Gossip

First published in Column 8 on the 15.7.1992

The endless profiteering done by British newspapers in regard to the royal nit-picking may soon be curtailed. The British Government, no less, has told the media that it’s editorial freedom may be curbed by law if it continues to pry too far into people’s privacy. Censorship of the Press!

At present the British press regulates itself voluntarily. Obviously it doesn’t regulate itself enough.

This political intrusion produced a most amazing statement from newspaper editors. They said they were being made scapegoats for any problems the royals might have! (It was the royals’ fault for being royals.) If the editors hadn’t told all the details about possible royal rifts they would themselves have been censoring news.

This is the press that’s already bayed like dogs during the demise of one royal marriage. Is their greed for grubbiness so great? And are they too shortsighted to realise that when they’ve destroyed this prince’s marriage there won’t be much else to go for?

I was impressed to see on the cover of one women’s magazine the admission that they felt the media was very much to blame for what happened to Fergie and her husband.

What’s happened to the media? Why is there such a hatred of people in positions of power and authority and glamour?

In the past magazines gave you interesting details about people and their lives. The gossip in which they dealt, if any, was mostly mild. Now it’s mostly malicious, and frequently untruthful.

I guess it’s a sign of the times, a sign of the general hatred people have for one another, especially those people who are better off than most, or who’ve made it in the world.

We talk about the great New Zealand clobbering machine. But I don’t know why we single ourselves out as being clobberers – the Latin Europeans have been at it for decades, the Americans not far behind, and now the Brits are aiming to win the race.

There’s an ugliness about much of what’s now produced as ‘news.’ Truth and integrity appear to be irrelevant.

An example was the birth of Rod Stewart’s baby which was described in one magazine as ‘bizarre.’ A quick glance at the article shows’ that I have been bizarre in like manner on at least five occasions, since Rod’s bizarrity consisted of little more than his attending his child’s birth.

Katherine Hepburn was interviewed in Time magazine recently. Sorry, interviewed isn’t the word. the aggression of the actress exactly matched the aggression with which the article was written, by a seemingly disgruntled reporter who was put off by Miss Hepburn’s admittedly bad manners.

In fact, over two closely written pages we found out nothing about Miss Hepburn that was pleasant, positive or (to be honest) worth noting.

The article deserved burial long before it made the pages of a magazine that used to have a reputation for distinguished reporting.

There has always been gossip, and magazines aren’t doing anything new by having gossip columns or by reporting stories about people’s lives. What is new, however, is the overwhelming emphasis on half-truths, and the garbage that these spew forth.

What I object to, and what I believe the British Government is taking a serious line on, is the viciousness, the malice, the malignity, the spite and venom, and the plain lack of charitableness which is vented through both newspapers and magazines in that country.

Makes you glad that New Zealand still has newspapers and (some) magazines that are relatively civilised.

Of course, in line with everything else in the world, things have got far worse. New Zealand no longer has a media that can be said to be fully honest or to have integrity. During Covid, the media often led the way in terms of destroying people’s lives – especially those who fought against our Government’s own insistence that they were the ‘Source of Truth’ about everything to do with that plague. And the media continue to do so whenever there is anything said that’s contrary to their left wing mentality.

Since I wrote this column in 1992, things have gone down the tubes in Britain: justice has been undermined continually, the royals are frequently maligned (though admittedly some of them don’t help their situation), Charles’ marriage was destroyed, in part, by the gutter press, and Diana was hounded to death, virtually, by paparazzi.  

The Hepburn interview, incidentally, is just a puff piece, although not in Hepburn’s favour. It’s a kind of clever-clever article that aims to show how well the writer can write, to the detriment of the interviewee. While Hepburn is admittedly pretty rough with the writer, the latter gets her revenge all the way down. The writer was Margaret Carlson, though it was Time’s rule not to give by-lines to their writers at the time, and her name doesn’t appear on the article. She was the first female columnist for Time.