Army Archerd, who has covered the beat for 45 years and who broke the 1985 story that Rock Hudson had AIDS: "News about who is sleeping with whom was never covered in the old movie magazines. Now it's common family dinner conversation."
Michael Gross, 37, of New York magazine, attributes some of the change in standards to the emergence of a new generation not only of columnists but also of news subjects. "To an extent," he says, "the right of privacy has been redefined by all these personalities -- company raiders, nouvelle society -- begging for attention and promoting themselves through the gossip columns." Gross also points to Spy, the impertinent monthly lampoon of New York City society launched in 1986, as having pushed toward new and fiercer standards of what is allowable. Many of its stories have been enterprising and funny, but some have been simply meanspirited, mocking people's physical shortcomings or purporting to detail their sex lives.
Even in venues where gossip does not exploit the new, more lax standards of taste and propriety, it always operates a bit outside normal press ethics. Objectivity is not required. Where a theater critic or sportswriter who socialized with a news subject would probably be expected to abstain from writing about that friend, most gossip columnists write about friends every day of the year. Says Liz Smith: "One way to work is to have access and do a very insider kind of thing. The other is to be totally removed and dispassionate, completely uninvolved with the people you write about. I wouldn't be good at that."
Accuracy too is not as highly prized in gossip as on the news pages. Columnists expect to be wrong fairly frequently, and correct themselves only grudgingly. If a gossip columnist has the essence of a story right, he or she often doesn't mind that many of the details are in error, a situation that would make most reporters flinch. In one egregious episode, Suzy of the New York Post published a March 1988 description of the celebrity guests at a ( party, only to have it exposed that many of them had not been there, and neither had she. She wrote up the event in advance from a press release, then took off for a Caribbean vacation. Post editor Jerry Nachman says that gossip "exists in a netherworld where the traditional tests that would hold in the rest of the newspaper get flexed a bit." He adds that if he had his way, every gossip column everywhere would appear beneath the following disclaimer: "The normal rules of journalism don't apply here." ABC media critic Jeff Greenfield says, "Gossip is the id rather than the superego of journalism. We just love this kind of stuff."