“If you haven’t anything nice to say, sit by me.” Alice Roosevelt

“See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil. Never be invited to any parties.” Oscar Wilde

A beautiful young girl from a disadvantaged background takes up with an older, very wealthy, man. Later, she marries a different, very wealthy, man. In the course of this marriage, the man’s family grows to hate the woman and tries to keep her from the family money.

No, it’s not Anna Nicole Smith. It’s Evelyn Nesbit. And it’s not 2007, it’s 1906.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately over the shoddy shape of journalism in this country. Pundits from both sides have been whipping the “tabloid-journalism-is-bad” horse for some time. And while I agree that the obsession with celebrity and pseudo-celebrity has taken a turn for the bizarre and apparently all-consuming – it’s just not the core problem with journalism right now.

Tabloid journalism has always been with us in one form or another. Humans love to gossip. And those of you who say you don’t gossip are either, uhm, not being completely honest — or the gossip you prefer doesn’t fit the usual mold.

Trust me, we love The Gossip.*

Yellow journalism – a precursor to tabloid journalism — didn’t really come into its own until the late 1800s, and the man who pushed it to its apotheosis was William Randolph Hearst. Since then gossip has ebbed and flowed in its respectability.

Respectability? Gossip? Absolutely. From the ‘20s to the late ‘50s, most newspapers ran celebrity gossip columns. Now, these columns were manipulated and managed by both the stars, their agents, and the studios. Gossip columnists like Louella Parsons, Walter Winchell, and Hedda Hopper were adored. They had a loyal readership and wielded an amazing amount of power. The right story could make or break a career.

The problem with journalism today is that journalists don’t know how to do their jobs anymore. The reason for that is that “straight” news services are trying to compete for the same stories as the tabloid (and now blogosphere) services. In the past, gossip and “real” news were separate. People understood there was a difference between the two.

But from the mid-’70s on, gossip and gossip coverage has become more and more important to “straight” news services until it now seems almost impossible to tell the difference between tabloid and regular news. One has only to look at the coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to see how far down the rabbit hole we’ve gone.

Smith really was the apotheosis of “personality” reporting. Her life was just the kind of train wreck people love to watch. If ever there was a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of fame and fortune, it was in the tawdry, excessive, and deeply yucky Smith. Astonishingly enough, in death, Smith has become a bizarrely sympathetic icon. Of what, I’m not exactly certain. She’s been transformed into a “deeply” misunderstood character who “loved her daughter and her son.” If Smith had ever had press this good while she was alive, we would have been subjected to “Anna Nicole for Savior.” It kinda makes you wonder who did Jesus’s press.

Yes, in death, Smith has achieved an unwarranted gravitas. (I’m getting cognitive dissonance just from writing that.) The nonstop coverage of the latest wrangling over Smith’s body, her newborn child, and the potential $500 million from her dead husband’s estate have transfixed the news media. The story is also all over the Internet and the tabloids – which is where it should have stayed.

But the intersection between power, money, and sleaze is just too juicy for our mainstream reports to leave be. On the Internet, no one is making Smith out to be anything other than what she was – an ill-educated, money-grubbing trollop. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) But change her story from the logical result of drug abuse and over-indulgence into a tragedy, and at that point you can pretend that obsessing over her death and its aftermath is “important.”

But let’s face it, the press isn’t all to blame. Yes, journalists have apparently lost the ability to do investigative reporting and have decided to throw fact-checking to the wind. But, honestly, we’re to blame.

Dick Stolley, who ran People Magazine and turned it into one of the premier mainstreamed gossip magazines of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, developed the “Stolley Formula:”

Young is better than Old
Pretty is better than Ugly
Rich is better than Poor
TV is better than Music.
Music is better than Movies
Movies are better than Sports
And anything is better than Politics.

I think that pretty much sums up what’s driving news coverage nowadays. Outing a CIA operative . . . maimed soldiers living in squalor at Walter Reed . . . Katrina victims still without help . . . No, these things aren’t sexy. They don’t make us feel superior. They don’t show us that rich, pretty people have shitty lives, too. No, this is just the stuff we could actually do something about. This is just the stuff that, well, matters.

I do see a faint glimmer of light, though. It appears that the Internet is starting to drive out some of the old-fashioned gossip reporting. With almost instantaneous posting and the ability to run corrections as quickly, gossip blogs are beating print and even TV gossip to the punch. Not to mention that most of these sites don’t have to worry about the salacious level of what they post. The Inquirer won’t post the naked and hairless crotch-shots of Britney Spears, but TMZ.com will. (Or at least they’ll link to a site that does.)

If standard media can’t compete with the gossip blogs, maybe they’ll try a new approach. Maybe they’ll try, you know, reporting the news again.

It might just be so novel that people will watch.

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*I highly recommend “Dish” by Jeannette Walls for a wonderful historical take on the rise of gossip in America. It’s well-written and well-researched and a damn fine read.