If you care about media, culture, or the real roots of the cyberworld, take a few hours of your time to honor and understand Walter Winchell, an unlikely father of the information age. He's an ancestor we might never think to claim - or want to - but one to whom we owe more than we might imagine.
Broadway columnist, radio broadcaster, FDR-New Deal supporter, anti-Nazi patriot, and, finally, right-wing journalistic flunky, Winchell altered American media for good by feeding the country's ravenous appetite for news and gossip about popular culture and the celebrities created by it. His life and times are brilliantly documented by Neal Gabler in Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity.
More than any other media figure (possibly excepting William Randolph Hearst, the great media schlockmeister), Winchell liberated entertainment and culture from the domain of media titans: his sensationalist gossip mongering struck a cord in the American public. He understood the intoxicating connection between cultural awareness and power.
If we could choose our liberators, Winchell probably would not have been one of them. If any life demonstrates that power corrupts, Winchell's did. Gabler paints a heartbreaking portrait of Winchell's personal ruin and political decline from populism and liberalism into McCarthyism. His name has become synonymous with exploitation, abuse of media power, and sensationalism.
But Gabler's perhaps too-long book is an important reminder of what Winchell wrought. The real roots of the exploding computer culture aren't only in MIT labs or hacker bedrooms, but equally in the far-reaching visions of Frankenstein-like innovators Winchell and Hearst. We are repulsed by their values, yet we are obliged to acknowledge them; their voices echo through our culture. Like the founders of our electronic information age, Winchell and Hearst tormented the pious and powerful to establish their own agendas, using imagery, language, and technology to connect with millions of people to whom nobody in media ever had much to say.
Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture Of Celebrity, by Neal Gabler: US$30. Alfred A. Knopf: (800) 726 0600, +1 (212) 751 2600.
STREET CRED
Winchell: An Unlikely Liberator of the Information Era Digital Fanzine
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