By: M.C. Wood

Rumor is the lifeblood of gossip. As far back as Homer’s The Odyssey, the goddess Rumor has been spreading stories that have, at their core, just enough plausibility, or even truth, to give them legs. Those legs, a.k.a. gossip, become stronger and stronger as they make their rounds.

Whether real or manufactured, gossip is also the lifeblood of entertainment industry careers. There was a time when stars tried to stay out of the gossip news, since a write-up could annihilate a career. Studios would go to great lengths to keep their contracted stars from getting ripped to shreds by the inky talons of Hedda Hopper or her bitter rival, Louella Parsons. Today, it’s the job of a publicist to get their clients into the gossip cycle rather than keep them out of it, since mere talk can launch or revive careers, or catapult them into the stratosphere of “household name.”

Part of the shift has to do with technology. It’s just easier and easier to confirm a rumor. We’ve got cellphone cameras, instant access to an Internet where we can upload photos, and 24-hour television that can report, or at least give a scroll line, to the first citing of Halle Berry’s new baby or the deep divide over who’s cuter: Shiloh or Suri. Whether technology fuels our appetite for this stuff or merely serves it, I don’t know. But there’s no doubt it’s a crucial component to the success of compromising stories, footage, and photos.

As easy as it is to confirm a rumor with our sophisticated technology, it’s almost impossible to disconfirm it. That’s why scientists leave this stuff alone, but anyone who doesn’t care a whit about truth loves to gossip. Joy Behar, take note. Your comment on Larry King Live about the McCain camp not properly vetting Sarah Palin but instead Googling her is too outlandish to be believed. You can do better than this, no?

So enamored are we of the glow of celebrity that an entire industry is built around creating and managing gossip. In fact, there is a cable channel devoted entirely to the entertainment industry. E! features a daily entertainment “news” show — one in a long line dating back to the syndicated program, Entertainment Tonight. Several others, such as Access Hollywood and The Insider, devote time to informing the U.S. citizenry of the day’s important celebrity events. Then, of course, there are the websites.

TMZ.com now has its own television show committed to showing photos of celebrities without their underpants, with their married hands on breasts that don’t belong their wives, or sex videos that somehow manage to get into their possession. (The celebrity is shocked, just shocked that someone could invade their privacy like that.) What started out as a gotcha celebrity photo site made famous for posting Mel Gibson’s mug shot after a late night in Malibu that ended with an anti-Semitic rant, TMZ.com is now one of, if not the premier purveyor of paparazzi wares both online and on television. We viewers, with our rapacious appetite for the less-and-less scandalous events of other people’s lives, make everyone involved — except us — filthy rich for the effort. After all, the bar must be raised increasingly.

What’s most irksome about these shows and sites is that they revel in the very behaviors they deride. It is, perhaps, part of the very nature of gossip. “Well I heard…,” one says with the self-satisfied intonation of one who would never have been caught in similar circumstances. That’s true, if only because no one was around to record it. Gossip makes us feel better about ourselves. Celebrity gossip is best of all, since it allows us to feel morally superior to people who live lives of material wealth and comfort that most of us can barely imagine, let alone achieve for ourselves. We’re full of envy, and given how easy it is these days to capture on tape or digital picture a celebrity doing something that most people think is scandalous, gossip feels more like truth. Maybe it is.

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