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The real question is whether celebrity journalism or its sub-category gossip poses a genuine threat to taste and morals, or whether it is instead harmless airhead fun. The fear in the intellectual marketplace, as in the mercantile one, is always that cheap currency will debase good. Yet the truth is that even at the height of Trump mania, Bess mania, Malcolm mania or any of the other periodic explosions of silliness, those who wanted to know the weightier news of the world had no real difficulty in learning it. And unseemly as that front-page photo may have appeared, Liz Smith's injection of herself into the Trump tempest was no more outrageous than Stanley's stunts in quest of Livingstone, Nellie Bly's travels and impersonations, John Reed's reportage turned revolution in Lenin's Russia or Barbara Walters' on-air diplomacy to help launch the Camp David negotiations between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. Journalists just like to grandstand.
The truly troubling thing about the resurgence of gossip is not what it displays about journalists but what it implies about their audiences. The story of the Trumps could, to be sure, be offered as a cautionary morality tale. But for the most part, it wasn't. It was freestyle wrestling, with attention fixed firmly on the pot of gold rather than on the end of the rainbow. Instead of finding moment and meaning in their own lives, Americans were encouraged to live in daydreams about the life-styles of the rich and famous, to emphasize the material over the spiritual. Gossip can be marketed so as to make the listener feel smugly superior to those being talked about. But in the gossip journalism of today, Liz wants to be Ivana, Ivana wants to be Liz, and nobody even pretends to want to be the gentle reader.