Life: The Movie - How Entertainment Conquered Reality by Gabler Neal

Author:Gabler, Neal [Gabler, Neal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780375706530
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 11444431
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1998-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

WHILE THE PRINT MEDIA moved effortlessly into celebrity through profiles and photos that featured stars in civilian life, television had a much more difficult time developing a format to accommodate the idea of human entertainment. Back in the 1930s and 1940s gossip columnist Walter Winchell, a former vaudeville hoofer, suggested one possible approach by freely interlarding celebrity items with dramatically delivered news on his radio broadcasts, turning news into entertainment and celebrities into news. In the late 1950s CBS’s Edward R. Murrow, a distinguished correspondent who had memorably reported World War II from the Europear theater over CBS radio, further elided news into celebrity while hosting a popular television program titled Person to Person in which he interviewed stars ensconced in their homes and implicitly blessed the proceedings with his own journalistic integrity, even as he made it clear that he was slumming.

Yet Winchell and Murrow were primitives compared to their true heir, Barbara Walters. No figure in late-twentieth-century journalism was more representative of the merger of news and celebrity worship, and none, not even Tina Brown, may have done more to advance it than she. The daughter of the owner of the Latin Quarter nightclub in New York City, Walters, like Winchell, came by her show business instincts honestly. Though she first appeared on the national scene as cohost of the NBC morning program Today, which was itself an amiable blend of news and light features, Walters posed as and was accepted as a newswoman. She would even hold the distinction of being named the first female network news anchor in America, an appointment that lent her credibility even as, in her critics’ eyes, it diminished the position itself.

But Walters made her reputation less as a news anchor than as a celebrity interviewer. With a shamelessness that a traditionalist like Murrow would have found unseemly if not contemptible, Walters disdained the pose of disinterested objectivity and instead conducted her interviews in the manner of an earnest high school guidance counselor talking to a fragile charge. She prefaced personal questions by averring her obligation to ask them, and then listened to the answers in wide, almost misty-eyed agony, emoting as much sympathy as anyone could possibly have mustered. When she prodded her subjects about their failed marriages, drug and alcohol addictions, improprieties, peccadilloes and crimes, she was at pains to show she got no joy from prying these secrets from them, that she was actually there for succor. (She was also at pains to show that she herself had ascended to celebrity, that she was one of them.) Her trademark was the sobbing celebrity broken by so much sensitivity, while Walters sat with her face frozen in deep, empathic hurt.*

Inimitable as it may have seemed, Walters’s overwrought yet nonjudgmental style of interviewing would in time become the industry standard. Network news interviewers like Jane Pauley, Connie Chung, Diane Sawyer and scores of lesser-knowns would all adopt the Walters attitude, some of them even the patented Walters tics: the interrogator’s anguish,

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