Karen Adkins (Auth.) - Gossip, Epistemology, and Power - Knowledge Underground-Palgrave Macmillan (2017)

G O S S I P,
E P I S T E M O L O G Y,
& POWER
Knowledge Underground
KAREN ADKINS
Gossip, Epistemology, and Power
Karen Adkins
Gossip, Epistemology,
and Power
Knowledge Underground
Karen Adkins
Regis University
Denver, Colorado, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-47839-5 ISBN 978-3-319-47840-1 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47840-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963733
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For Brian
Contents
1 Introduction: Some Loose Talk About Gossip 1

1.1 What We Talk About When We Talk About Gossip 7
1.2 A Gossip Agenda 12
2 Gossip’s Bad Reputation 19

2.1 Gossip’s Pre-History, or Grooming and Intimacy 20
2.2 The Fall of Gossip 23
2.3 Small Talk 28
2.4 Slam Books or Malicious Gossip 36
2.5 Mean Girls: The Gendering of Gossip 39
2.6 What Is Left Unsaid 41
3 The Word On the Street: Gossip’s Contributions to

Knowledge 51
3.1 Gossip as Selection 60
3.2 Gossip as Synthesis 64
3.3 Evaluating Gossip as Knowledge 69
3.4 Epistemic Imagination and Subversion in Gossip 73
4 Failure to Communicate: Gossip as Institutional Conflict 77

4.1 Perestroika 82
4.2 The Pluralist’s Guide 83
vii
viii Contents
4.3 Institutional Responses and Invisible Gossip 87

4.4 The Power of Invisible Gossip 93
5 Rumors Help the Enemy! Gossip in Politics 107

5.1 Gossip as Surprise: Gary Hart112
5.2 Gossip in Politics: The Long View115
5.3 Gossip in the 1980s: The Wide View119
5.4 Gossip at the Center: Bill Clinton137
5.5 Gossip as a Tool: Valerie Plame154
5.6 Gossip, Leaking, and Anonymous Sourcing: The Long
and Wide View164
5.7 Conclusion170
6 Weaponized Gossip 177
6.1 Compromised Intimacy, Compromised Gossip184
6.2 Closed Circles187
6.3 Gossip in Turbulent Times192
6.4 Shaming Gossip196
6.5 Conclusion207
7 Gossip in the Ether: How the Internet Does, and Doesn’t,

Change Gossip 211
7.1 How Public Is My Digital Dirty Laundry?215
7.2 Who Are the Digital Gossips?222
7.3 How Concrete Is Digital Gossip?230
7.4 The Architecture of Virtual Talk232
8 Conclusion: Schools for Scandal 241

8.1 How to Gossip246
8.2 The Social Context of Gossip252
8.3 Facilitating Good Gossip256
Works Cited 267
Index 291
Acknowledgments
I have been thinking and writing about gossip for a long time, but my
thinking and talking have been improved and challenged by many differ-
ent people and offices. Thanks to the Provost of Regis University and the
Dean’s office, for sabbatical support that facilitated, finally, the completion
of the project. My colleagues in the philosophy department, both former
and current (Ron DiSanto, Steve Doty, Tom Duggan, Abby Gosselin,
Jason Taylor, Rebecca Vartabedian, Ted Zenzinger), have heard or read
extracts from this work over the years; I appreciate their patience and their
feedback. Anyone who does scholarly research at a school with a small
library knows how invaluable the library faculty are, and Regis’ librar-
ians have been remarkably patient with my endless requests for materi-
als from other sources. My particular thanks to librarians Mary Sponsel,
Jason Horodyski, Tom Riedel, and Erin McCaffrey. Phil Getz at Palgrave
Macmillan was a humorous and encouraging editor; I am also deeply
grateful for Alexis Nelson’s and Amy Invernizzi’s prompt and helpful
assistance at crucial points during the publishing process. Thanks to the
anonymous reviewer who assessed my proposal and draft chapters, and
gave helpful feedback for revision. My deepest appreciation to the edi-
tors of Synergies for permission to use parts of an article I published there
in 2014 in what is now Chap. 4. Chapter 3 was originally drawn from a
2002 article in Social Epistemology; while the work has been revised sub-
stantially, my grateful appreciation for their permission as well. Finally,
the Kriminalmuseum in Rothenburg ab der Tauber, Germany, contains a
tremendous collection of shame masks that were used as punishments in
the medieval era, including some truly spectacular masks for gossips. The
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
masks are worth examining in person; the museum generously shared a

photograph of one of the more extravagant shame masks for the cover art,
for which I am deeply appreciative.
Colleagues and friends have responded to conference papers, drafts, or
previous publications with advice, counterexamples, arguments, and sup-
port. Lorraine Code, Ann Ferguson, Ted Gaensbauer, Nancy Matchett,
Daryl Palmer, and Gaile Pohlhaus have all lent their ears and eyes to parts
of this work at different periods. Jennifer Barker, Geoffrey Bateman,
Gabriela Carrion, Barbara Coleman, Betsy Davis, Janet Stansberry Drake,
Jennifer Franz, Eric Fretz, Lisa Garza, Kyndra Georgeson, Mike Ghedotti,
Janna Goodwin, David Hicks, Sue Kilgore, Cath Kleier, Kim Kucera,
Helen Quinn, Heidi Cordova Strang, Tara Tull, and Karen Webber have
all been encouraging during the isolating work of finishing the book, as
well as helpfully distracting at relevant moments. George Leaman intro-
duced me to the valuable art of interpreting memos against a backdrop
of gossip; Dan Costello was my first Cone of Silence gossip partner.
Millar Kelley provided regular and welcome distraction via Denver’s ten-
nis courts. While all the Barker-Bates children (Fiona, Vivian, and Elena)
regularly asked how my work was going in a thoughtful way, I particularly
want to thank Miss Vivian Barker-Bates for her support. Her almost daily
check-ins with me at the school playground during pickup were a regular
incentive to keep writing, so I would have a concrete authorial accom-
plishment to report to her.
It is impossible for me to overstate how precious the friendship and sup-
port of Rebecca (Becky) Vartabedian and Deborah (Debbie) Gaensbauer
has been for me in the last few years. I have spent many hours with Becky
discussing our classes and our writing. She gave me a crucial reader’s boost
during a low point in this project, during a time when she was busy with
her own projects. Debbie has supported my scholarly work, took on the
thankless job of reading chapters in draft form, and for decades was crucial
for me as a model of how to combine satisfying academic work with a
meaningful family life. She is an incisive and astute gossip as well as scholar;
while I know I failed to incorporate all her suggestions for improving the
text, I still aim to emulate her skill in gossip.
My family has been a constant source of joy and distraction during
this work. Audrey and Cassandra have been sweetly supportive, even at
the cost of their mother hogging the computer. They also model how to
combine hard work and commitment to one’s projects with being seri-
ously social; I can only hope to live up to their expectations. My husband,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi
Brian Moore, is a marvel; he combines brilliance, patience, and discretion.

(The last feature, admittedly, is occasionally annoying.) Brian, thank you
for being such an interesting, generous, and thoughtful husband; I love
you, and I hope you’re looking forward to us having more varied and less
angst-filled discussions soon.
Finally, I first started thinking about gossip as both philosophically
and practically relevant because of my dissertation advisor, Robert John
Ackermann. Bob was philosophically prolific, a generous and supportive
advisor, and politically astute—he recognized the value of gossip through-
out much of his career. He first encouraged me to write about the sub-
ject (naturally, after we’d just finished a brief gossipy conversation about
some toxic university politics), and continued to be a sounding board for
years after graduate school. He died of cancer in 2011. His death is a loss
for many reasons—he was a devoted family man, committed community
member and social activist, and an endlessly creative philosopher. I am
sorry that he didn’t get to see my ideas in their more developed form.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Some Loose Talk About

Gossip
I gossip a lot. Indeed, I have only half-jokingly remarked to friends that

much of my professional and personal conversations are really just field-
work; more to the point, I’ve been aware of my status as a gossiper since an
early age. When I was ten, I began the first (no doubt only, and certainly
short-lived) Gossip Club at my elementary school; we met every afternoon
at recess on the parallel bars to evaluate fellow schoolmates, teachers, and
siblings. While my gossip practices have never again reached such a high
degree of formality, my lasting enthusiasm for gossip has fallen little from
this apex; friends and I will lunch at far-flung greasy joints we dub “Cones
of Silence” so that we can gossip with abandon and absent fear of eaves-
dropping. I have been known to bring “gossip agendas” with important
bulleted items to be discussed to prearranged breakfasts or coffees, when
I have a long-postponed date with a friend. My long-standing penchant
for gossip isn’t simply self-indulgent (though it no doubt is often that).
Several times, when seeking to understand a phenomenon, I’ve found
that the gossip version of events explained more information better than
the more authoritative public versions. Indeed, in my years working as an
academic administrator, I was often immersed in gossip (both giving and
receiving), and quickly came to recognize the ways in which knowing the
backstory was crucial for my job. Important off-the-record conversations
were important for figuring out why institutional initiatives with sound
supporting evidence were dying on the vine in meetings, and for being
able to figure out an approach or alliance for success.
© The Author(s) 2017 1

K. Adkins, Gossip, Epistemology, and Power,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47840-1_1
2 K. ADKINS
I begin this project so ostensively flippantly for two distinct reasons.

First, despite the omnipresence of gossip in people’s personal and public
lives, few people seem comfortable admitting their own personal gossipy
tendencies. This squeamishness, I contend, helps nobody, in particular
those who would like nothing more than the elimination or reduction of
gossip. Gossip, as I’m going to show, is not simply idle talk, or a bad habit,
or a personal vice or sin, but a sometimes crucial tool for making sense
out of the world. When we gossip, I will argue, we are often engaging in
two different ways of sense-making. Its reputation suffers, though, in part
because few people admit actually to participating in it. While we utilize—
indeed, sometimes rely upon—gossip for sense-making, we do not want
to acknowledge it in our world, and, indeed, gossip often gets criticized
and undermined in the popular and scholarly press. It is like the unsavory
private investigator (PI) hired in endless crime novels or suspense movies;
clients pay for, appreciate, and depend upon the valuable information, but
they never invite the PI to their dinner parties. This is the way in which
gossip is so often “underground”; no matter how useful its insights or
challenges, we keep it from public acknowledgment. If we want seriously
to learn what we can from gossip, we cannot depersonalize it. We must
admit that the gossip comes from and to actual people. I am one of those
people.
Conversely, of course, I want to put my epistemic cards on the table so
readers are under no illusions. I do not believe that gossip is (of necessity,
invariably, or mostly) a bad habit, pointless, or a sin. It can at times be the
first two of those (I remain agnostic, in every sense, on the third); how-
ever, gossip’s bad reputation, I will show, leads too much of the scholarship
on gossip to be trivializing or minimizing in nature. While scholars from
many fields (literary criticism, philosophy, history, psychology, sociology,
communication) study gossip, anthropologists typically produce the most
interesting accounts of gossip. I suspect this is the case because gossip is a
necessary tool for anthropologists. For them to do the kind of interpretive
work their fields require, they cannot simply rely upon direct observa-
tions within a culture. Max Gluckman makes this case elegantly in 1963.
Cultures have subcultures; people can dissemble (or simply have multiple
motivations); loyalties can be divided; communities face challenges and
divisions. Consequently, what can seem like simple, direct, public observa-
tions and conclusions can often miss the mark, and widely, because of what
is unstated, or simply unknown. Apparently, straightforward testimony is
INTRODUCTION: SOME LOOSE TALK ABOUT GOSSIP 3
not always straightforward; being able to “read” a culture’s gossip is a sign

that one has demystified the relations in the community.
Because it is a tool for doing their work, anthropologists take it seriously
of necessity. Substantial scholarship occurs on gossip in other fields as well,
including history, literary criticism, psychology, philosophy, and organiza-
tion studies. But too often, scholarship on gossip replicates assumptions
about the practice. It is true, but trivially or idly so (relevant only for per-
sonal or psychological illumination); true, but malevolently or unethically
so (the spreading is not worth the cost to one’s ethics or reputation); or
false or exaggerated (of no epistemic value whatsoever). And of course,
the person of the gossip, not just the act, is too often connected with ste-
reotypes—gossips are women, gay men, servants. Gossip gets ostracized,
and its practitioners isolated. Minimizing, or typing, gossip in this way
misses crucial parts of its existence and value. If gossip really were only, or
mostly, how it is described in much of the literature, it should stagger the
imagination that we not only indulge in it so regularly but also make use
of it. Surely, we have better things to do with our time.
My most basic contention in this book is that gossip is a path to knowl-
edge. Not on its own, and it gets combined with information we seek and
assess in more traditional, and more public, ways. While other philosophi-
cal accounts of gossip have argued for its role in how we come to knowl-
edge (most notably Code [1995]), I want to extend these arguments by
articulating specific ways in which gossip works to help us think about
the world. First, gossip functions selectively; in doing it, we sort through
information to figure out what we want to pay attention to, think more
about, or sort the epistemic wheat from the chaff. And second, when
we gossip we synthesize; we combine disparate bits of information (often
that don’t intrinsically appear to belong together) into a story or expla-
nation for some sort of dissonant behavior, act, value, or person. Part of
what’s distinctive (and distinctively troublesome) about gossip in this role
is that it demonstrates the ways in which knowledge is more than simply
propositional. As many philosophers of knowledge have demonstrated,
classically William James and recently José Medina (2013), ideas don’t
simply come to our attention and receive our reception neutrally—we
understand them against a backdrop of our previous ideas, beliefs, and
sometimes prejudices. This process is further complicated because of the
fact that we are sometimes unaware of our background ideas or beliefs
(and particularly our prejudices); we may think we are receiving an idea
neutrally or thoughtfully when in fact we are pre-judging it. But that may
4 K. ADKINS
be a best-case scenario; often times, an idea won’t be literally or publicly

even intelligible to us (we can’t recognize it as an idea, or an idea worth
entertaining).1 Gossip can be a liminal space in which the publicly unsay-
able, or unthinkable, gets said or thought—ideas can be tested in gossip.
This argument about gossip’s contribution to our thinking brings
along with it two secondary arguments, which will run throughout the
book. The first is that gossip’s transgressive nature—its spanning of public
and private—means that it can add chaos to normal workings of structures
and institutions of power. Gossip is often viewed one-dimensionally with
respect to power; either it is a tool for the socially dominant to surveil and
manage the rebellious (Gluckman 1963: 313) or it is a “weapon of the
weak” (Scott 1987). I want to suggest that gossip is not only both of those
things but also the combination of gossip’s bad reputation and its aim at
power relations means that it becomes hidden and redirected, depend-
ing on the position of those doing the gossiping. As many cases of gossip
indicate, when we examine them, gossip is interesting because it is often a
marker for boundaries of power—their emergence, reification, undermin-
ing, or crisis. Access to information, even in this age of electronic satura-
tion, is far from democratic. Controlling information, whether directly, or
indirectly, by affecting the reputation of those holding or seeking infor-
mation, gives one power. Fights over what we know or claim are often
fights over real resources: money, authority, status. These fights, of course,
are often divided along lines of race, gender, class, or other social mark-
ers. Those in subaltern positions—women, people of color, people who
identify as LBGTQ—are often and disproportionately targeted as gossips
or gossipy, carrying with it a corollary condemnation of being less ratio-
nal, less logical. Thus, gossip is often an important tool in marginalized
communities, and we will see many examples of gossip by marginalized.
Gossip has value for marginalized people both because their perspectives
and credibility get diminished or undermined and because much conven-
tional viewpoints or theories ignore or minimize alternative viewpoints.
Because gossip is a tool that is most powerful when used subterraneanly,
it has a specific (and insidious) value for those in socially and epistemically
empowered positions. We will see examples of empowered gossip repeated
invisibly, because it circulates without the label of gossip: it is a report on
a blog or anonymous sourcing in the New York Times. In other words,
because gossip thrives at the nexus between public and private, and often
criticizes or debunks power, it can function in very different ways for the
powerless and the powerful. The knowledge viewpoints in which gossip
emerges often clash around precisely the ideas that are at the source of the
gossip. Gossip is often a political early warning system, heralding chang-
ing beliefs about status or authority of communities or asserting power
for those previously denied it. Following José Medina, I call this tendency
epistemic subversion. In particular, we can see a deep inconsistency when
utterances and claims are labeled gossip; unpopular or minority positions
are often promptly tarred with the label of gossip, and thus dismissed as
irrational, probably wrong, and said out of resentment. By contrast, we
will see many examples of what I call “invisible gossip,” where those who
already have public authority and credibility use the tools of gossip to
demean and diminish their critics, but what fits the rhetorical markers of
gossip goes unrecognized as such, being instead labeled “news,” “reports
about the profession,” or anonymous sourcing. In other words, gossip’s
entanglement with power means that we are selective, and self-serving,
about even recognizing its appearance and our uses of it.
The second sub-contention about gossip falls directly from the claim
about power. We are deeply hypocritical about our recognition and use
of gossip, and I think this hypocrisy does not serve public conversation
or thought well. Dismissing unpopular views as gossip means we listen
poorly; we fail to consider that there may be a connection worth ponder-
ing, a consequence of an action or a policy that we’ve ignored, or a whole
group of people whose experiences are being dismissed or marginalized.
By contrast, permitting those who already have public soapboxes to use
gossip to undermine the credibility or authority of those who would chal-
lenge their positions further limits the range of ideas and positions we
consider. Following the arguments of Miranda Fricker (2007), we grant
unjustified credibility to those who already enjoy a surfeit of credibility.
But more than that, we essentially give permission to those who have a
surfeit of credibility to abuse that credibility by taking it away from others.
Striving for some consistency even in recognizing gossip as such, and its
pervasive presence in our public and private dialogues, would rebalance
the scales of credibility somewhat.
Destructive gossip occurs, and occurs in many communities; it is not
simply a subterranean tool of the powerful to wave away the powerless.
Part of why anthropological literature on gossip is so much richer than
most of the philosophical literature on gossip, I would suggest, is because
the work of anthropology is so contextual—examining community behav-
ior and beliefs as they develop and change, and in context of the physi-
cal, economic, political, and religious location of the community.2 This
6 K. ADKINS
dynamic within gossip is revealed when one looks at actual gossip epi-
sodes, as I will do in several chapters, because gossip flourishes in relatively
insular communities, with sharp power differentials. Indeed, I will sug-
gest in Chap. 6 that the amount of gossip becomes too frequent, and too
dangerous, loosely correlating to how insular the society is. Communities
have their own “local knowledges,” as Clifford Geertz describes them,
and understanding how to read and assess the gossip is a valuable tool for
grasping the knowledge that is specific to the community. Applying this
anthropological lens and focus to communities that typically avoid the
anthropological gaze, such as academia, professions, large corporations,
reveals some comparable strategies for assessing credibility and reputation
in sub-groups, and across lines of status and authority. In short, familiarity
has bred contempt in scholarly treatments of gossip; it becomes interest-
ing when we see it as done by exotic communities far from our own, but
miss the relevance to what we say to one another in the break room, at the
conference, or on the neighborhood blog.
Furthermore, as some of these case studies show, there are interesting
differences between the way in which gossip is used, and whether or not
it is even recognized as such, depending on the authority and status of the
gossipers. Gossip’s unique status as a relatively safe place to play out or
describe differences between viewpoints means that it is not simply a path
to knowledge for the subaltern but also a relatively safe path to surveil-
lance and control for those in a dominant position. We will see in Chaps.
4 and 5 several instances of gossip being done invisibly by those from a
dominant epistemic and social position. Either it is not recognized as gos-
sip or the title is emphatically and explicitly rejected. “Whispering cam-
paigns” have been revitalized for the Internet era; and as Daniel Solove
indicates, because the whispers last forever electronically, they are now
much more damaging than purely oral campaigns. Gossip can be weapon-
ized, as recent scholarship on shaming makes clear, and while arguments
about public shaming have clear value and interest, it’s also important to
reckon with its dangers. Weaponized gossip, I will contend, is more likely
to occur the more insular the community, the more turbulent the power
relations within the community, and the higher the stakes of the issue at
hand. The Internet makes shaming gossip all the more present and potent,
for good and for ill. Recognizing instrumental uses of gossip that serve no
legitimate purpose is also helpful for understanding the dynamics within
the community as a whole. Those who wish to minimize gossip need to
understand why and when it gets out of hand.
In other words, it is important to be able to read gossip literally and

interpretively. Doing this, though, requires that we abandon a narrow
construction of the term gossip, as well as the value judgments that
render its analysis trivial or useless. There can be ways in which, for
instance, newspaper stories can have two totally different meanings,
depending on whether or not one is in the gossip circuit (and can fig-
ure out who the “anonymous source within the White House” is, for
instance, and why she wants this information or theory out there).3
Anthropologist Karen Brison, in following the Kwanga’s weekly com-
munity meetings about sorcery (1992), realized that much of the
speeches were opaque to her because they were so thick with innuendo
and references to local gossip (xiv). Without hearing or understanding
gossip, we are often only hearing part of the story. Treating gossip as
almost always scurrilous, false or exaggerated, or of purely private or
psychological interest, means that we miss some of what we know, and
why we know it. We also miss the ways in which our ideas and beliefs
about the world change, and not for purely aboveground, publicly
articulable reasons. Gossip can indeed be knowledge underground; it
is time for it to be disinterred.
1.1 What We Talk About When We Talk

About Gossip
As the title of the introduction suggests, gossip is a difficult concept to pin
down. Patricia Spacks’ pathbreaking analysis of gossip (1985) makes this
clear in her introductory chapter, by choosing less to define gossip than to
iterate its problematics. First, the word has undergone a clear transvalu-
ation in the last 400 years. Its original definition was neutral if not posi-
tive in origin: “god sibbe,” god-sibling, friend of the family standing in a
position of trust and authority, from Late Old English. By the seventeenth
century, the word had a more clearly negative and trivializing definition;
idle or trifling talk, rumor-mongering, as well as becoming feminized in its
noun forms (Oxford English Dictionary 1997). But second and more cru-
cially, its usage has far outpaced its origins and contemporary definition.
Gossip originates as a purely oral concept (from primarily oral cultures),
and out of trust. Robin Dunbar’s research connecting the development
of gossip with the development of grooming and language itself (1996)
underscores this idea. Now, of course, much of what we call gossip takes
8 K. ADKINS
place in the pages of glossy magazines about and directed to strangers, to

say nothing of the gossip free-for-all that is the blogosphere.
Starting with some conceptual clarity is imperative. I will operate from
a definition that follows the word’s origins. Gossip is loose, typically evalu-
ative talk that emerges from intimacy; there is some degree of trust, or
shared background, at least asserted between participants, and it is the talk
of a dyad or small group. Looseness, here, simply means that participants
aren’t holding themselves to public standards of evidence or proof: gossip
talk is not that of the seminar room or the courtroom (though it may take
place in both). It is casual; it is more than simple storytelling and reception
(though it may include or feature those). It is context-specific; it cannot
be wholly anonymous, and it often contains, or is predicated upon, the
shared references of some common background. The “at least asserted” is
a relevant qualifier about intimacy; as we will see in some later case stud-
ies, Internet gossip in particular is rife with discussions of lack or betrayal
of trust (to say nothing of virtual interlocutors feigning or hiding their
identities). While this definition is looser than the more typical definitions
one finds in the scholarly literature, which follow the [recent] dictionary
definition of idle or personal talk about an absent person, it is shared by
some other scholars. Most recently, Kathryn Waddington’s pathbreaking
analysis of institutional gossip (2012) uses a version of this definition (25),
as do Kurland and Pelled (2000: 429).
There are a few reasons for starting with this more catholic definition.
First, cleaving to the newer dictionary definition of idle talk or rumor-
mongering (what I will henceforth call the “conventional” definition)
separates the word from its history and practices, but historical gossip-
incidences can often inform contemporary practice. Secondly, the conven-
tional definition draws such a tight and judgmental circle around gossip
(irresponsible by definition, either false or trivial) that it sets up a necessar-
ily circular analysis. Thirdly, the origins of the word in intimacy and friend-
ship have an organic quality that is important to heed.4 The conversations
of friendship and intimates are not generally agenda-driven (duly not-
ing my counterexamples above). As linguist Jennifer Coates notes in her
thorough analysis of women friends’ conversations (1996), conversation
is more like a “jam session”; individual voices trade riffs, and melodies,
and a voice of the group emerges over any single speaker (117). Maryann
Ayim’s pathbreaking analysis of gossip as fruitful investigation (1994)
stresses intimacy as a precondition for gossip (88).5 More conventional
analyses of gossip, which focus on a single story told to a rapt a udience,
miss the interdependence and symmetry of friendship (and utterly ignore

the context in which the stories are told). Gossip is a primarily oral phe-
nomenon; written gossip (whether on paper or digitally) often seeks to
recreate the flavor not just of orality but also of intimacy. As John Peters
(1999) describes it, “oral speech [is generally] a singular event shared
uniquely by the parties privy to the discussion, [whereas] writing allows
all manner of strange couplings: the distant influence the near, the dead
speak to the living, and the many read what was intended for the few”
(37). Gossip, in its orality, is (or simulates) intimacy; it is not didactic or
pedantic. The more conventional accounts of gossip as mere storytelling
seem more appropriate to rumor, which works via anonymity.
Let me pause to stress what is not part of this definition, that is, part
of virtually all working definitions of gossip: the condition that the talk
be about a person who’s absent. There are two reasons for this. The first
is that, if one works backward in research, as I have (collecting gossip
narratives and episodes), it’s clear that much of what conversationalists
have self-identified as gossip isn’t simply or merely personal in nature. In
other words, when we gossip, we aren’t always just talking about people
(let alone the behind their back part). To be specific, as later chapters will
demonstrate, people gossip at work a lot, and often what they’re talk-
ing about (evaluatively, confidentially, sometimes angrily) are corporate or
institutional events and actions, which is not reducible to the personali-
ties of the actors. (A university that decides, to take an all-too-common
current example, to eliminate one or more whole departments on the
thin justification that they are insufficiently profitable will prompt exten-
sive academic gossip; the analysis of why the decision happened will not
simply be disparaging the personality of she who issued the final memo.)
Alternatively, discussions of people are often simultaneously discussions
of the institutions and their norms; academic gossip, in particular, is rife
with this. Pending layoffs, mergers, promotions, changes in company mis-
sion or culture—these are all ripe subjects for the office gossip circuit,
and substantial research supports this.6 Gossip scholarship, particularly in
literature and philosophy, tends to follow W.H. Auden’s (1938) classic
formulation that gossip’s three subjects are “love, crime, and money,”
which on its surface suggests an utterly personal limitation. But money
isn’t simply about how much a person earns, or how one displays their
wealth. Americans, in particular, spend a substantial part of their wak-
ing hours at work, and work forms a large part of American identity. Of
course, we gossip at work, about work—it is a relevant professional tool.7
10 K. ADKINS
To ignore these kinds of episodes as irrelevant draws a circle around gossip

that seems to ignore its own practice through history.
The second reason is more diffuse; there is a whiff of finger-wagging
judgment in accounts of gossip as primarily or necessarily talk about the
absent that I think it worthwhile both to identify and to deemphasize.
Much of the literature on gossip has been theological and moralizing;
the sins of the tongue that classic authors and the Bible articulate car-
ries forward to the present day. To be sure, gossip is secret and private
conversation; we gossip when we are in pairs or small groups. But the
way in which secrecy is described in much scholarship on gossip (such
as Linda Radzik’s otherwise excellent piece in Res Philosophica [2016],
which repeatedly stresses that what differentiates gossip from other kinds
of talk is this behind-the-back quality) suggests a kind of dishonesty to the
secrecy. The implication is that gossips say something personally disparag-
ing about someone that they would be unwilling to say directly to that
person. While this may certainly be a feature of some (if not much) gossip,
there is ample evidence to suggest that it is not a definitional distinction. I
think it worthwhile to separate the fact of the secrecy from the assumption
of dishonesty, and indeed, the episodes we will explore indicate that there
can be relevant honesty in gossip that can be lacking in apparently above-
board and public conversations. This is not to say that gossip becomes
an automatically positive phenomenon. Rather, I want to stress that the
transgressive and intimate nature of gossip is potentially neither positive
nor negative; it is intrinsically an ambivalent phenomenon. As John Peters
points out, the Greek word for communication, koinoō , is comparably
ambivalent. “It means to make common, communicate, impart, or share;
it also means to pollute or make unclean” (267). I aim, in this book, to
examine the ways in which gossip fulfills both of these means of commu-
nication (sometimes at once): gossip can be generative and creative in its
sharing (connecting ideas that we would otherwise see as disconnected,
revealing perspectives that are too often diminished), and equally, gos-
sip can be destructive (poisoning the well of speakers or positions, subtly
undermining credibility or authority).
Crucially for my purposes, finally, using a definition that harkens back
to the word’s origins sets helpful parameters for what counts as gossip.
Celebrity gossip, for the most part, is ruled out—there is no degree of
intimacy or shared background asserted or required for one to read People
magazine or the website Gawker. (By unexpected contrast, participants in
websites like blindgossip.com, who offer theories about which blind items
fit which celebrities, do appear to have at least some shared information or

background—or at least, those who get the items right more often than
not appear to have.) But defining gossip in this way allows us fruitfully to
compare gossip across a broad range of communities and institutions—
this book’s examples range from politics, science, academia, to nursing
and the corporate world.
Not incidentally, this definition of gossip offers a helpful barometer
with which to differentiate gossip and rumor. The conventional distinction
between the two is that gossip is about people, whereas rumors are about
things.8 As C.A.J. Coady phrases it, “You can spread a rumour about an
earthquake but you cannot gossip about it” (2006: 263). While it’s cer-
tainly true that there are some sorts of events that one cannot imagine gos-
siping about—an earthquake is a purely natural event, though its indirect
causes may have social, economic, or political features—it’s also clearly the
case that there are events about which dyads or small groups can or will
want to discuss privately. The list of events that can be subjects for rumor,
according to Coady, includes (among others) institutional, political, and
religious events. But those institutions aren’t purely physical; they are
made up of people who are taking the actions, writing the memos, financ-
ing the deeds. And there are stakes in institutional, political, and religious
events that aren’t present in physical events like earthquakes—people can
want or reject secrecy around their company’s layoff decisions, a politi-
cian’s tax records, or a religious figure’s donors. The sharing and trading
of this information, because access to it is restrictive, is often much more
guarded and cautious than in the sort of generic work of rumor. There is
an assumed relationship of trust, or some common background, present in
gossip, from its infancy, that doesn’t exist for rumor. The primary defini-
tions of rumor in the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, all stress the
indeterminate status of rumor (it is not fact, merely talked about); none
describe it as emerging out of intimacy or friendship. It is “widespread,”
“general,” “hearsay.” Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, describing the speed
of rumors spreading across Libya’s cities, captures the generic quality of
rumor, which fits its origins (fama, simply meaning fame or being talked
about). Rumors have a degree of publicity that gossip does not. I can
spread and receive rumors from anyone, anywhere (in the checkout line
at the grocery store, waiting for the copier at work, while in a crowd at a
public event). By contrast, I only gossip with those I trust.
This is not to say that gossip cannot become rumor. Coady’s point that
“rumour, however, seems essentially prone to run abroad” (2006: 263) is
12 K. ADKINS
well taken for some of the instances of gossip that we examine, particularly
in the fourth and fifth chapters. Stories that were initially shared between
a few trusted intimates can spread enough to where their further spread-
ing seems relatively safe; the information won’t necessarily get back to an
initial leaker. This is because of a second distinction between gossip and
rumor, its speed of transmission. The items of rumors are items that are
transmitted, not discussed at length. If indeed I am spreading a rumor
about an impending earthquake in my town, it’s probably not the time for
a leisurely discussion of possible causes and impacts; it’s time to grab fam-
ily members, forms of identification and go. Topics of rumors are often
time-urgent in this way (a newsworthy event is about to occur or just
happened); the purpose of rumor is simply spreading news. Its absence
of sourcing facilitates this. By contrast, we settle in with a friend or two
for a gossip session; while there may be a particular item or two that kicks
off the discussion, one of the markers of gossip is the way in which it has
the time for (albeit disorderly) rumination. While individual gossip items
can and do travel (and occasionally quite quickly), there is a difference
of degree and urgency between rumor and gossip; as Tamotsu Shibutani
observes (1966), rumors flourish in times of crisis (46).
While my definition for gossip may sound overly sanitizing, I want to
stress that the background of intimacy can be treacherous for gossips.
Because rumors are often utterly anonymous, spreading a rumor (even a
clearly irresponsible one) carries little threat to one’s personal reputation.
By contrast, intimate conversation means that one is lending one’s reputa-
tion, however loosely, to the ideas one carries and shares. Gossip that is
spreadable is risky, and as the following chapters will show, good gossip
is compulsively spreadable. Enthusiastic gossips can be seen as less trust-
worthy, less worthy of conversational intimacy. This, we will see, is part of
the reason that empowered gossip can be so emphatically and effectively
labeled by its spreaders as anything but gossip; while there are clearly epis-
temic blinders on, there’s also a recognition that to be labeled as a gossip
is intrinsically to be seen as less epistemically trustworthy than others. This
is most prominent in the chapter that examines gossip in politics.
1.2 A Gossip Agenda

Some precision might now be in order. The book consists of eight chap-
ters. The second, “Gossip’s Bad Reputation,” orients us toward the his-
tory, and in particular, the lexical decline of gossip from ambivalent to
negative (and primarily feminine). The chapter will also incorporate some
of the elements of a standard literature review; however, its organization
is not around disciplines, but around conventional views of gossip (trivial,
personal, malicious, gendered or otherwise “othered”). As I suggested
above, one of the limitations of some of the conventional work on gossip
is that it often draws its definitional net so tightly as to reduce the explana-
tory impact of gossip, failing to explain not simply why gossip is peren-
nially done, but in fact relied upon (absent public acknowledgment). My
aim here is to look at gossip as it has been practiced, as much as theorized.
The third chapter (“The Word on the Street”) presents the heart of the
argument, demonstrating the ways in which gossip contributes to knowl-
edge. The two particular means by which knowledge helps us think are
selection (choosing between competing theories), and synthesis (gossip as
imaginative thought-space, helping us to put together ostensively distinct
or disanalogous ideas into a coherent theory). While the examples span
subcultures, recent critical epistemology is helpful here for context. Gossip
gives us tools by which to imagine and choose alternatives.
This epistemic imagination, of course, occurs within what I think is
an often-charged background—knowledge claims are asserted against
competing paradigms of knowledge, belief, and prejudice. Recent work
on critical race theory, and feminist epistemology, provides relevant con-
ceptual architecture for this idea. Chapter 4 (“Failure to Communicate”)
examines two recent cases of institutional gossip within academia, that
demonstrate the ways in which competing ideas about both theories of
disciplines and the composition of the profession get played out aboveg-
round, in journals and conference talks, and below ground, in vicious
emails and blog attacks. In essence, gossip is a knowledge source of neces-
sity—subaltern communities, in particular, rely upon gossip when their
access to conventional sources of information is limited. The mirror image
of this idea—that gossip by the empowered gets disseminated without
recognition or negative impact on reputation—also becomes clear. The
breakdown, in other words, has perilous effects for both the majority and
minority viewpoints.
This is, of course, why gossip is such a powerful, if closeted, tool in pol-
itics. The fifth chapter, “Rumors Help the Enemy,” while giving a quick
nod to the history of political gossip, zeroes in on a few recent case stud-
ies in US politics (Gary Hart’s aborted candidacy for the Presidency, the
Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the George W. Bush White
House’s leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name during the run-up to
14 K. ADKINS
the 2003 Iraq invasion). In these cases, not only do we see the invisibility
of gossip by the empowered (and indeed, their reliance upon it as a crucial
political tool) but we also see the ways in which blindness to gossip as itself
political can reveal political and epistemic weaknesses. This is clearest in
the Gary Hart case, in which case the candidate was blindsided by press
and public interest in his personal life—accounts of this case, most recently
that of Matt Bai (2014) focus too much on the shared norms of journal-
ism as an industry, and ignore the ways in which the Hart revelations were
tied to larger political changes in the landscape, and crucially, different
views about what happened with Hart, and what it meant.
Gossip is political in part because gossip can be used aggressively or
instrumentally. Chapter 6, “Weaponized Gossip,” examines the ways in
which gossip gets zeroed in on a single meaning, usually for a single pur-
pose (the takedown of someone’s career or reputation). The classic, fic-
tional, examples are whispering campaigns: The Children’s Hour, Notes on
a Scandal. What’s common in these two examples is the insularity of the
communities in which the gossip happens. Indeed, examples of gossip that
is particularly reputation-focused give us some sense of a tipping point
(when gossip moves from being constructive to destructive). The combi-
nation of an insular community (one in which alternative viewpoints tend
not to be recognized or legitimated), sharp divisions of power, and high
stakes can result in a toxic environment for gossip. Gossip is not simply a
tool for the subaltern to express their ideas but also a way to do the dirty
work of politics, relatively cleanly.
Finally, it’s important to recognize the way in which gossip has changed
as communication has moved from primarily oral, to primarily printed,
to primarily digital. The seventh chapter, “Gossip in the Ether,” focuses
in on the ways in which gossip problematizes our understanding of pub-
lic and private. Classic methods of safer gossip (“blind items” columns)
allowed one to discuss and evaluate behavior without lasting personal and
legal consequences. The development, not just of blogs but also of apps
like Secret, Cloakroom, and Yik Yak, allow for permanently anonymous
(and endlessly available) gossip. Daniel Solove’s work on privacy and the
Internet (2008) helps us sketch out some of the dangers of this latest shift
in gossip.
There are good reasons for philosophers analyzing gossip primarily
from an ethical perspective—it is behavior that often directly concerns
itself and affects the behavior and reputation of others (as well as its
participants). While my focus is primarily epistemic in this work, there
are some clear ethical implications to my argument, particularly since I

distinguish between constructive and destructive gossip. I will conclude,
then, with a chapter (“Schools for Scandal”) that reviews the overall
argument, and points to some ways in which gossip can be done mean-
ingfully. First, recognizing some of the power dynamics within gossip
(particularly recognizing invisible gossip as such) is crucial, for egalitar-
ian purposes—it takes away an unfair epistemic edge from already privi-
leged speakers and communities.9 But in addition, being explicit about
what gossip can, and can’t, do for our knowledge, may finally help us
be self-conscious about these conversations. If they can be valuable, we
should treat them with some care. Gossipy conversations are the work
of intimacy, and intimacy acts as a valuable interstitial space between
public and private. As recent work on friendship and conversation argues
(notably Turkle [2015]), conversations work to strengthen our families
and our communities.
A few words about the book’s methodological approach. While my
focus is primarily philosophical, it is not exclusively so—the bibliography
reflects a rather promiscuous approach to reading. This is in part because
so much of the literature on gossip straddles disciplines; fruitful work has
been done on gossip in literary criticism, history, anthropology, psychol-
ogy, sociology, and management. I make heavy use of work in disciplines
remote from my own, in part because many of them deal with gossip as it
has been practiced. Philosophers analyzing gossip tend to use such small
examples (conversations between two imagined people about the ward-
robe or sexual practices of an absent third), lacking context, that is difficult
to imagine where gossip might matter. When we look at the people, places,
and topics we’ve actually gossiped about, however, there is plenty of dirt
for the archaeologist, and the dirt is as important as the shards of pottery.
While there are a few contemporary philosophers whose theories will be
regularly useful here—Miranda Fricker, José Medina, Lorraine Code—I
also frequently invoke ideas from John Stuart Mill. In part, this is simply
because he is such a touchstone philosopher, but mostly it is because he
is one of the most incisive philosophers about the role of the social realm
interpolating between the individual and the government. My arguments
about gossip are directed at the ways in which it, as a social phenomenon,
has impact on our both personal and political lives, and reveals the ways in
which these realms are always already deeply interconnected. Even when I
disagree with his analysis, his insights and emphasis on the importance of
the social realm are instructive.
16 K. ADKINS
In short, history’s whisperings in our collective ears aren’t merely dis-

tracting or destructive. They are a valuable, if secretive, element of how
we come to know things, and how we can effect change, for good and for
ill. “Come, let us gossip about the universe,” William James was wont to
say (Berenson 1952: x). Let’s listen closely to these whisperings, and see
what they say.
Notes
1. Jennifer Saul (2012) and Claude Steele (2010: 76–98) explain some
of the ways in which unconscious stereotypes and biases negatively
affect thinking and performance.
2. By contrast, much of the philosophical literature on gossip utilizes
either decontextualized and hypothetical conversations between
two generic people or examples from fiction or mythology (see
Code or Westacott). While these examples are useful for specific
analysis of epistemic claims (what P, precisely, is S claiming to
know?), the absence of context means that the gossip has less poten-
tial for meaning beyond the immediate realm.
3. Thanks to Robert Paul Wolff for calling my attention to this
phenomenon.
4. Many commentators describe gossip as “informal” talk between a
few people; my departure from this definition is to describe it as
“intimate,” which I think points back to the word’s origins more
faithfully.
5. To be clear, not all scholars of gossip stress intimacy or informality as
a precondition; for instance, Yerkovich (1977) merely contends that
gossip participants must know one another well enough that social
distance (age or class) would not be an obstructing factor (192).
6. To be clear, these topics can also be discussed in ways that incorpo-
rate personal evaluation; discussions of pending or past decisions
that are problematic are often evaluated in the context of the
decision-maker (“why did she decide to fire the hardest-working
person in our unit?” would be an example of a conversation opener
here). But my point is that the what of this story is at least as impor-
tant, or motivating to the speakers, as the personal evaluation.
7. Emily Toth (1997: 68–69) provides a fine summary of the profes-
sional value of academic gossip; Rochman (2010) explains some of
the business value of gossip.
8. An alternative take on this distinction, offered by Bertoletti and

Magnani (2014) is that gossip requires firsthand testimony (4041).
This speaks to the way in which gossip has a connection to sourcing
and authority that rumor does not.
9. This insight has been reinforced in some recent scholarship about
institutional gossip. Van Iterson and Clegg (2008) in analyzing the
gossip around an oil-for-food scandal in Australia, conclude that
organizations can evade responsibility for their actions as long as the
negative gossip stays gossip only; it must be public or legitimated for
there to be a chance of accountability (1131).
CHAPTER 2
Gossip’s Bad Reputation
Gossip is a recursive concept. Because it is itself talk, it can be the subject

of its own talk, and indeed, its own gossip. My goal in this chapter is two-
fold: to attempt to present a historical overview of the history of the word
and practice, particularly, how the word “gossip” has become embedded
with value judgments, and to review the basic scholarly approaches toward
gossip. Because the word’s recent history is so loaded, in my view, too
much of the scholarly literature still reflects those assumptions. The initial
Sects. 2.1 and 2.2 give a brief overview to the practice of gossip in history,
and how it shifted from being seen as an inevitable and ambiguous cultural
practice to being one that has decidedly negative values. Robin Dunbar’s
pathbreaking research, which situates gossip and more generally language
as an outgrowth of primate grooming, puts the emphasis of gossip as a
manifestation of intimacy. The action of intimacy, in whatever form, is
intrinsically vulnerable; I entrust some part of myself that is normally
not publicly known (whether physical, verbal, intellectual, emotional) to
someone else. It is typically, if not always, symmetric, and it can backfire.
Those we trust can take advantage of our trust, whether out of carelessness
or genuine malice. Accordingly, when we look at the history of gossip as
a practice, we see it both relied upon and resisted; it is an inevitable corol-
lary of people being together, and dangerous in its use or abuse.
But gossip moves from being a more culturally ambivalent concept to
more decidedly negative in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in
dictionary definitions, it acquires characteristics of being idle, trifling talk,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47840-1_2
20 K. ADKINS
done chiefly by women. While I am no historian, I want to venture an

explanation for this shift. My contention is that the decline of gossip’s
status in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a corollary of the
emergence of what Walter Ong captures as the values of print culture.
The spread of printing and literacy generates expectations about the fini-
tude and assignment of individual authority, authorship, credibility, and
accountability. The devaluing of orality that occurs during this period is a
general devaluation; the devaluation of gossip that occurs is one particular
consequences of this. Gossip’s relentless undermining of exactly the val-
ues of literacy becomes distinctively dangerous as literacy spreads. While
orality in general undermines the value of individual authority and author-
ship, gossip can in very specific and targeted ways reveal dishonesties and
hypocrisies in our claims of individuality. In the latter sections, I’ll review
the scholarly literature, grouped less by discipline—though the garrulous-
ness and openness of gossip as a practice means that it has been studied
by specialists across a wide range of fields—than by starting assumptions
about the practice.
2.1 Gossip’s Pre-History, or Grooming

and Intimacy
“Gossip,” as a term, has a relatively short linguistic history. The Oxford

English Dictionary cites 1014 as the first appearance of the term in its orig-
inal Old English form: “godsibbe,” meaning simply a family intimate or
godparent. But gossip as a practice has more ancient origins. Robin Dunbar
(1996) argues that all primates are distinct from other animals by virtue of
our high sociality (18), and that mutual physical grooming, the means by
which non-human primates maintain the micro- and macro-alliances that
protect them from predators, is a precursor of spoken language. In other
words, grooming functions to generate and maintain social connections
that are both pleasurable and utilitarian; grooming keeps group connec-
tions strong and healthy. Dunbar pinpoints a link between the dramatic
increase in primate group size and the concurrent development of lan-
guage (112), and argues that language allows us to maintain group ties,
loyalty, and intimacy on a much more efficient basis than grooming. We
can communicate developments and connections via language over min-
utes, in larger groups and across distances; by contrast, grooming requires
physical closeness, can only be done in dyads or very small groups, and
requires hours. In short, language’s inherent and multiple sociality (192)
GOSSIP’S BAD REPUTATION 21
draws its origins from prelinguistic patterns of grooming. The initial pur-
pose of language, according to Dunbar, is simply “checking in” with one
another—small talk about how we are, where we are, that serves the same
purposes grooming does, of intimacy, pleasure, closeness, location, and
community (123).
Dunbar’s contention is basic; “language evolved to allow us to gossip”
(79). Much of our talk, he contends, is small talk—the kind of checking-in
that was previously accomplished via grooming. His analysis, while gener-
ally persuasive in grounding small talk as an integral piece of language,
displays some limitations in its depictions of socialization. Dunbar assumes
strong biological construction and sharply limits the possibility of social
construction of selves, except as an outgrowth of biological patterning.
This is clearest in his gender dimorphism when discussing talk; women
“network,” whereas men “advertise” (177), which he analogizes from
animal mating patterns. The “advertising” talk of men is adversarial and
mercenary; women’s “networking” is a social fusion evocative of the ethics
of care. More plainly, gossip is clearly subtext-free for Dunbar. Small talk
is a large part of our conversation—Dunbar tracks topics of conversations,
and says that “big talk” about topics like politics, religion, science, and
sports (sic) takes up less than 10% of our conversational time (123). Small
talk is about reputation only. The possibility that small talk might be con-
nected to, have threads with, or also be about bigger topics is not part of
his discussion. To take just a single example, scholars across cultures have
documented the ways in which accusations of witchcraft originate and
spread through village gossip.1 Equally, it’s clear that these conversations
and accusations don’t simply record and condemn individual behavior,
but individual behavior in social and political context: witchcraft accusa-
tions often track along lines of political, economic, and gender disputes,
with witches being relative community newcomers who espouse or repre-
sent unpopular positions.2
Gossip’s precondition is physical intimacy. The symbolism in groom-
ing is clear: yes, hominids are checking in with one another, but the
checking-in is all immediate and direct. The transition from grooming
to language marks the ability to check in about each other in part by
discussing somebody or something else; with gossip, then, indirection
emerges. It’s interesting that the metaphor “nit-picking” is so negative;
somebody who’s a nit-picker focuses on irrelevant minutia, and point-
lessly so. To the contrary, Dunbar reminds us that the physical origins
of nit-picking are dyadic, intimate, and deeply nurturing. But the term,
22 K. ADKINS
more than the practice, is personalized. Gossip’s origins are as a noun;

the gossip is a person (identity) as much as an act. The “godsibbe,” or
god-sibling, wasn’t simply a casual declaration of family intimacy; it was
a formal role of pastoral and baptismal sponsorship. The gossip as god-
sibling is present in English medieval texts dating back to the eleventh
century,3 and the roles of the gossips were various: aiding at women’s
childbirths and recuperation from delivery, acting as godparents, nam-
ing the child, taking him or her for baptism, acting as sponsors in church
(Phillips 154). The word only emerges in its verb form in the sixteenth
century (Phillips 169). These relationships, then, were formal, legal, and
extended through time.
Gossiping wasn’t merely an expression of social cohesion throughout
these centuries, of course. It was routinely criticized, challenged, and
contained—theologically, poetically, and judicially. In the Old Testament,
Solomon issues warnings against the treacherousness of speech, but it is
clear that it is only some speech that is dangerous. “All the words of my
mouth are righteous; there is nothing twisted or cooked in them. They
are all straight to one who understands and right to those who find knowl-
edge” (Prov. 8:8–9). This speech, coming after a lascivious indictment of
a woman who seduces an innocent young man with her words as much as
with her physicality, makes a clear contrast between good speech and bad
speech. Talking too much, too freely, too extravagantly, too physically (too
femininely) represents a moral danger. Solomon’s concerns are echoed in
the Mishnah, which outlines in great detail penalties for wrong speech
and distinctions between right and wrong speech. The Mishnah demon-
strates subtlety, allowing that exaggerated speech or joking speech (often
rhetorical markers of gossip) doesn’t necessarily merit penalty (Neusner
1991: 409, 639). Writing of rumor, Virgil observes the same physicality
and uncontrollability others see in gossip: rumor is the “swiftest of all the
evils in the world,” mixes fact and fable indiscriminately, and is a “sordid
goddess,” promiscuously infecting others with her manipulations (Aeneid
IV: 220–245). These kinds of traits in gossip no doubt are why its practi-
tioners are punished and shamed; medieval Germans would be sentenced
to wear elaborate, heavy iron gossipers’ masks in public as repentance for
their idle talk. Gossip’s genealogy, then, reflects its origins in intimacy; as
something that operates from a space of privacy, secrecy, and vulnerability,
it can nurture or damage relationships. But it is a persistent phenomenon
in these early years, and not reducible to the stereotype we more regularly
see nowadays.
2.2 The Fall of Gossip

This subsection’s title is almost certainly a bit too strong, as well as too
theological. As we have seen, gossip has had an ambivalent reputation
almost since its beginning. So it does not undergo a tidy transvaluation
or reversal of fortune as does the concept of “good” in Nietzsche’s On
the Genealogy of Morals. However, it clearly begins losing status and value
during the Enlightenment, when its parent concept of orality does as well.
This combination, I will argue, is not accidental. While many critics, most
notably Patricia Meyer Spacks, point out that gossip’s definition and sta-
tus change in this period, little is typically offered in the way of explain-
ing the transformation. The devaluation of gossip is particularly striking,
given much of the European world had elaborate formal or legal ways or
surveilling, monitoring, or utilizing gossip. The American colonies and
much of Europe during the medieval era had elaborate legal or theologi-
cal procedures in place for both utilizing and disciplining gossip.4 The
widespread recognition of the subversive power of voices in oral culture
was also apparent; Ranjit Guha (1992) lists some of the many cultures that
employed formal police or governmental forces to track street rumors for
possible insurgency (252).
But we can observe some commonalities, when we examine some his-
torical shifts that occur in the treatment of public speech, the recognition
and legitimation of a public sphere and the legal status of the individual
over a few hundred years.5 Rapid shifts in how information is transmitted
change how we understand thought, authorship, and authority. The devel-
opment of the printing press (1400) means that information can be spread
not just rapidly (tongues wag quickly, after all) but also consistently—the
information becomes much more mechanized and uniform. The several
technological changes traceable to the printing press—the translation of
the Bible into dialect (1534), the emergence of the modern copyright,
modern plagiarism, rapid spread of newspapers, and development of the
diary and novel as literary form, and the proliferation of dictionaries and
encyclopedias (sixteenth through eighteenth centuries) together are trans-
formative. The implications of these developments have been explored
eloquently by Walter Ong (1995 [1982]) and Elizabeth Eisenstein (2005
[1983]). As Eisenstein frames the argument, a print culture has divers
and diverse effects. It facilitates the spreading and assessment of infor-
mation; students and scholars can cover more intellectual territory, more
consistently, when books become more easily m anufactured and traded
24 K. ADKINS
(47). This book economy doesn’t merely propel quantities of learning

but qualitative moves; scholars can read more widely, and make connec-
tions across disparate intellectual areas and cultures (49). New methods
of organizing and collecting data develop (74–78). Eisenstein traces the
flowering of the Scientific Revolution, the Protestant Reformation and
emergence of Catholic orthodoxy, and the emergence of capitalism in part
to these cultural markers. The ways in which print culture both fixes and
disperses ideas, in short, promotes both the flourishing of disparate ideas,
and the centralization of lines of authority at once. Ong extends this analy-
sis into the linguistic and philosophic realms. Print culture, in his view,
renders language abstract and removed from the subjects it discusses (84).
It decontextualizes both the reader and the writer (102). It “reifie[s] the
word” (119), and creates “a sense of the private ownership of words”
(131).
Ong and Eisenstein’s analysis is sound. Here I would like to extend it
specifically, albeit speculatively, to the historical status of gossip. They both
write about the ways in which authority and authorship become tech-
nologized and commodified—in many disciplines and realms, ideas and
words become fixed objects to be attached to persons, and which can
have variable monetary value. Eisenstein calls our attention to the paradox
that it is the mechanization of print that produces personal, distinctive
voices separated from a crowd (149). As Ong makes explicit, however, this
commodification and technologizing is always already partial and illusory;
we do not lose the markers of oral culture, they merely go underground
and become hidden, surreptitious (131). But one of the consequences
of this illusory fixing of authority and value is the necessary degrading
and devaluing of orality. Eisenstein notes that in a print culture, collective
authorship in theology, science, and the law becomes undermined (96). In
the sixteenth century, for instance, French law explicitly reversed the legal
status of documents over testimony; the formula “witnesses over letters”
became “letters over witnesses” in with the Ordinance of Moulins in 1566
(McIlvenna 2012: 332). While both Eisenstein and Ong give plentiful
examples of this degradation of orality in many realms, it’s striking that the
genres of orality they discuss are exclusively that enjoyed high social capi-
tal. Ong entirely ignores popular culture and speech, while Eisenstein pays
it only glancing attention. She recognizes that the developments of print
culture extend to scandal and smut just as they do to theology (104), but
focuses more on major historical developments. She is dismayed by histo-
rians who attribute historical weight to politically influential Renaissance
gossip specialist Pietro Aretino, described by Eisenstein as “one of the

founders of the gutter press” (145). But Aretino also raked his muck in
well-reviewed plays, poetry, and essays; his gossipy letters are of a compa-
rable tone with his more high-status work.6 Eisenstein and Ong’s mini-
mization of popular oral work, I believe, misses part of the effect of the
transformation to print culture. I want to suggest that the devaluing and
subjugation of orality has effects not just in previously valued ways of
gathering information but also in the ways in which people always already
talked to each other. As we know (and will see many more examples of in
later chapters), people have gossiped throughout history, and their gossip
has been not just personally but also publicly rebellious and contentious.
In a more oral world (and one in which literacy was confined to a few
elites), a constant rumbling undercurrent of gossip is to be expected. But
in a world where literacy becomes more widespread, ideas and information
can be attached to authors for posterity, and public positions and author-
ity have at least the illusion of permanence, the murmurings of the crowd
become particularly extraneous. Gossip both looks less authoritative in a
print culture, and is undermining of the form of authority as well as the
content. At the very moment when print is attaining dominance as author-
ity,7 challenges to its status are intrusive, and an obstacle to the spread of
the values of print culture. Gossip, the rhetorical heckler and trickster, can
hobble pompous public pronouncements. Private whisperings can render
public restrictions impotent. It seems like more than a coincidence to me
that the word gossip becomes lexically devalued in the century after print
culture and literacy become widespread. Cordoning off gossip as trivial,
probably false, malicious, and the talk of (ignorant or spiteful) women
minimizes the effect of gossip as a critical act. Gossip, more than other oral
practices, reminds us of the incomplete and illusory nature of the print
world. Print seeks to fix information, authority, credibility. The sideline
mutterers persistently refuse to accept these valuations. Gossip aims at the
discordant, it often works by debunking—its interest is “dirt,” revealing
what doesn’t fit or is out of place (whether it be a person, action, value,
or institutional position). Gossip, by this reading, is one of the rhetorical
scapegoats of this print culture, and its lexical devaluation ties rather neatly
in with these markers of an emergence of print culture. The degradation of
gossip is a symptom of the anxiety of clarity.
There is a straightforward political extension of this anxiety of clarity.
Jürgen Habermas’ (1991 [1962]) argument about the transformation of
the public sphere depends on a reading of communication and deliberation
26 K. ADKINS
as a result of the press. Habermas, drawing from diverse historical and

philosophical sources, tracks the emergence or shifting of cultural practices
from private or courtly value to a public or civic space of deliberation and
disagreement. Nancy Fraser (1990) complicates his assessment in ways
that apply to this analysis of gossip. She notes that his assumption that
there is a single sense of the public (a bourgeois public, 61) reflects both
a faulty history (ignoring those who were excluded from public or civic
groups or the fact that excluded groups often formed their own groups)
and a faulty ideology. Habermas privileges a certain kind of rationality and
discourse that reflects the narrowed gaze of the groups. His recasting of
the emergence of the gossipy periodicals (Tatler and Spectator) affirms this
reading; he describes them as “[emancipating] civic morality from moral
theology and of practical wisdom from the philosophy of the scholars”
(43). While this laudable goal may have been what Addison and Steele
aimed at, the reading erases the gossipy manner in which they carried it
out—telling stories about the failings and foibles of Londoners. This sani-
tization of the public—who is really in it, what it really does—supports my
observations about gossip. As we will see in our examples, gossip often
serves as a kind of counter-discourse for subjugated groups—it is a way of
sense-making when people find that facts they consider to be relevant get
routinely ignored or minimized in conventional media and discussions.
In other words, “the public” gains authority as a concept and a political
space, but at a cost. Fraser’s point is that this articulation tells only part
of the story—it misses resistance that occurs, and it ignores some of the
other-publics that were present at the time. “The public,” then, is only
“some of the public,” or “what we think of as the best, or the real, public.”
This political argument (which is simultaneous to the devaluing of gossip)
is a concrete extension of the degradation of gossip.
The theme of gossip as dangerous emerges in multiple realms. Susan
Phillips, in her analysis of gossip in literary and pastoral texts, notes the
emergence of women’s authority in the pastoral realm. The emergence of
late medieval religious groups like the Lollards challenged male pastoral
authority and practice; confession should be public, women could read
and teach scripture, and the pastoral community stood in authority over a
single leading figure (Phillips 187–199). The gossip of women during this
period (late fourteenth through sixteenth century) was particularly sub-
versive of the very authorities that normally regulated it. Dissonant voices
also emerge in social practices; the spread of coffeehouses in England
throughout the seventeenth century is almost immediately controversial,
in part because coffeehouses are widely recognized as places for political

gossip, and are frequented by not simply dissidents but also politicians
and journalists to get otherwise unavailable news (Pincus 1995: 813–814,
821–822; Price 2014: 61). The suppression of coffeehouses was formally
proposed, though withdrawn promptly (Pincus 831). Across the ocean
and one century later, a comparable move occurs in the American colonies.
Jane Kamensky argues that during the seventeenth century, legal prosecu-
tions of speech and gossip are replaced with a regulation via etiquette
(182–183). She observes a similar denaturing of speech; while gossip may
become more pervasive, it is less powerful. Both arguments, in short, rest
on a recognition that subversive speech can disrupt the very authority
that has kept it in check; gossip’s orality makes it impossible to regulate
formally. The only solution is mockery (parodic gospels of women gossips
were produced in England that can be read as undermining the Lollards)
or manners. In other words, in all of these cases gossip is the vehicle for
dissonance, and is thus dangerous to established authority. Dissonance
is at first formally denied in the colonies, but then diminished via social
means; the response is reversed with the Lollards.
This interpretation of history is strengthened when we consider anthro-
pology of cultures that are less saturated with print, and the status of gossip
within them.8 In John Beard Haviland’s (1977) analysis of gossip among
the Zinacanteco (residents of the municipality of San Lorenzo Zinacantan
within the Chiapas province of Mexico), Karen Brison’s (1992) analysis
of gossip within Papua New Guinea, Sarah Miller’s (1992a, b) analysis
of the role of gossip within marriage negotiations in Nepal, and Niko
Besnier’s (2009) examination of the work of gossip in Nukulaelae, one
of the Tuvalu islands in the South Pacific, we see a reminder of how gos-
sip used to be understood in much of the world still operative. In each
of these cultures, gossip can be both socially constructive or destructive,
but it is in all cultures a deeply integrated part of the community. Gossip
is simply an expected and relevant part of oral and social behavior; what is
said in gossip, and how it is said, isn’t ignored by participants and leaders
in the community, but is taken seriously. Haviland describes the “gos-
sip areas” of the hamlets of Zinacantan corresponding to agricultural and
traffic divisions in the community (21). Even when gossip is highly dis-
ruptive—Besnier describes a public conflict over reputation-challenging
gossip that has stark personal and political results (165–173), Haviland
describes “factional” gossip about political and land disputes within the
Zinacanteco (26), and Brison notes that for all their gossiping, the Kwanga
28 K. ADKINS
consider gossip to be a danger comparable to sorcery—it isn’t to be dis-

missed. It has too much to say, even in its detours, about community val-
ues or points of dissension. Haviland observes that when the Zinacanteco
gossip, they “continually test ordinary rules and evaluative words against
actual behavior” (55). Brison tracks the long meetings that the Kwanga
hold for the exclusive purpose of discussing the gossip and rumors prolif-
erating in the village. She also notes that powerful and ambitious Kwanga
would make special trips to other villages to spread and receive gossip
(xvi). That gossip’s degradation is both simultaneous with the emergence
of print culture, and does not occur in cultures that retain more of their
oral character, suggests the particular danger to the values of print culture
that gossip presents. Let’s look more closely at the specific ways in which
gossip gets undermined or diminished as a way of speaking and thinking.
2.3 Small Talk

I want to pay particular attention to not simply the subject of each of the
major criticisms of gossip (personal, malicious, gendered) but also what
we could call its theme or voice. There are clear subtexts to each of these
criticisms that I believe are philosophically relevant, for they say as much
about what one thinks of the person gossiping, as of the content of the
talk. For instance, criticisms of gossip as small, trivial, or personal only are
also sometimes implicit criticisms of the character of the gossiper; a faulty
or damaged character produces someone who relishes in the irrelevance
of gossip. Classic or theological treatments of gossip minimize it in this
fashion. The scholarship that falls into the “trivial” category, however,
often includes defenses of gossip on epistemological or moral grounds,
indeed, analyses that contribute some of the framework for my argument.
I contend that they are nonetheless incomplete, in the sense of limiting
their analysis to gossip and its cognitive reach to the personal realm only.
Some of the defenses of gossip in contemporary scholarship limit its effec-
tiveness or reach to the purely personal—gossip has no meaningful impact
on a wider world. While it may generate knowledge or ethical claims, these
claims have no interest or merit beyond a tiny subsection of people.9
I will begin with one of the most robust analyses of gossip. Patricia
Spacks’ fine work of literary criticism, Gossip (1985), traces many ways
in which gossip moves with indirection and among audiences. Spacks
brings her acute critical eye to the presence, voice, text, and subtext of
gossip throughout literature—in particular, to its myriad uses in novels
and drama. Her critical eye and ear pick up on the nuances and slippages
within gossip; she emphasizes the way in which gossip eludes easy defini-
tion or categorization, because its very nature is transgressive, and empha-
sizes the way in which it is both private and public at once. Spacks writes
evocatively of the diffuse ways in which gossip propels plots and charac-
ters, and thus reflects our own engagement with the world. Refreshingly,
she is also one of the few scholars on gossip who puts her gossiping cards
on the table; she immediately outs herself as someone who practices and
values gossip (ix). And yet, the effects of gossip in her analysis seem relent-
lessly personal in nature. Its most vital effects are the “bonding” it pro-
duces between participants (22), or the good feelings it produces (63).
Even when gossip’s subjects go beyond the personal, its tone and framing
limit its impact. The social class gossip that dominates The House of Mirth
and Middlemarch tracks moral destruction more than ideological (200).
Talk at a hiring committee of a candidate’s behavior is not gossip, no
matter how close to gossip it may seem (26). In this, Spacks echoes Max
Gluckman’s line-drawing (the gossip of one’s own profession is not in fact
gossip, but professionally necessary talk). When gossip crosses boundar-
ies of private and public, the crossing runs only one way: “Gossip inter-
prets public facts in private terms,” Spacks concludes about political gossip
(262). Spacks recognizes that gossip can be a channel for the marginalized
to express resentment or resistance (256), but doesn’t demonstrate the
way in which this channel is ever effective, or results in a material change
for characters. Her read of gossip is more reactive than productive.
Lorraine Code’s criticisms of conventional epistemology lays the
groundwork for my analysis of gossip; as I will elaborate upon in Chap. 3,
she opens up the philosophical line of examination into the social position
of the knower. Much of Lorraine Code’s defense of gossip as epistemo-
logically worthy in its methodological disorder (1995) breaks new ground
for gossip as epistemology. She notes that gossip subverts the assumptions
of credibility and authority in more mainstream approaches like in natural
science (148). She argues, convincingly, that the interrelatedness for gossip
gives it its intellectual power. But while she makes a quick concluding ref-
erence to gossip that has political effect (Bill Clinton [153]), her primary
understanding of gossip is ultimately as personal as is Spacks’. Gossip, for
Code, has distinctive epistemological value because it is so deeply rooted
in concrete personal situations; its rooting, however, seems also to have
a limit on its impact. “Because it is always specifically located, attuned to
nuance and minutiae … gossip is a finely-tuned instrument for establishing
30 K. ADKINS
truths—albeit often corrigible, renegotiable truths—about people” (147,

emphasis added). The knowledge gossip produces is partial, limited, and
personal; the qualifiers are so stark as to limit the epistemic reach of gossip.
I do not deny the conclusion Code draws, especially her careful critique
about the limits of conventional epistemology, but I want to extend her
analysis of gossip. As we will see in future chapters, people’s gossip isn’t
simply about personal activity or behavior. When people gossip at work,
for instance, their gossip is often about work—the experiments competing
scientists are performing, upcoming decisions about promotions, layoffs,
corporate restructurings, who’s getting assigned which desirable or unde-
sirable projects. Code’s defense of gossip doesn’t make space for this kind
of talk; that we can talk about these things with the same methodological
casualness that we do others’ personal behavior, and with similar results.
Code’s and Spacks’ defenses of gossip stress its playful, disorderly, or idle
character, and while I concur fully with this feature of it, I want to stress
the way in which the play of gossip can accomplish cognitive tasks beyond
the personal realm. Gossip is indeed often playful if not downright silly;
however, like the trickster persona that Patricia Turner explores so well in
her analysis of rumor in African-American communities (1993), the play-
ful or tricky tone can at times conceal serious purpose. Listening to the
subtext of the gossip, as much as the text, is instructive.
Emrys Westacott’s defense of gossip on moral grounds (2012) is care-
ful and precise. He demonstrates the faults in absolute moral abolitions of
gossip, as well as universal defenses. Each of these approaches, he points
out, fails to attend to the context and impact of gossip, and indeed, he
concludes that much gossip is ethically permissible. When we share infor-
mation about an absent person to another, he notes that it can be a way
for us to learn about the social world we inhabit, become closer to some-
one else, or navigate social norms (91–94). But these defenses, while well
expressed, aren’t too distinctive to gossip; they could apply to almost any
social interaction. Westacott’s discussion of gossip pays no attention to
the role power has in who gossips about whom (and when we do or don’t
recognize something as gossip), which I think is part of why gossip’s effect
is neutralized in his discussion. His discussion of gossip as useful for social
functioning is explored only as an individual benefit; actors can better
learn to navigate the social system if they know the feuds and divisions that
don’t get expressed in official memos (93). His defense of gossip as a use-
ful antidote to excessive official secrecy suggests that gossip is a “relatively
harmless outlet” for people to gripe about social differences as opposed to

doing anything about them (272, fn 26).
Other analyses of gossip as personal display little nuance. Jörg
Bergmann’s sociolinguistic analysis of gossip transcriptions Discreet
Indiscretions: The Social Organization of Gossip (1993) persistently dimin-
ishes gossip throughout his exploration of it. Gossip is a “kind of toy for
adults,” Bergmann offers (2), and is talk about a person’s private affairs
that is morally contaminated (58). Bergmann reconstructs gossip con-
versations in a highly formalistic fashion, having a triad of participants,
and a recognizable structure, with gossip inquiries that are proposed and
accepted. The seriousness and formality of the structure conflicts with the
subjects and conversations he reproduces. Bergmann records residents of
a housing development for homeless people discussing fellow and former
residents with each other; the conversation snippets he reproduces are all
the critical discussion of residents’ behavior. While Bergmann’s definition
of gossip is interesting, focusing on discordant behavior, the content is of
interest to a small group (only the people who know the person being gos-
siped about), and carries with it the whiff of immorality.10
Bergmann’s structural analysis of gossip, however limiting, is still far
sturdier than the conventional attitudes philosophers in history have main-
tained about gossip. Philosophers are particularly likely to dismiss gossip as
trivial. Walter Benjamin describes gossip as the “most petit bourgeois of all
phenomena” (302), which comes about because people seek clarity. The
obvious implication is that the clarity people seek is regarding personal
minutiae; the gossip is contrasted to Benjamin’s “destructive character,”
who clears away the clutter of bourgeois capitalism. Gossips gain clarity,
but clarity about mental clutter. Martin Heidegger’s distinction in Being
and Time (1962 [1927]) between substantive language and degraded,
purposeless language (Sprache vs. Gerede) incorporates an extensive dis-
cussion of gossip. While Heidegger begins his discussion of idle talk by
assuring his readers that he does not mean the term in a derogatory fash-
ion (211), the substance of his discussion suggests otherwise. What marks
idle talk and thus gossip, for Heidegger, is its emptiness, its disconnection
with engaged interlocutors seeking to come to genuine understanding.
“Gossip” is synonymous with “passing the word along” (212); in other
words, gossip requires no actual thought or engagement, it merely echoes
what was previously and uncritically heard. Thus gossip reveals what is
already assumed to be true rather than in any fashion engage in what might
be called inquiry. There is no cognitive “struggle” with gossip; it goes into
32 K. ADKINS
ears and brains too easily for resistance (212). Interestingly, what frames
Heidegger’s disgust with gerede is its lack of context; he is criticizing the
way in which gossip is detached from actual, lived relationships with con-
crete others. And his arguments clearly apply to negative gossip; it is easy
to see examples of people being reduced to types or caricatures in negative
gossip, and allow for the possibility of that as ethically harmful. However,
it’s also the case that Heidegger has similar blindness about gossip toward
those who practice it.11 His discussion of gerede is rife with dismissive ref-
erences to those of “average understanding,” which seems to condition
his concern with the democratic nature of gossip. “Idle talk is something
which anyone can rake up,” he warns (213); the fact that just anybody
(including the cognitively average) could venture opinions and criticisms
of others seems particularly worrisome. And certainly, it is this very fea-
ture of gossip—its use and value for marginalized c ommunities as a way
of critiquing or challenging empowered people, ideas, or institutions—
that we will see generate concern across eras and cultures.
Now, it is certainly the case that a phenomenologist like Heidegger
would be unlikely to find value in gossip. His phenomenological method
emphasizes understanding Being as existence, immersed into specific
spatio-temporal locations, and in relation with other beings. As such,
the indirectness and secondhand nature of gossip (reporting on what
happened elsewhere or to others) is anathema. Regardless, Heidegger’s
phenomenological account of language misses possible complexity in
language use. Heidegger’s contrast of superficial talk and reading with
deep engagement with original sources misses the way in which gossip,
particularly when done by those on the margins, is precisely the work of
struggle. People whose voices and views are routinely silenced or under-
mined must be able both to navigate conventional viewpoints and under-
stand the ways in which alternative viewpoints critique and undermine the
conventional position. This analysis, so deftly articulated by Patricia Hill
Collins (2000: 269–271), reminds us that accounts of knowledge in rela-
tionship are incomplete as long as they don’t recognize the ways in which
relationships form and contain power dynamics. Her critical response to
Hegelian binaries, applied to the ways in which African Americans speak
and think effectively in two different languages, illustrates the weakness of
Heidegger’s analysis (69–96). Heidegger can only recognize one sort of
struggle—intellectual struggle with the work of philosophy. His account
misses the ways in which the work of philosophy itself often fails to cap-
ture people’s lived experience, and thus the ways in which a “trivial” act
like gossip can actual contain worthwhile content. The assumption that
talk in an idle or intimate form must be essentially contentless and absent
struggle is belied by the content of much gossip.
If Heidegger’s account of gossip reflects a straightforward dismissal of
talk as trivia, Søren Kierkegaard’s account represents a more complicated
position. On the surface, Kierkegaard’s arguments against gossip resemble
Heidegger’s; he dismisses the world of the public as a generic herd or
crowd. In The Present Age (1846), he contends that gossip and chatter
do not elevate but level (90); they undermine the possibility of speak-
ing and acting with authority (109). In his journals, he makes a sharp
distinction between conversation and gossip; gossip is consumed only by
trivia and is thus repugnant (The Corsair Affair 199). We are obsessed
with the lowest common denominator of people when we gossip, and in
so doing we degrade people who are superior (95). But there is more to
Kierkegaard’s diatribe than simple antidemocratic anger; his true object
of concern here is interiority, a person’s relationship with herself. “Only
the person who can remain essentially silent can speak essentially, can act
essentially. Silence is inwardness” (97). Kierkegaard resists the call of the
crowd because it discourages meaningful reflection, which for him must be
protracted, individual, and dialectical. His dialectical philosophy embraces
paradox; he tracks the minutiae of life—indeed, at various moments in
his works seeming to be obsessed with the sorts of smallnesses of people
that the worst caricatures of gossip represent12—as well as the categories
that so imperfectly capture them. Phenomena like gossip and chatter do
violence to this sort of meditation. Kierkegaard worries that what he sees
as the trivia of gossip doesn’t simply make private affairs public, but reveals
as absurd the idea of thought itself: “Something that no one would dare
present at a meeting, something that no one would be able to speak about,
something that even gossips would scarcely admit to have chattered about,
can very well be put in writing for the public and be known by the public
as the public” (100). The trivia of gossip doesn’t merely inappropriately
cross previously established realms of private and public, for Kierkegaard;
it overtakes categories of judgment and thought. “The public” becomes
an empty abstraction that is used to justify any publicity about anything
at all; our conversation becomes compulsive, constant, and corrosive. We
iterate and air irrelevant particulars with no consideration of importance.
“That Mr. Madsen has become engaged and given his sweetheart a Persian
shawl, that Petersen the poet plans to write a new book of verse, that
Marcussen the actor mispronounced a word last night—such things are
34 K. ADKINS
something only in the sense of factual triviality” (99–100). Kierkegaard’s

list is revealing; chatter is decontextualized news, each item disconnected
to the next, and listed without comment or analysis. Such gossip can only
be trivial absent further discussion.13
Kierkegaard’s arguments about gossip sound a valid warning about
interiority; it is certainly possible to gossip in an unreflective way, and we
will see examples of precisely this phenomenon in later chapters.14 But his
example of gossip is distinctly individual in nature: a list of items, abstracted
not just from context but also from discussion. Gossip is social and rela-
tional; its virtues and vices emerge through discussion. Kierkegaard’s value
of reflection is primarily self-reflection; the individual contemplating prac-
tices and ideals as they are practiced, violated, modulated. The possible
value of social reflection is absent in his work—the idea that we can do
more or serious reflection when two voices and perspectives are joined in
conversation. In particular, gossip’s condition of intimacy and trust allows
for the possibility that our self-image could be reflected back onto us by
another. In point of fact, this was Kierkegaard’s personal experience with
gossip. Denmark’s leading scandal sheet the Corsair subjected Kierkegaard
to relentless mockery in its pages for years, initially due to the abstruse
quality of his philosophy, but ultimately for his unusual physical appear-
ance.15 The physical teasing left the pages of the Corsair; he was teased on
the streets and in plays by the nickname “Either/Or” (The Corsair Affair
xxx). Kierkegaard was deeply wounded by the mockery, and even left
Copenhagen briefly to escape it. In his private papers, Kierkegaard makes
clear that despite its trivial nature, the gossip produced by the Corsair had
effects that were anything but trivial. “The Corsair wheels and deals in
people, holds their honor and serene private lives in their hands as if they
were trifles,” he writes (The Corsair Affair 169).
It is clear in retrospect that part of the tussle over the Corsair was public
prestige; Kierkegaard’s main public attacker P.L. Møller hoped for a pro-
fessorship in aesthetics (which did not materialize), and saw a public bout
of wits with Kierkegaard as a way of burnishing his profile (The Corsair
Affair 144–145).16 Kierkegaard’s revulsion at the Corsair isn’t merely per-
sonal; he repeatedly expresses disgust at the Corsair’s method of receiv-
ing anonymous information about Danes’ private lives (Corsair Affair
140, 167). And he pulls no punches in his own defense; one of his public
responses to Møller’s criticism contains regular insults to Møller’s intel-
ligence and reading comprehension (The Corsair Affair 38–46); he later
compares the Corsair to prostitution (49). Given this disgust, his specific
and detailed questioning of another Corsair editor, Meïr Goldschmidt,

about exactly how the Corsair received anonymous information, is a bit
dissonant (140). For someone as disgusted by gossip as Kierkegaard por-
trays himself to be, he seems to have a very detailed interest in how exactly
the gossip makes its way to the paper. Indeed, where he loses interest in
Goldschmidt’s account is when Goldschmidt mentions the way in which
much of the received gossip is never printed, because it is deemed too
unreliable, or has clear personal agendas (ibid.).17
And yet, all trivia is not trivial. While Kierkegaard’s caution about inte-
riority is well taken (and well developed in his philosophy), his recasting of
the gossip about him in his both public and private papers is noteworthy.
In both the Corsair and Goldschmidt’s papers, references are made to
the ways in which Kierkegaard’s philosophical tendencies are criticized
in public talk in the same ways his dress and appearance are. The initial
reviews of his work in the Corsair mock it, albeit gently, for its excessive
wordiness. Kierkegaard’s writing about his broken engagement (a relent-
less subject of his philosophy, if thinly veiled) is criticized as exploitative;
he is critiqued for dissecting an unwilling and private other in his philoso-
phy (102). Goldschmidt later recognizes that this view was widespread,
noting that many people thought “Kierkegaard did not stand in a genuine
personal relation to his writings or to his life but carried on everything as
a thought-experiment” (147). Whether or not these criticisms are accu-
rate—let alone the tu quoque aspect of the Corsair, of all publications,
criticizing someone for making public light of a private figure—is not the
point. The point, rather, is that the gossip and teasing about Kierkegaard
wasn’t merely about trivia, but was simultaneously trivial and substantive,
and that the two were intertwined. (To be sure, is there a more reliable,
if clichéd, stereotype of an abstruse and indifferent philosopher than of
someone whose head is so in the clouds that he is unaware of his ridicu-
lous physical appearance?) While Kierkegaard’s “Good-Natured Gossipy
Remarks” to himself in his papers (197–201) focus mainly on the personal
criticisms, this is in part a tidy way of erasing and delegitimizing any criti-
cism of his philosophy as personal only.
Many of the social science treatments of gossip fall within this limiting
category, though for reasons that are less obvious than the kind of dismissal
evident in the philosophers’ analysis. Sociologists and social psychologists
who study gossip tend to see it as possessing social value; Elias and Scotson
(1965) and Bergmann (1993) are typical of an approach toward gossip
that recognizes its importance in reflecting and reinforcing group norms
36 K. ADKINS
and practices. While this certainly doesn’t sound trivial, I want to suggest
than in some senses, it is—this approach to gossip is essentially content-
irrelevant. It’s the form of gossip itself that is being lauded in this analysis,
the fact that it is done and the variances between who hears the news, and
who misses out, that has scholarly relevance. The content of the gossip is
less relevant in these analyses—whether it is true or not, how it bears upon
individuals, communities, ideas, or actions. The gossip itself becomes curi-
ously immaterial.
2.4 Slam Books or Malicious Gossip

The assumption that gossip is not just negative but also malicious (done
with ill intention, or unfoundedly negative) is so commonly held within
popular and scholarly literature, that I won’t spend extensive time on its
documentation. Bergmann’s analysis of gossip from the previous section
fits this criticism, as does Laurence Thomas’ (1994), in which gossip is
marked by being not just negative but also conveyed for “no socially legit-
imate” reason (49). Phyllis Chesler (2001) approvingly quotes Roland
Barthes’ description of gossip as the “death by language” (151–152),
but strips his phrasing of its subtlety, and redirects it largely at women.18
Gossip, in Chesler’s reading, is digital: bonding talk between friends, or
passive-aggressive taking-down of another woman, in service of patriarchal
norms (466). These theoretical claims certainly have overlap with the his-
torical treatment of gossips, wherein they are seen as doing an activity that
is vicious or violent, and worthy of punishment.19 The extremes of social
punishment and shaming of gossip (as well as legal [see Kamensky]) were
resorted to out of perceived need. The multitude of words that existed in
late medieval Dutch (Dumolyn and Haemers 60) and medieval English
(Phillips 13–15) for loose or dangerous speech speaks to the ways in which
gossip isn’t merely idle speech but has meaningful consequences. Indeed,
the existence of these punishments itself underlies the view of gossip as pri-
marily trivial, idling, and unimportant. If gossip requires such extreme and
public countermeasures, it cannot be merely trivia. As Nietzsche reminds
us in his Genealogy of Morals, the “old German punishments” of public
violence and torment were necessary so that citizens could finally remem-
ber “five or six ‘I will nots’” (Essay 2, §3). Patricia Meyer Spacks, while
recognizing the power differentials that can sometimes motivate gossip,
nonetheless recognizes malice only when it comes from the underside of
the power divide; while the empowered may occasionally gossip about
those beneath them, she notes, they mostly don’t, as they have other and
more direct ways to exert authority (30). Malicious gossip is powerful, but
it is a dark art in these views; gossipers attempt to control their futures by
demeaning others, and in the process risk their reputation.
Arguments about gossip as malicious often focus on the characters of
the gossips, and minimize the content of the gossip. P.M. Forni’s brief
treatment of gossip in his Choosing Civility (2002) aptly summarizes the
arguments of those who see gossip as purposely cruel. The fact that gos-
sip can be anything other than malicious isn’t part of his treatment. His
arguments about why people gossip speak entirely to their weaknesses of
character; they are afraid or insecure about their own reputation, jealous of
others, seeking power by exerting damage (65). In particular, he describes
gossip as “cowardly,” because the absence of direct confrontation means
that someone can exaggerate or fabricate reality (66). What’s striking
about his use of the word “cowardly,” of course, is its insinuation of a
groundless fear; we feel cowardice when our fear is disproportionate to the
actual or potential harm of a situation. Our fear may be disproportionate
because the quarrel at the heart of the gossip may not matter. Immanuel
Kant’s dismissal of gossip suggests as much, by characterizing gossip as
both shallow and malicious in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic View.
“Pay no attention to gossip,” he advises in his writings on personal char-
acter, because it “comes from people’s shallow and malicious judgment,”
and “is a sign of weakness” (159). Given that Kant’s many correspondents
included academic gossip in their letters to him (Correspondence 13, 23,
34, 259, 393) as well as direct evidence of him vigorously gossiping about
a scandalous marriage of two acquaintances (Kuehn 167–168), one sus-
pects that his barbed remarks were as much directed toward his own ten-
dencies as they were outwards. In fact, Kant’s dinner parties were known
for their length and vigorous gossip (Kuehn 273, 325), and he engaged
in barbed gossip about an affair between his friends (Kuehn 167–168).
So as not to reduce this argument to claims about personal hypocrisy,
Kant’s tracking and monitoring of academic gossip, so familiar to modern-
day participants in academic life, suggests the ways in which ivory-tower
scholars could not be ignorant of the professional and political dynamics
conditioning their work. Kant, who carefully and strategically advocated
for Jewish intellectuals and students during a period of German restriction
and racism toward Jews (Kuehn 305–309, 314, 319), no doubt benefited
from awareness of academic players as much as by his growing academic
38 K. ADKINS
stardom. Kant’s use of gossip, as opposed to his rhetoric about it, demon-
strates the way in which gossip has power even as it is being diminished.
Historical examples support the view that gossip can be powerful, and
often the only way in which grievances can be aired absent the risk of
very real harms. Medieval practices had public and very direct shaming
for those who engaged in gossip. German women charged with gossip
were sentenced to wear iron gossip masks that exaggerated facial features
to indicate their transgression of boundaries; they were publicly shamed
and humiliated.20 In the fifteenth-century Malleus Malificarum, women’s
garrulousness was cited as one of only three reasons they were more likely
to be witches than men to be warlocks; “they have loose tongues and can
hardly conceal from their female companions the things that they know
through evil art” (Mackay 164). Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
speech laws had sharp boundaries around appropriate and inappropri-
ate speech, and gossip was regularly, even enthusiastically, pursued and
punished in US courts through the colonial era (Kamensky and Brown).
While we don’t formally target and label people as gossips in the contem-
porary world, libel and slander laws still serve to indicate boundaries for
rough and disorderly speech.21
But even more plainly, the costs of challenging ideas and people directly
when one is in a marginalized position can be seen in other respects.
Shifting penalties for gossip from the legal to the social realm doesn’t
solve the problem of malicious gossip, I would contend; rather, it makes
it easier for material disincentives to exist (whether in formal systems or
informal work culture) that work against people using gossip and rumor
as a way of voicing criticism. We can see this phenomenon during several
periods in history. Tamotsu Shibutani (1966) lists several examples of offi-
cial campaigns of discrediting or ridiculing people who believe or spread
rumors during World War II (205–206); this went beyond simple posters
condemning gossip as unpatriotic or dangerous, to wholesale condemna-
tions of those who repeated rumors as, in one case, needing psychiatric
care (206). More recently, Nitasha Tiku (2014) revealed that there were
many female programmers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley refusing
to name venture capitalists who are serial sexual harassers directly and
publicly. These women are clearly aware that doing this directly (even if
anonymously) could be a death blow to their careers, and that in Silicon
Valley, an assumption of electronic anonymity is dangerous and foolhardy.
Maureen Sherry’s experience on Wall Street, recounted in an opinion
piece for the New York Times, extends this experience to another industry,
and demonstrates the way in which it is actually formalized (2016). Sherry

describes keeping silent about the manifest and often repellent sexism
and harassment she experienced and witnessed as a managing director at
Bear Stearns when a female job applicant inquires. The widespread Wall
Street practice of requiring bankers to sign arbitration agreements essen-
tially binds all complaining about work practices to silence; complaints get
handled in secret, behind closed doors, complainers get payouts, and they
leave. Sherry contends that mandatory arbitration makes it too risky to
speak publicly—or even informally, in a one-on-one conversation—about
systemic injustices at work. The government of South Korea has recently
been criticized by the UN’s Human Rights Commission for using defa-
mation laws to indict or jail journalists, opposition lawmakers, or activ-
ists who spread rumors about the president, which presents a singularly
stark example of tilting formal power away from the critics and toward the
empowered (Hun). These four examples demonstrate the ways in which
both formal systems and informal culture can work not simply to make
people insecure about voicing their ideas but also to provide material dis-
incentives to speak publicly and directly. Thus, Forni’s casual condemna-
tion of gossips as the cowardly needlessly hiding their malicious barbs
behind anonymity, while surely describing some gossip, does a poor job
at capturing the wide history and use of the practice. And the condemna-
tion of gossip as malicious captures only some of its power, at a cost of
minimizing its meaning in some contexts. None of this, of course, is to
say that gossip can’t ever be malicious. It clearly can, and I will explore the
factors behind its malice in the sixth chapter of the book. But analyses or
presentations of gossip that present it primarily or essentially as malicious
distort the more complicated picture.
2.5 Mean Girls: The Gendering of Gossip

Gossip’s association with women or the feminine is long-standing, so much
so that it would probably be more efficient to examine the scholars and
writers who do not associate gossip with primarily women. And to be clear,
contemporary gossip isn’t just seen as gendered, but more generally “oth-
ered”—it is what is done by gossipy gay men, working-class people, or
people of color. “Gay people, traditionally powerless, love to revel in gossip
and dish,” Michelangelo Signorile observes in his hybrid autobiography/
defense of outing (1993: 42–43). But it is worth a quick look at the ways in
which gossip gets assigned a gender, and thus further degraded. Solomon,
40 K. ADKINS
in the Old Testament, provides both association and contrasting testimony,

when he writes about the dangers of seductive speech. Hesiod, writing
in Homeric Greece, describes Pandora as filled with “lies, and wheedling
words of falsehood, and a treacherous nature” (Works and Days 77). His
caution for the virtuous man to avoid trusting too much is entirely gen-
dered; men are warned that “sweet-talking women beguile” good sense;
they are merely “trusting flatterers” (Works and Days 373–375). This image
of women’s speech as initially palatable and pleasurable, but treacherous and
costly, is directly applied to gossip (which is itself directly gendered). Hesiod
writes that “gossip is an evil thing by nature, she’s a light weight to lift up,
oh very easy, but heavy to carry, and hard to put down again. Gossip never
disappears entirely once many people have talked her big. In fact, she really
is some sort of goddess” (Works and Days 760–764). The very flimsiness
and orality of gossip, apparently especially suited to women’s tongues, gives
it truly supernatural and transcendent power; it long outlasts its speakers.
Contemporary scholars often, for good and ill, tie gossip to women.
Phyllis Chesler’s (2001) review of anthropological literature on gossip
contains several mentions of widespread beliefs that women gossip more
than men, in different cultures (153–156). While she acknowledges that
gossip isn’t purely a female phenomenon (463), she singles out women’s
gossip as destructive (aligning with her thesis, about women’s internalized
sexism). Chesler claims that gossip is a way for women to be indirectly
aggressive toward other women, and can even foment direct and violent
aggression, like honor killings (161). While Deborah Jones’ exploratory
article on gossip as oral culture (1980) is more positive about gossip,
it explicitly marks it as women’s terrain, and of necessity depoliticized.
“The cultural and physical settings of gossip are, like those of women’s
lives, characterized by restriction,” she observes (194). Her intention is
to articulate paths for future research, but in so doing she inadvertently
marks gossip off as impotent. At best, it can be indirectly effective; it can
be an implicit form of consciousness-raising in some contexts (197). By
contrast, Jörg Bergmann sees very little possibility in women’s talk, claim-
ing that there is plenty of evidence that women are more inclined to gos-
sip than men (59). His argument has the ring of a Just-So story, however,
when one considers what he ignores in his own historical account of gos-
sip. Bergmann presents the full activity of klatsching (gossip’s modern
German cognate) historically, as a female response to the overwhelmingly
male coffeehouses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Curiously,
Bergmann is quick to ascribe dramatically serious purpose to the cof-
feehouses, which “function primarily as places of business … centers of

communication in early bourgeois economic and cultural history … [and]
serve the editors of the London moral weeklies as editorial locations and
… business addresses … [and thus] exercise no small influence on litera-
ture” (72). By contrast, their female counterparts, women’s coffee circles,
gets dismissive and quick treatment as centers of gossip talk only. Indeed,
Bergmann chiefly characterizes them as the “butt of men’s jokes” (ibid.).
Even if klatsching could not possibly play the same role in economic and
cultural history as coffeehouses, given women’s general exclusion from
public life, its influence on literature is unmistakable, and at least the equal
if not better of that of coffeehouse denizens. This is so not just because
gossip is such a favored literary trope and device of novelists from all cen-
turies, as Spacks illustrates so effectively in her analysis, but because novels
originally were more heavily read by women than men, and focused more
on intimate dramas, the stereotypical domain of gossip.
But there are two more substantive problems with this analysis. First is
the assumption that talk is serious or trivial, and that never the twain shall
meet. This is historically incomplete—there are many examples of side
and small talk that is inextricably intertwined with political discussions.22
While it is certainly true that serious business did and does get conducted
in coffeehouses and bars, it is disingenuous to suggest that non-“serious”
activities like gossip also occurred, to say nothing of the possibility that
business sometimes occurs in and through gossip. Bergmann’s description
suggests that coffeehouses weren’t so much sites of socializing as business
guilds, or oral newspapers. His attempt to read female gossip and female
work as simultaneously serious and silly, purposive and idle, cannot trans-
late into a similarly complicated attitude toward men’s gossip and work.
This argument demonstrates an asymmetrically uncritical attitude toward
men’s activities versus women’s activities. And finally, Bergmann’s claim
that coffeehouses were largely male domains has many historical counter-
examples. Steve Pincus (1995), for instance, presents copious examples
not simply of the presence of women in coffeehouses but their regular
patronage of it (815–816).
2.6 What Is Left Unsaid

To be clear, the major criticisms of gossip—that it is trivial, spiteful, or
malicious, and the work of (probably petty or spiteful) women—aren’t
wholly vacuous. There certainly are examples of trivial or malicious gossip,
42 K. ADKINS
to say nothing of examples of women gossips. But they suffer from two
flaws. First, they are incomplete. Criticisms of gossip as trivial reduce gos-
sip to specific stories, to literal meanings of stories, or reduce the impact
of gossip to the small group of people talking. Criticisms of gossip as
malicious or the work of women suffer from the same selectivity, only (or
primarily) hearing the talk that reinforces those starting assumptions. But
this incompleteness, I would argue, isn’t simply a failure of listening (miss-
ing part of the story, or only hearing some speakers). It is a missed connec-
tion. Treating gossip as the work on the margins, or of interest only with
respect to marginalization, consigns it to the margins. Gossip, in this view,
has nothing to do with public claims or arguments; they can stand alone
on their own merits, and get no support or undermining from side talk.
This view of gossip radically separates it from the bigger conversational
picture, and this separation, I contend, is false.
It is valuable to examine the critiques of gossip together, first because
the logical incoherence of the critiques becomes visible when they are con-
sidered as a unit. As we scrutinize the history of commentary and use of
gossip, it’s striking to see that gossip can be condemned as both trivial and
destructive. Nicholas Emler notes this paradox in his own (1994) analy-
sis of gossip, and notes that such a dismissive paradox ignores the ways
in which gossip contributes toward successful social functioning (118,
138). Many of the examples of destructive gossip are hardly trivial in their
effects, if not the conversation. The trivial gossip is often and clearly not
merely trivial. Complaints about women as gossips are rendered in gos-
sip, by men, and are punished in highly public and forceful fashion, which
suggests that the small talk of women can have big consequences. The
common thread to these misdiagnoses of gossip, I would suggest, is the
flattening out of gossip as an occurrence—seeing it only as a manifestation
of one thing or phenomenon. By contrast, I want to stress that precisely
what’s interesting about gossip is its border-crossing nature. It is both
private and public, malicious and constructive, serious and trivial, margin-
alized and central.23
The condemnation of gossip as trivial is particularly selective. Avner
Grief’s economic account of the Maghribi traders in eleventh century
documents that gossip was a crucial tool to keep their agents honest
(quoted in Solove [2008]: 31–32). Gossip was economically vital as a
reputational tool for the Maghribi, but has demonstrated its economic
vitality in other domains. Nineteenth-century British women used gossip
as a channel to figure out who needed different services, particularly ser-
vices like abortions that were overtly damned (Tebbutt 75). People gossip
about what’s important and interesting to them, and those things aren’t
simply trivial; John Hunt documents the rich economy of rumor and gos-
sip that flourished around papal enclaves for hundreds of years (2012).
He notes that the Vatican regularly tightened secrecy around the con-
clave, in an attempt to minimize leaks and gossip, to no avail (360–361).
Sally Engle Merry (1984) cites ways in which neighborhood gossip has
serious and formal consequences. Her example is specific to low-income
communities—neighborhood gossip spreading news of infractions that
violate public-housing or IRS rules—but it is easy to imagine how this
could be extended up the economic scale (to overly intrusive suburban
home owners’ associations, for instance [295]). Max Gluckman’s path-
breaking analysis of gossip (1963) indirectly supports this observation;
he notes that many of Elizabeth Colson’s Makah informants dissembled
to her about their backgrounds and provided competing accounts of who
was kin and how kinship was determined (310–311). Colson learned
this information gradually, as well as learning about the class system that
so divided the small Makah community. Given that kinship had formal,
legal, and financial implications (the tribe had autonomy and members
received financial support), it seems plausible that part of why Colson
was given so many competing narratives about who was related to whom
was because community members disagreed about who should be in the
community.24 Colson, as an outsider, would be potentially a dangerous
person to learn about kinship, and could undermine claims. In all of these
cases, the behind-the-hand conversation has ramifications with more for-
mal proceedings; while in some cases the gossip directly undermines the
aboveground work, in others it supplements or supports it. Brison’s eth-
nography of the Kwanga notes that the residents of Inakor held lengthy
weekly meetings that were principally about gossip and rumor in the vil-
lage (10). Given that time spent discussing gossip and rumors is time not
spent on their livelihoods (primarily labor- and time-intensive agriculture),
this extraordinary commitment of time demonstrates the way in which
gossip is not trivial—its content and consequences matter in people’s lives.
The dismissal of gossip as idle also leaves the rest of our conversation off
the moral hook. As C. Edwin Baker reminds us (2004), most of our con-
versations, including our political conversations, occur idly (260); singling
out gossip for criticism on this basis is random.
The assumption of gossip as inaccurate isn’t fully borne out when gos-
sip is studied. To be sure, there are examples, some of them dramatic,
44 K. ADKINS
of false gossip being spread. In 1635, ambitious members of the British

court spread false rumors that a minister had been assassinated to improve
their own chances of getting a high position (Coast 2012: 348). But stud-
ies of its practice suggest more reliability than these spectacular exam-
ples indicate. One study of office gossip (Davis, cited in Smeltzer 1991:
16) counted 80–90% of the office grapevine as accurate. Another recent
study of information recall demonstrated that people had more and more
accurate recall of gossipy information than merely physical information
(Mesoudi et al. 2006: 413, 415). But more trenchantly, definitions of gos-
sip that emphasize its negativity or malice ignore historical and empirical
research. Elias and Scotson’s six years of fieldwork in an English suburb,
for instance, documents many instances of praise-gossip or simple news
gossip (123). In point of fact, village gossip chains were often used to pur-
poses that restored and strengthened community ties; the community’s
Benevolent Committee found gossip channels the most reliable way of
finding out who needed support from the community (125). Most con-
cretely, forms of gossip were intermingled: positive, negative, and news
gossip might occur in the same conversation (ibid.). A contemporary case
study finds a rowing team using both positive and negative gossip about
members and their work habits simultaneously (Kniffin and Wilson 2010:
163). Indeed, as slander and libel laws have contended both currently and
as far back as classical Greece, critical talk about another isn’t to be penal-
ized if it’s true (MacDowell [1986] 128).
Finally, the gendering of gossip is based largely on stereotypes. As
Melanie Tebbutt noted in her study of gossip from nineteenth-century
working-class English neighborhoods, there is evidence that men gos-
siped, but because it happened in social locations removed from public life
(they gossiped at work or in pubs), it went largely undocumented (181).
The visibility of women’s lives (women’s chores are often performed in
public spaces, at shared water sources, for instance) means that their gos-
sip is more public. And yet the original gossips (pastoral sponsors) could
be men as well as women; Susan Phillips supplies multiple examples of
male gossips in medieval England (161). Elizabeth Horodowich (2008)
crosses centuries and oceans to substantiate this claim. She notes that in
early modern Venice, women were clearly marked and devalued as gos-
sip; Venetian authors and artists produced numerous texts disparaging
the triviality and malice of women’s talk (136, 139, 142–144). And yet,
examination of court and Vatican records from this period uncovers plen-
tiful examples of male gossip (134, 148, 150, 153). The fact of women’s
lower public status seems to be the issue; women’s gossip can make them
have unlikely political power, whereas male talk (whether formal or infor-
mal) is expected to be taken seriously (146). In other words, women’s
talk becomes recognized and dangerous because it is a power outlet than
women would otherwise not possess. Its subversive capacities must be
limited, whereas the power in men’s talk is to be expected.
We can see this distinction neatly displayed in a fictional representa-
tion of gossip, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Wife of Bath displays all
the stereotypically negative markers of a gossip. She is loud, interested
in attention from others, outwardly respectable as a Christian but as a
much-married, openly liaising woman, violating the very moral norms
that define her. But Chaucer gives her much textual attention; her pro-
logue is twice as long as her tale, and is essentially an autobiography
mixed with sharp admonitions for women to take control of their lives
however they can (151–152). Gossip for her is clearly a survival strat-
egy; she describes how she would share secrets with her dear friend, but
not her parish priest, including secrets about her husband’s bad behavior
(158–159). Her gossip is risky; her most religiously sanctimonious hus-
band hated her gossiping, would deliver lectures to her on its evils, and in
a climactic scene, erupts in violence, and perversely stabilizes her power
in their marriage (164). In other words, the movement of the plot cuts
against overt readings of gossip as a negative. Indeed, a character drawn
as the Wife of Bath’s foil supports this reading. The Friar regularly inter-
rupts the Wife of Bath and chastises her for her irreligiosity, and the open-
ness of her appetitiveness. But his tale, immediately following the Wife
of Bath’s and intended as a riposte, actually zeroes in on a hypocritical
male gossip getting his due comeuppance. “The summoner was as full
of gossip as a carrion crow is full of worms” (181), and yet his appetites
for gossip blind him to the appearance and lure of the devil. So while the
Friar offers a straightforward and uncomplicated condemnation of gossip,
it is in the person of a man. And as Susan Phillips rightly points out, the
Tales hang together because of the host, Harry Bailey, who regularly calms
down and intercedes in fights between the pilgrims by demanding more
gossip, as well as offering his own gossipy commentary on the tales and
their tellers (87). His appetite for gossip seems more insatiable than any
of the others, including the Wife of Bath’s. The Canterbury Tales is not a
historical outlier. Dumolyn and Haemers’ analysis of political rumor and
gossip in late medieval Flanders notes the conspicuous absence of women
from these accounts. While women were present and visible in public life,
46 K. ADKINS
their voices go unheard in political rumor and gossip (65). Chris Wickham
(1998) notes that in medieval Italy, publica fama (the talk of the street)
was legally admissible in court, and at times superseded or clarified direct
eyewitness testimony (4). Publica fama, he notes was “almost always the
work of men” (15). This medieval gender double standard for gossip—
condemned when done by women, silently endorsed and relied upon by
men—exists in witchcraft history and practice. I have previously referred
to the way in which women’s tendency toward talk was identified by medi-
eval church authorities in the Malleus Maleficarum as a sign or indicator of
their greater propensity toward witchcraft. But curiously, accusations and
denunciations of witchcraft were themselves regularly made by gossip that
was empowered when it fit the convenient narrative of dangerous heretics.
The Malleus is clear on this subject; it lays out proceedings for denounc-
ing someone for witchcraft for merely having a bad reputation (Mackay
494), and clarifies proceedings for inquisitions that have their origins not
in specific, named denunciations, but in “general rumor” or village gossip
(503). In short, the talk of women is unreliable and a sign of their lesser
intelligence except when it serves the purposes of men.
More contemporary examples of this false assumption of gossip as the
work of women are plentiful. In Kathryn Waddington’s insightful study of
organization gossip, she regularly notes that the difference between men
and women on gossip was simply that women would freely use the term
about themselves. To the contrary, male informants would say things like
“Well of course, I’m not one to gossip, but” and go on to engage in a
lengthy and gossipy conversation (85). One study that recorded teacher’s
meetings for months found that one of the biggest gossips in the school
was a man (Hallett et al. 2009). The distinction, then, is less than women
gossip and men don’t, but that women are less afraid of being seen as gos-
sips. In other words, gossip is less female than feminine; for men to engage
in it is to behave in a gender-nonconforming fashion.
Finally, what these accounts of gossip omit, by and large, is the pos-
sibility that gossip can be constructive or positive. Dunbar’s evolutionary
account of gossip demonstrates some of this; gossip functions as a way of
maintaining and strengthening social bonds. Jason van Niekerk (2008)
extends this analysis by suggesting that contemporary views of gossip are
too constrained by Western and explicitly Christian values. He suggests
that gossip can be a “moral sandbox,” in which we explore and develop
our positions in part by examining the actions of others (408). Tommaso
Bertoletti and Lorenzo Magnani (2014) tease out a model of how gossip
contributes to a group’s knowledge basis via abduction, by pooling and

evaluating their knowledge of other actors in discussion. The raising of
behavioral anomalies helps us compare what we know or think about oth-
ers (4046). It is this idea—that gossip contributes to what we know, but
that its contributions are largely unrecognized—that will be the work of
the next chapter.
Notes
1. Sally Engle Merry (1984) summarizes witchcraft research (286).
2. Ehrenreich (1990) demonstrates this with a case in Ecuador
(343–344). Niki Besnier provides comparable evidence from his
study of the Tuvalu natives in the South Pacific (173, 178). Boyer
and Nissenbaum (1976) make this case for the Puritan witch trials
in their Salem Possessed: The Social Origin of Witchcraft. Schiff’s The
Witches: Salem, 1692 (2015) provides supporting evidence
(240–241).
3. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the earliest use of gossip in this
form as 1014, in Wulfstan’s sermons (310).
4. For the American colonies, see Kamensky 47 and Brown 99–100.
For medieval Europe, see Hunt 358, 365–366, Horodowich
134–153, Criminal Justice Through the Ages 154–155, and Phillips
13, 31–42.
5. Thanks to Ann Ferguson for first suggesting this line of thinking.
6. Aretino’s play La Cortigiana (1525), for instance, is full of satirical
references to prominent, real-life Romans. Aretino’s narrator
announces the play’s prologue as “a piece of nonsense, part gos-
sip” (51).
7. Authors other than Ong and Eisenstein remind us that the switch
to literacy was neither immediate nor without resistance. Lentz
(1989: 6) reminds us that Hellenic courts refused to accept docu-
ments as credible when the alphabet first developed; documents
had to be read to the court to give it validity. Oral testimony was
far more trustworthy than the printed word; it could be questioned
and examined.
8. To be clear, this is not to say that these three cultures are fully
comparable in their educational rates or literacy; Zincantan, for
instance, has very low rates of literacy, whereas education through
middle school is common for the Tuvalu islanders. But it is to say
48 K. ADKINS
that in their smallness, intimacy, and relative geographic isolation,

these micro-cultures are more connected to oral practices, and less
absorbed by print culture.
9. Indeed, this argument could be extended to some of the writing
on gossip itself. It’s worth pausing to note that this condemnation
of gossip as trivial or marginal itself applies to how gossip is so
often handled in scholarship, and in primary sources. Gossip is
often itself a topic of marginal citation—referred to, but paren-
thetically, half-handedly, or with caveats, both cited and disavowed
simultaneously. While there certainly are scholarly treatments of
gossip where gossip takes center stage, what’s more striking is to
note how routinely gossip is referenced only in a footnote or par-
enthetical comment, or a blog post. It’s evidence for people, but of
such a diffuse if not embarrassing sort that it cannot be directly
stated. To take just one example, Jonas Salk’s otherwise fine intro-
duction to Latour and Woolgar Laboratory Life (1986) praises the
book for being free of “gossip, innuendo, and embarrassing sto-
ries” (12), even though, as we’ll see in Chap. 3, Latour and
Woolgar document just how thoroughly talk of science is talk of
scientific reputation. Several of the scholars analyzing the
Perestroika conflict in political science (discussed in Chap. 4) men-
tion academic gossip as a support for their position, but in clearly
qualified terms if not relegated to a footnote (Farrell and Finemore
2009: 63; Schram et al. 2013, footnote 10).
10. Bergmann’s analysis contains much more than a whiff of moral
condemnation, in truth; his critical discussion of Max Gluckman’s
analysis of gossip faults Gluckman for ignoring the apparently
indisputable fact that gossipers have “a completely broken relation
with moral norms and values” and that gossip is “a morally dis-
reputable practice” (146).
11. This blindness may be because Heidegger himself gossiped about
his fellow philosophers; Sarah Bakewell (2016) catalogs two differ-
ent examples of Heidegger saying nasty things about rival thinkers
behind their backs, and then being challenged on his behavior (66,
84). (Both times, Heidegger denied gossiping.)
12. His relentless mockery of P.L. Møller’s intelligence and manners
when Kierkegaard responds to the Corsair are good evidence of
this.
13. Not all readers of Kierkegaard interpret his condemnations of chat-

ter so literally. Peter Fenves (1993) contends that gossip and chat-
ter, present (always fragmentedly so) across Kierkegaard’s writings,
plays a deliberate role in his critique of Hegelian systems in lan-
guage and philosophy. “‘Chatter’ is, rather, the permanent dis-
placement of the terms through which language has been grasped,
including the terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ as they have been
deployed in philosophy, logic, and grammar” (234).
14. At risk of cattiness, however, it is possible to do many kinds of
professional talking, speaking, and writing in an unreflective,
decontextualized, and anti-intellectual manner; gossip is hardly
distinctive in this potentiality. Political campaigning comes to
mind.
15. Given that Kierkegaard’s unusual appearance is due not simply to
his great height but to physical deformity, the teasing gossip seems
remarkably and pointlessly cruel.
16. By contrast, Kierkegaard’s work was virtually exclusively done via
pseudonyms. However, this does not make him disinterested in his
public reception; one journal entry, from March 9, 1846, agonizes
over the gulf between his prodigious publication record which
finds so small an audience, and contrasts it bitterly to those who
find it easy to write books, and the Corsair, which “almost every-
one reads” (The Corsair Affair 211).
17. In this, Kierkegaard is not unusual; Walter Lowrie notes that the
Corsair was widely condemned by reputable men as a scandal, who
still “secretly read it with malicious enjoyment” (176).
18. In doing this, Chesler engages in cherry-picking; Barthes’ refer-
ences to gossip (2010 [1978]) are more complex than this apoca-
lyptic quote suggests. Among other mentions, he notes that Plato’s
Symposium is structured and engendered through gossip (183),
compares the language of science to gossip, and observes that
“gossip is the voice of truth” (184). In other words, his argu-
ments—about language in and of intimacy—are more about the
ways in which gossip claims a theoretical position that undermines
and flattens out love.
19. Indeed, gossip was worthy of public punishment in many places
and periods; this will be discussed more in Chap. 6.
50 K. ADKINS
20. Criminal Justice Through the Ages 154–155. An extensive and

well-preserved collection of shame masks is available at the
Medieval Crime Museum in Rothenburg ob der Tauber.
21. Incidentally, these medieval practice and laws further undercut the
claim that gossip is trivial or irrelevant. While there were a wide
variety of shaming punishments in the medieval world, most of
them were for concrete and material violations of social order that
had direct consequences for survival. Bakers were punished for sell-
ing underweight loaves, those who failed to pay their debts were
publicly shamed, husbands who weren’t appropriately controlling
of their wives were shamed for being insufficiently manly. The fact
that town magistrates took the time to police and regulate speech,
in particular, the speech of women, indicates the fact that the
speech wasn’t simply trivial but often could have real
consequences.
22. Chapter 5 gives many explicit examples of this phenomenon, as
does Antoine Lilti (2005), The World of the Salons (esp. 162–233).
23. Cowan (2011) provides visual and spatial illustration of this border-
straddling, in his argument that early modern Venetian gossip
flourished because of the proliferation of balconies in Italian archi-
tecture, which permitted a lively economy of mutual observation,
commentary and visitation (728–729, 734).
24. Indeed, Peter Wilson makes this case explicitly (1974).
CHAPTER 3
The Word On the Street: Gossip’s

Contributions to Knowledge
We have seen, in the last chapter, some of the ways in which gossip has tradi-
tionally been underregarded by scholars. The most enduring way in which
gossip gets trivialized is in its literal reduction to trivia. Gossip is small,
critical, probably hypocritical talk about people only, of no interest to any-
one, and of no real value, which is why it must be spoken sotto voce. Too
much of gossip scholarship adheres too closely to the Eleanor Roosevelt
model of “great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small
minds discuss people.” One can hear in this phrase Roosevelt’s disdain
for her cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who notoriously said, “if you
haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come and sit by me.”
However, as I argued in the last chapter, what both Roosevelts miss, along
with some scholars, is the way in which gossip, even nasty, personal gos-
sip, isn’t always simply and only personal. With the privacy and intimacy
of gossip comes a certain freedom; one can think about ideas differently.
The most basic argument of this chapter is that gossip isn’t idea-free. It
contributes, sometimes crucially, to our knowledge.
Gossip’s contributions to knowledge are most clearly recognized when
we examine gossip within the context of power relations between groups.
Gossip is a way of communicating and inquiry that people pursue when
they are otherwise blocked from avenues of knowledge. In this chapter,
I will explore at least two ways in which gossip works constructively, and
distinctively, as a path to knowledge. First, in Sect. 3.1, I will examine the

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47840-1_3
52 K. ADKINS
idea of gossip as selection. We find that gossip becomes a useful epistemic

tool to respond to an obstacle of time: there are many ideas to pursue;
time is limited; small talk with friends helps us select between competing
ideas. Gossip functions here invisibly—it is often not explicitly called gos-
sip, even when it functions as such—but effectively. Most crucially, in this
function gossip works even in very privileged communities (my examples
all come from the world of natural science).
While time can constrain our information-gathering and decision-making,
it is not the only or even most common blockage we see. Obstructions
to knowledge or information can also be institutional or political. Literacy
itself, of course, has been a political and economic spoil. Historically lim-
ited to those already possessing economic, political, race, and gender status,
literacy can be a way of keeping ideas cordoned off only for those who are
sufficiently equipped. Gossip, by contrast, is accessible to anyone; its require-
ments for participation are low. It is informal, usually oral, and private. Thus
it is particularly useful to people in marginalized positions, because the
intimacy and shared context of its participants means that participants can
speak more freely than in more formal settings. My examination in Sect. 3.2
of some instances of gossip across divides of power demonstrates the way in
which gossip can be used as a form of sense-making, or connecting bits of
information that are otherwise dispersed. This second form of gossip being
used as constructive is synthetic. The looseness of gossip foments broad,
creative thinking that connects ostensively disconnected ideas or claims. It
is one thing, of course, to suggest that gossip can add information or per-
spective to our thinking; in this way, gossip functions additively. It is quite
another and more demanding thing to suggest that gossip can work to con-
strict or constrain itself; that gossip can be self-critical, or that participants
can have standards for their own spreading of gossip and what “counts” as
reliable. While some of the gossip scholars we examined in Chap. 2 grant
some epistemic power to gossip, rarely do they examine the ways in which
gossip self-regulates. Its reputation as disorderly or subversive conversation,
its family relationship to rumor, makes it too easy for scholars and the public
to see gossip as uncritical talk. Gossips’ mouths run ahead of their minds.
To the contrary, there is some good evidence within gossip rhetoric itself
of practitioners being critical as they gossip; I will examine this evaluation
of gossip as knowledge in Sect. 3.3. Finally, in Sect. 3.4, I posit that gossip
as discourse can work as a kind of epistemic imagination; its playful nature
means that it has exploratory possibilities that are missed in more conven-
tional modes of seeking and assessing information.
THE WORD ON THE STREET: GOSSIP’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO KNOWLEDGE 53
The language of social epistemology will help frame this argument.

Theorists of knowledge sometimes work as if ideas emerge in a vacuum.
What Steve Fuller (2002 [1988]) describes as classical epistemology
mimics an idealized version of the scientific method in its construction.
Theories of knowledge are generated by assessing individual proposi-
tions out of context, which perpetuates what Fuller describes as a fallacy
of composition, by assuming that any account of individual knowledge
can be competently generalized to all (xxviii). Criteria for evaluating and
assessing knowledge claims are advanced by virtue of these thought exper-
iments, whereas examples of the messier ways in which knowledge accu-
mulates—not simply propositionally, nor evaluated fully in a dispassionate
and impartial fashion—get dismissed as momentary and regrettable depar-
tures from methodical epistemic work (Fuller 17). By contrast, social epis-
temology seeks to make explicit what is often implicit: the social norms
and assumptions that govern the sorting and assessment of knowledge.
In particular, social norms around race and gender have disparate
impact on how speakers and ideas are treated. Recent work in feminist
epistemology and epistemology of race shows the way in which think-
ing about knowledge claims as merely propositional strips away impor-
tant meaning and relevant social context. Lorraine Code demonstrates
the cognitive double standard that results in conventional epistemology,
where the identity and social location of the subject (“S”) in “S knows
that P” is treated as irrelevant (1991: 8–12). Code’s incisive point is that
focusing on the propositional content of the knowledge in epistemology
(the “P”) minimizes the ways in which knowledge can vary across social
positions. Equally, conventional epistemology’s minimization of the sub-
ject ends up assuming and reifying the knower (and objectivity) as white,
male, and occupying a position of socioeconomic privilege. It forecloses
an examination of the kinds of assumptions and limitations that this social
positioning entails. Code’s analysis is mostly focused on the ways in which
sex and gender are treated disparately in epistemology, but her arguments
can and have been extended to frames of social justice. Most fruitfully,
she opened up a line of philosophical examination into credibility, and the
ways in which we implicitly and explicitly extend or draw back credibil-
ity from speakers and ideas. Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice (2007)
builds upon this line of thinking, and articulates two concepts of epistemic
justice that reveal and ethical component to our epistemic actions. Her
first concept, testimonial injustice, recognizes that the extent and man-
ner to which we grant or diminish someone authority or credibility in
54 K. ADKINS
their speaking isn’t simply connected to their epistemic bona fides, but
often represents hidden biases about their status. Her second concept,
hermeneutical injustice, is particularly relevant for this chapter. Fricker
fruitfully examines the historical context in which the concept of “sexual
harassment” emerges as both an idea and a legal claim. Her position is
that, before the consciousness-raising work of feminists, women didn’t
have effective, comprehensible, or credible language to describe what
was happening to them at the workplace, and why it was problematic or
offensive. Women experiencing harassment certainly knew it was offen-
sive and problematic; Fricker’s point is that, absent a vocabulary, there
wasn’t a way to make these claims clear, particularly to people who hadn’t
experienced workplace discrimination. José Medina in The Epistemology of
Resistance (2013) explicitly extends Fricker’s work from the ethical to the
political sphere. He notes that “we cannot properly address the epistemic
and the ethical independently of the political” (86). In other words, this
granting and diminishing of credibility, and recognizing or delegitimizing
perspectives, often tracks political lines of authority and privilege. Medina
tracks several ways in which epistemological claims cannot be separated
from ethical and political domains. One that is particularly relevant for
an analysis of gossip is his concept of “meta-blindness,” the idea that one
can be incapable of recognizing one’s own limitations and blind spots
and that these blind spots aren’t merely cognitive, but political (150).
To take a very common example, someone who makes a racist comment
but who then refuses to recognize racism or says she was merely joking is
deliberately refusing to recognize an alternative viewpoint. This kind of
meta-blindness is particularly likely when not only the speaker but also
the manner of speaking is subversive; in other words, when an outsider
gossips. Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers (2012) provide direct evidence
of that in analyzing rumor and gossip in medieval Flanders; they note that
a man imprisoned by “muttering,” rumor-spreading rebels asked them
“What is it that you are trying to say? In fact, do you even know what
you are saying, and what you really want?” (85). The rumor-monger is
discredited as insane, which efficiently undermines the rumor as well. By
contrast, and reaching even further back into history, Thucydides’ account
of the Peloponnesian War stands as testimony to the value of skepticism
toward one’s own preconceptions. Discussing his method of presenting
speeches in his history, Thucydides notes that even though he witnessed
many of them himself, he often “did not even trust [his] own impres-
sions,” but would talk to others who heard the speech, and try to present
the “general sense” (13). This quick reference indicates that he actively
sought the reaction of those in the crowds. Public debates around a long
a costly war were well attended and also controversial; Thucydides dem-
onstrates humility toward his own ears, and recognizes that a good his-
tory records the division and the dissension, not just the decisions. His
viewpoint is more unusual that we might hope, when it comes to paying
attention to the murmurs of the crowd. Rumors and gossip cannot even
be recognized as coherent language or their ideas legitimated, when their
perspective is so far from the received viewpoint. The extent to which we
are incapable of labeling an idea as worthy because it or its viewpoint of
origin is utterly alien to what we consider “rational” similarly limits our
discussion.
This crucial insight has a long genealogy. Many Enlightenment thinkers
explicitly link their era’s political revolutions and the loosening of theolog-
ical and political authority to intellectual growth and shifting beliefs about
morality. It is John Stuart Mill, however, in his On Liberty (2008), who
does the most explicit anticipatory work laying out the interconnection
between these domains. He explicitly notes that part of the reason con-
ventional wisdom has such enduring power is because people’s encounters
with others who view the world differently is so comparatively meager. He
describes this evocatively: “the world, to each individual, means the part
of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his
class of society: the man may be called, by comparison, almost liberal and
large-minded, to whom it means anything so comprehensive as his own
country or his own age” (24). Mill’s case for what we would now call a
libertarian state is grounded in the interaction of epistemology and poli-
tics. He argues that we will think better, more creatively or rigorously, and
for ourselves in an environment in which we have the personal freedom
to shape our own lives, for good or for ill. This better thinking seems to
be premised upon our challenging ourselves to listen to and interact with
people from radically difference perspectives than ours. Crucially, he does
not make explicit how that interaction feeds and brings liberty to fruition.
But he also happens to make a splendid personal case study for Medina’s
insight that ideas emerge and are reified in ethical and political contexts
and that even one’s best thinking can be limited by one’s personal and
perspectival restrictiveness. In at least two instances, his beliefs about the
world were shaped by exactly the kind of personal limitations he decries
above. His views on women and the Irish were deeply conventional in the
first part of this life. Mill describes the Irish as barbaric and deserving of
56 K. ADKINS
British imperialism as late as 1861, and he describes women in an early

essay (1832) as mostly useful for “beautifying” life (Reeves, 183; Mill
1970, 74). Meeting Harriet Taylor, who had been describing marriage as
a kind of slavery in essays for several years, radically reshaped his views on
feminism. Still later in his life, meeting Irish economist John Cairnes soft-
ened his views on Irish autonomy, and he became a sharp critic of British
colonial practices in Ireland (Reeves 395). One aspect of Mill’s early think-
ing that he never complicated demonstrates the connection between our
personal spheres and our thinking by its absence. His Victorian belief that
peoples living in colonized countries were in their “nonage” and couldn’t
be trusted with political liberty was held consistently throughout his pub-
lic life. There is no evidence of him engaging seriously with people from
the colonized world. These examples taken together demonstrate the way
in which a remarkably brilliant person can have his ideas sharpened and
challenged because of personal connections and challenges, and also the
ways in which personal homogeneity can limit even the most intelligent
of minds.
Mill’s life experience is illustrative for us in many respects—the rela-
tive health of the suffragette movement in Britain meant that there were
women in public life for Mill to encounter. In other words, his experiences
occur in part because of the political changes that made those encounters
more or less likely to occur. It is this sort of structural dynamic and its
consequences that Medina explores in his work on legitimation. Medina
gives several examples of the ways in which political, epistemic, and ethical
treatment and mistreatment happen simultaneously and describes several
explicit dynamics of delegitimization and resistance. In general, he seeks
to rescue the idea of epistemic resistance as purely negative, pointing out
that in a heterogeneous world, resistance can be both positive and nega-
tive. Resistance can be a resource for alternative ways of thinking, as well
as a blindness to critique, or more worrisomely, an aggressive silencing
of other views (48). He recognizes that gaps in worldview and points of
resistance, or what he calls epistemic friction (158) can be valuable—they
can act as points of departure for further questions and inquiry. He urges
us to recognize the way in which we construct knowledge partially, incom-
pletely, and socially. Given this partial and incomplete path to knowledge,
Medina advocates guiding maxims, which urge us to prioritize moments
of relevant tension within our communities of responsibility, consistently
to be open to friction, correction, reconsideration, and to treat this as
a shared epistemic enterprise, not a singular epistemic responsibility
(157–158). Medina’s model for knowledge contains transparency about

the limits of knowledge, the recognition and demand for conflict and fric-
tion, as well as humility in the process. This is knowledge-making that is
reflective of heterogeneous communities.
Medina’s appealing model captures a large range of factors that rec-
ognize epistemic conflict and disconnection as well as lay paths toward
productive mediation. This model can be applied fruitfully to an analy-
sis of gossip. As Chap. 2 demonstrated, gossip has historically acquired a
bad and unfairly assigned reputation. In particular, I think the historical
evidence points to significant meta-blindness in how we recognize gos-
sip. While there are notable exceptions in the literature, gossip is on the
whole minimized as epistemically productive, and we fail to take seriously
enough its particular epistemic and political value for marginalized people.
But if Fricker and Medina are correct that our knowledge-making that
social markers of power and status both close off avenues of knowledge
and open up other avenues, then gossip, in its particular mode of a chan-
nel for the voiceless, becomes a worthy subject of epistemological exami-
nation. Subversive or unpopular ideas can be voiced more safely via gossip
with a trusted intimate, than openly, where they can meet with derision
that is often not simply directed at the idea but the speaker.
As we discussed in the previous chapter, this kind of claim for gos-
sip is contentious, because even the most sympathetic scholars of gossip
see its origins in interested participants as a crucial limit to its value for
knowledge. Lorraine Code’s (1995) defense of gossip as productive for
knowledge praises it for its absence of rules and order, but constrains its
value as an activity of inquiry. “[G]ossip has instrumental uses, [but] it is
important to note that characterizing it as inquiry, as intrinsically instru-
mental, amounts to reclaiming it for respectable epistemological discourse
case in a traditionally disinterested mode. Such a reclamation obscures its
power as a located, idiosyncratic, and hence peculiarly perceptive activ-
ity” (151). I would argue that this analysis perpetuates a false dichotomy
between orderly and disorderly knowledge. But the scales are always
already weighted in this scale: orderly, rational, and disinterested tradi-
tional knowledge automatically has an edge over gossip. Code’s markers
of gossip as idiosyncratic and perceptive rather than analytic limit gossip to
a minor role in the domain of knowledge; it supplements rather than mod-
ifies, challenges, or reorients. As the last chapter’s history demonstrates,
the preponderance and efficacy of gossip through the ages—in many com-
munities, not just the marginalized—suggests that this cannot tell the
58 K. ADKINS
whole gossipy story. But more saliently, this analysis also lets “respect-
able epistemological discourse” off the hook, by leaving it mostly intact,
and not sufficiently challenging the norms of rationality and disinterest in
thinkers’ lived experience.
Philosophical defenses of gossip often sound defensive in tone, protest-
ing that, despite all appearances, there truly is a substantive role for gossip
in knowledge of ethics. But what if the epistemic shoe is on the other foot;
what if traditional accounts of epistemology ask too little of their partici-
pants, and thus permit slippages and erasures of thought and argument? It
is this sort of challenge that we see in Medina’s account of resistant epis-
temology. Rather than only defend the epistemology of the marginalized,
he challenges those with epistemic privilege. They are “hermeneutically
marginalized”; their privilege leaves them incapable of perceiving or mak-
ing sense of facts or perspectives in the world they inhabit (109). This isn’t
a minor failing; “the things that they are ill-equipped to understand are
precisely the things they may not want to understand, the things that could
be in their advantage to remain opaque—perhaps the things that they need
not to know if they are to keep enjoying their privilege without having
to face uncomfortable questions” (109). In other words, dominant and
conventional worldviews are inconsistent, incomplete, and illogical, just as
gossip can be. The crucial difference is that many people refuse to recog-
nize the inconsistencies as such when it is a home view, and are all too ready
to label gossip as inconsistent, incomplete, or illogical, even when it is not.
Medina helpfully resists holism in his theory, which could lead to inco-
herence. Contrary to Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice, he explicitly
notes that hermeneutical gaps and congruencies aren’t univocal. Using
her example of sexual harassment, for instance, he notes that it’s not the
case that an experience would be rendered unintelligible for everybody
across the board. Rather, he contends that “speakers encounter counter-
interpretations that systematically distort their communicative attempts—
for example, when a woman’s attempts to convey that she feels sexually
harassed are interpreted as an overreaction to ‘harmless flirting’” (101).
In short, the relationship between dominant narratives and recognitions
and subaltern narratives and recognition is neither digital nor univocal.
Medina’s norm of polyphonic contextualism captures the textures that are
always already present in knowledge creation, but periodically silenced or
ignored.
Gossip is an example of this polyphony. As I have contended, it’s been
embedded in our conversation since we’ve started talking. In particu-
lar, it has been both present and resisted in knowledge creation as well.
Let’s examine an instance of this, to see polyphony and meaning con-
testation at work. The first comes from Patricia Turner’s book, I Heard
it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (1993),
which argues that rumor and gossip play important roles allowing oth-
erwise disenfranchised African Americans to critique power structures in
their lives. Rumor and gossip are positive social forces in Turner’s analysis;
among other things, they foment boycotts of consumer goods or exploit-
ative businesses. One of her many examples of gossip’s function in black
communities is the talk among African-American Atlantans in the early
1980s about CIA conspiracies to spread the AIDS virus disproportion-
ately among black communities. While Turner is writing about rumors,
this rumor has some of the markers of gossip. Spreading these rumors
would require some basic intimacy; no one in a community that already
feels besieged would casually disparage a powerful government agency
without some sense of trust in her interlocutors. But the power disparity
of what is known is immediately present. When the rumors catch hold
in the community and make the mainstream press, they were dismissed
by a CIA spokesperson as “the result of what we would call ‘disinforma-
tion’ efforts of hostile intelligence services to damage the United States”
(Turner 156). This dynamic of a volatile and contrary rumor being offi-
cially quashed with conspiratorial language is repeated. Another potent
rumor Turner documents, that the Klan owns certain cigarette brands
marketed primarily to African Americans, gets a comparably pitched cor-
porate denial: “‘[o]ne can assume these lies are most likely perpetuated
by those groups or individuals who oppose tobacco interests and will say
anything to disparage the industry’” (Turner 99). In other words, official
gossip is basically being spread. The language traditionally associated with
gossip and rumor is evident: the complete absence of appeal to facts or
evidence, and the suggestively vague language (“those groups or individu-
als”) keeps the discussion on the associative rather than the agonistic level.
Further, it seems that a counter-community is implied in both of these
sets of remarks. The use of “one,” particularly, in the tobacco dismissal
suggests the way in which there’s an assumption of a general and gener-
ally objective, disinterested, fair-minded community that’s being unjustly
attacked by a hostile group of hopelessly biased outsiders. Both dismiss-
als draw a boundary between the reasonable and the agenda-driven; the
CIA spokesperson casually refers to the loaded term “disinformation,”
the tobacco dismisser describes critics as “hostile” people who would do
60 K. ADKINS
“anything” to damage the industry. Both remarks clearly suggest that

people who know no bounds between reason and unreason, truth and
manipulation, are those who would irresponsibly spread dangerous gos-
sip, and again, these suggestions are made without any appeal to evidence.
Despite these parallels, nobody dismisses these claims as just gossip by
gullible intelligence agency or tobacco dupes who ought to know better.
While gossip is embedded in both powerless and powerful communities,
its polyphony doesn’t get sufficient recognition. Even when it is acknowl-
edged, it is in a specifically diminishing fashion; the claims of gossip and
rumor are recognized as disreputable. The extent to which gossip and
rumor are often the vehicles of uncomfortable facts or perspectival views
(as in Turner’s examples, the idea that black bodies are seen as intrinsi-
cally more violable to a white world than white bodies) gets minimized.
To counter this idea and defend polyphony at work, let’s look at some
examples of gossip being used constructively.
3.1 Gossip as Selection
The selective function in gossip is almost like running a “background

check” on potential beliefs.1 By this, I mean that the informal and more
playful arena that is gossip allows us to consider more casually possibilities
that might in more formal settings seem implausible or ridiculous. Gossip
allows us the check in informally on what others in our world are doing
(pace Dunbar) and to place ourselves and our beliefs on that grid. Gossip
as selective technique is more widely practiced, and thus often both more
invisible (unrecognized as gossip), and more explicitly practiced by those
in relative power. Indeed, my examples in this section come primarily and
explicitly from the world of natural science, which is not generally thought
of as a hive of the marginalized. But science’s workings are often presented
unrealistically in philosophy where the idea of the impartial, dispassionate
observer throwing off flimsy arguments by authority and appealing only
to direct, observed experience carries great weight. What I hope to dem-
onstrate in this section is that, even in fields like natural science, small talk
can foment big ideas.
James Watson’s The Double Helix (1969) is a lively, if sexist, account
of the international chase for the structure of DNA in the late 1940s and
early 1950s. The story of the son of Nobel laureate Linus Pauling (Peter
Pauling) beginning graduate school at the University of Cambridge,
where Watson and Crick had their lab, reveals some of the value of gossip
in science. Watson and Crick’s initial disinterest in taking Peter Pauling on

as a lab student, based on Watson’s highly critical description of Pauling’s
intellect and interest in research (89), becomes tempered once Pauling
arrives. His main use in the narrative seems to be as a gossip channel:
Watson and Crick grill him for news from home after every letter from
father to son, mainly so they can be apprised as to the progress of Pauling
père’s own pursuit of the structure of DNA (93, 99, 101). When Watson
and Crick realize that Pauling is researching a DNA model they them-
selves have already tried and rejected, they more confidently pursue their
own road. So aware is Watson of the power of gossip to turn people on
or off research roads that when the double helical structure is complete,
he asks a colleague to keep mum, for fear that “within hours the gos-
sip would travel from his lab in biology to their friends working under
Linus” (138). Watson’s nervousness here is probably connected to sta-
tus—at this point, Watson and Crick are relatively unknown in the science
world. Were Linus Pauling to adopt and demonstrate their model, as the
world-famous chemist, he would earn all the reputational credit. Gossip
is a way of keeping tabs on what experimental possibilities can be tried
or ignored. Watson describes the ways in which particular rumors in the
scientific community, casual chat passed between different labs’ workers,
served to focus attention on one particular method or another (30). In a
venture like mapping DNA, especially in the early days of genetic research,
where little was known about how this sort of structure might function,
informal reports on others were in fact a crucial means of keeping tabs
on scientific thinking. Gossip is not seen as something quite distinct from
the other lab functions; indeed, as Watson’s account makes clear, some of
the more worthwhile cogitation the scientists enjoy comes when they are
speaking casually, after evening lectures or over beer (83).
This is not simply an anomalous incident. As Bruno Latour discovered
in his almost two years of fieldwork in the Salk Institute in the 1970s,
ordinary working scientific conversations mix the professional and the per-
sonal, substantively as well as casually. Latour remarks upon how undif-
ferentiated scientific conversations were from personal ones; “there is no
indication that such exchanges comprise a kind of reasoning process mark-
edly different from those characteristic of exchanges in non-scientific set-
tings” (158). More to the point, scientific discussions of arguments and
papers, according to Latour, routinely take the person doing the work into
account; “who had made a claim was important as the claim itself” (164).
Reputation talk and management is a constant in science. In Latour’s time
62 K. ADKINS
in the Salk Institute, scientists talked casually about whether or not to

read an article, how good a reputation a competing team has, and which
journal would be the most reputable place to send an article (157–160).
Science functions by rules of collaboration and credit sharing; personal
and political strategy don’t work against, but support good science (213).
Sharon Traweek’s study of high-energy physicists supports this conten-
tion. Intense gossip, according to Traweek, surrounded the sharing of a
Nobel Prize for the discovery of the J/psi meson (65–66). Because two
different labs discovered the particle simultaneously, working with dif-
ferent methods, there was substantial informal talk about whether or not
both methods were legitimate. Ultimately, Traweek’s ethnography explic-
itly notes that becoming competent at professional gossip is part of what
makes a successful physicist (121–123).
The casual nature of scientific workplace gossip is present in all of these
examples; scientists don’t suddenly adopt a disinterested and rational
viewpoint only to drop it later. Their affect is simultaneously interested
and disinterested, rational but perspectivally so. Watson is being efficient
with his time management by seeking out what is essentially an advance
and informal peer review of prior work.
The tool of gossip as selection is used out of necessity. As I suggested in
the introduction, people gossip when other means of knowledge acquisi-
tion are blocked to them. What we see in these instances of gossip being
used to select among these is that selection, the tool most widely practiced
in gossip, is a response to temporal constraints. In the scientific community,
there simply isn’t enough time to pursue every seemingly viable hypoth-
esis in one’s specialty of research, even partially. Checking in informally
with one’s fellows, by doing quick, informal reputational assessments (do
colleagues I trust take this idea seriously? Have colleagues ruled this idea
out?) becomes an efficient way of managing one’s professional commit-
ments for scholarly efficacy. This selective use of gossip has been empiri-
cally verified in recent research; a study of cooperation in a game found
that players used gossip to select cooperation partners, and described gos-
sip as “an efficient vector for information transfer” (Sommerfeld et al.
2007: 17438). Indeed, gossip was so highly valued in the game that play-
ers sometimes relied upon it even when they had contrasting direct obser-
vation, which the authors infer means that “humans are used to basing
their decisions on gossip, rumor, or other spoken information” (ibid.).
Getting the gossip can be a time-efficient way of figuring out which path
to pursue.
The constraints here are also financial as much as temporal. Returning

to the world of natural science, scientific equipment and materials are not
inexpensive; grant funding is tied to original research projects; research
programs take time and money to set up (investing in training graduate
students and lab assistants, time coding data, etc.). As many anthropolo-
gists studying science, but particularly Traweek, have noted, reputation
management is a crucial tool in professional development; one cannot
simply assume that good work will earn its own credibility.
The idea that we do reputational check-ins as a way of saving our-
selves time to directly investigate knowledge claims is not, in fact, new.
Scholars who’ve examined the status of testimony in epistemology have
taken this idea seriously. But examinations of testimony as knowledge,
such as C.A.J. Coady’s (1992), focus on either commonsense written
examples of testimony (knowledge of our birth dates via birth certificates
that represent many people’s direct eyewitness experience), or formal,
legal testimony; gossip is entirely absent from Coady’s otherwise path-
breaking analysis of testimony. While more recent analyses of testimony
(Gelfert 2014; Coady 2006, 2012) give gossip some epistemic value,
their institutional applicability is limited. David Coady stresses that gos-
sip is “essentially personal,” thus ruling out the possibility that one might
meaningfully gossip about substantive work (107, footnote 4), a distinc-
tion followed by Gelfert (201). Indeed, Gelfert’s defense of gossip largely
minimizes its epistemic possibilities; he contends that practices like gossip
and rumor “do not, however, share the same epistemic goal of imparting
knowledge—though, of course, they may serve other goals, such as creat-
ing social cohesion or satisfying the speaker’s desire to be the center of
attention” (194). This is emblematic of damning with faint praise, reduc-
ing gossip to a social marker with occasionally narcissistic effects. How do
we square assessments like this with the unremarkable presence of gossip
in scientific practice, which philosophers so often hold up as an ideal of
disinterested knowledge collection?
The answer, I believe, speaks to both the strength and one of the weak-
nesses of gossip as selection. As I demonstrated in Chap. 2, and will dem-
onstrate further in the next two chapters, people have a particular blind
spot when it comes to their own practices, or the work of people in their
community. Terms like gossip and rumor are used as a way of discredit-
ing speakers and ideas when the information coming is suspect or critical;
however, the presence of gossip and rumor is either ignored or rewritten
as something else when done by those sympathetic to one’s own view.
64 K. ADKINS
This suggests that how we evaluate and assess the credibility of gossip
is tenuous, if not at times straightforwardly hypocritical. To be explicit,
reputational assessments as a shorthand for direct investigation are far
from foolproof, and, indeed, they can expose or replicate the kinds of
conventional-wisdom blinkers that can limit ideas in fields. The two major
case studies in Chap. 4, on academic gossip, provide clear examples where
entire subfields of research are dismissed and discredited largely for repu-
tational reasons.
But this should not be a sufficient reason to dismiss or diminish gossip.
For one thing, reputational tag-teaming has a long intellectual history.
During the Scientific Revolution, when instrumentation was custom-
designed and built, and literate scientists a relatively tiny community scat-
tered across the globe, scientists would describe experiments (and thought
experiments) in great detail in their letters to each other (Shapin 1998:
82–84, 107–108). The detailed and explicit letters meant that recipients
would be considered virtual witnesses to the experiments, simultaneous
to figures like Boyle and Bacon expressing concern about knowledge
proceeding by testimony, or “gossip of the streets” (Shapin 1994: 202;
Shapin 1998: 87). Their explicit lending of trust and credibility to each
other’s work ensured the growth and development of science, while simul-
taneously shrouding the role that credit, trustworthiness, and testimony
played in science’s development. In Shapin’s words, “[t]rust is a creative
as well as a conservative force in science” (25), for it allows both the pres-
ervation and the reconsideration of ideas.
In sum, when gossip functions as a device of selection in knowledge
creation, it is part of a much longer tradition in knowledge, whereby we
grant authority based on trust, and add credibility to testimony based on
reputation. Scholars who discuss testimony and trust in knowledge tend
to stick to what we might call “officially trustworthy” channels of repu-
tation; however, as these examples indicate, there is a rich vein of unof-
ficial trust and reputation being checked, and granted, consistently and
generally unacknowledged, even in our most credible knowledge-creating
enterprises like science.
3.2 Gossip as Synthesis
Gossip is fundamentally storytelling, Cynthia Ozick argues (2015), and

this claim sums up the synthetic function of gossip. If gossip as selection is
a kind of separation—pulling relevant bits of information or theories from
the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that can be our experience of the

world—then gossip as synthesis is its natural counterweight. Ozick waxes
philosophical in her essay, reminding us that “not unlike the philosophers,
the gossiper strives to fathom the difference between appearance and real-
ity, and to expose the gap between the false and the genuine” (18). In
other words, gossip as story or synthesis isn’t merely reportage. A story
isn’t simply an iterative list of what happens; our construction of the list—
what we choose to include or exclude—and its emphasis and tone all serve
to act as an interpretive framework. Good stories don’t simply tell us that
something (anything) happened; they tell us that something important
happened, and they give cues, nods, or downright shoves in the direction
of its meaning(s).
Gossip works to synthesize sometimes apparently disconnected ideas
or pieces of evidence, and it is this tool that is particularly valuable for
people in marginalized communities. When we colloquially refer to gos-
sip as the “dirt” or the “back story,” part of what we’re describing is the
way in which gossip tells us the rest of a story that on its face is illogical
or incomplete. In its synthetic function, gossip can fill in holes, or shift
emphasis or perspective, to help us make sense of our experiences. In this
sense, gossip works to make connections between public and private infor-
mation. Gossip, because of its intimate and playful setting, can be genera-
tive of meaning. Robert Darnton’s work on street knowledge before the
French Revolution gestures to the way in which people’s secretive talk and
thinking can be expansive. It’s also an early indicator of the feminist view
that “the personal is political”—the explicit connection between liberty in
the bedroom to political liberty, and the recognition of double standards
when it comes to royal morality versus common morality, suggest that
conventional notions of privacy were being problematized long ago. In
his Forbidden Novels of Pre-Revolutionary France (1996), Darnton surveys
the lucrative business in censored books before the French Revolution,
and draws some stunning conclusions about the intermixing of high and
low culture in books, contrary to received wisdom. Most compellingly, he
argues for the thematic relatedness of the most graphic of the books (nar-
rative pornography) along with Enlightenment philosophy—books from
both sides of the genre sold equally well. These livres philosophiques, as the
whole genre was coyly referred to by booksellers, represented the power
of the Enlightenment on all fronts. Throwing off churchly authority over
the mind had not simply theoretical effect, but bodily effect. To be sure,
one could read censored authors like Rousseau and Voltaire and liberate
66 K. ADKINS
one’s mind from official positions. From the same traffickers in censored
books, one could buy high-grade smut and gossip, and liberate the body
from comparable constraints. Along this line, highly gossipy libelles (politi-
cal scandal books focused on individuals) and chroniques scandaleuses (less
distinctively narratival scandal logs—more like an explicitly politicized
French National Enquirer)—became extremely popular. Even though
written, these books fit definitions of gossip. The libelles utilized ministers
and mistresses to reveal the inner life of royalty, and printed “dialogue that
came from [libellistes’] own unerring ability to be at the right place at the
right time, behind a curtain, peering through a window” (76). Chroniques
scandaleuses look more like our modern gossip columns: an “anonymous
amalgam of everything thrown up by public discussions of public affairs”
(80). Their subjects were often ostensibly private—lives of the royalty—
but their matter and import were very much public. Although these books’
formats and tones were wildly variant, Darnton argues that the books were
really little more than journalism tricked up as history (76, 80). But here
again, the crucial point is that these political gossip logs were the folk nar-
ratives that justified the force of Rousseau’s arguments about the obsoles-
cence of crown rule, and the indignity of the class system in France. From
the perspective of the French pre-Revolutionary customer, the same point
was getting reinforced and extended by the philosophy and the scandal.
People would read both the philosophy and the scandal sheets, not simply
one or the other (Darnton 223–224). The printed gossip and the spoken
gossip peaked in intensity and common arguments at similar points before
the revolution (238), suggesting that each influenced the other. The sub-
stantial and substantive connection between theoretical tracts and gossip
rags in pre-Revolutionary France suggest the ways in which revolutionary
readers reach across realms and domains when changing their perspectives.
This comparative means of gossip’s synthesis can be more indirect. Gossip
can synthesize by functioning as argument by analogy. Turner’s book on
rumor documents the striking frequency of rumors about outside contami-
nation of black bodies: Klan ownership of fried chicken franchises that result
in African-American male sterility, the previously mentioned AIDS theory,
and a rumor that the CIA, FBI, or CDC was kidnapping black Atlanta chil-
dren, killing them, and using their bodies for medical research (139–144).
This last rumor seems distinctly outlandish until its context comes into play.
The rumor occurred when over 20 black children disappeared from the
Atlanta area (virtually all disappearances unsolved by police). This period,
the late 1970s and early 1980s, marked the end of the shameful Tuskegee
“experiment” of monitoring syphilis symptoms on unknowing and thus

unconsenting black men. The Center for Disease Control (CDC), head-
quartered in Atlanta, was making news during the missing child years with
their research about interferon (then a potential cancer breakthrough.
Finally, just as in Tuskegee, all the missing children were male [145–147]).
Rather than simply dismiss this rumor out of hand as outlandish, the num-
ber of similarities between the two situations suggests that some Atlantans
saw the missing children as simply the government raising the bar on pre-
vious outrages committed against them in a systematic and intentional
fashion. Naturally, there are obvious gaps in such an idea; in Tuskegee,
government presence was explicit from the beginning, if also hidden. There
is no such evidence in the Atlanta case. However, simply to call it wild gos-
sip or unfounded rumor is to ignore that the difference between the earlier
outrage and the latter is one of degree, not of kind. In other words, there
is a serious comparison being made here, that African-American bodies are
regularly and disgracefully viewed as intrinsically violable.
A rumor from centuries before demonstrates the way in which this
insight is sadly not limited to the African-American community. In mid-
eighteenth-century France, rumors of police officers kidnapping children
from the streets of Paris and sending them to America were rampant (Farge
1991, 3). Once again, there is absolutely no concrete evidence supporting
this; but again, the context of the rumor explains its formation and persis-
tence. In 1750s Paris, the police had the power to imprison vagrants, and
(in part due to increasing poverty and famine in rural France) the presence
of poor and vagrant people increased by two-thirds in Paris over 50 years
(30). Consequently, harsh legal measures for poverty control ensued; the
police had increased power to arrest the poor, and deportation to the
colonies became law in 1719 (32). Subsequent grain shortages in the
1720s–1740s led to an 1749 edict that all beggars shall be arrested “of
whatever age and sex” and taken to prison “for as long as shall be deemed
necessary” (34). The police actually did arrest and imprison children,
sometimes without following procedure and taking them first to a police
commissioner for a hearing. Documented numbers vary between 27 and
80 in the month of the rumor and its attendant mass riots (82, 91–92).
In a broader context, then, this rumor seems less outlandish and irrespon-
sible than an extension of particular facts to a more general concept. To
be sure, “kidnapping”—where someone is held for a ransom—did not
literally occur. But the distinctions again seem to be those of degree, not
of kind. The children were undoubtedly taken by force; while monetary
68 K. ADKINS
ransom was certainly not involved, the punishment (as long as necessary)
must have seemed as insurmountable as a ransom to poor Parisian families.
Given the legally existent policy of deportation to colonies, the danger
that “kidnapping” implies (the possibility of death) is also effectively pres-
ent. So again, what we have here is an analogy based upon actual historical
substance, and not simply fantastic whispering.
It is worth pausing to contemplate the dynamics in the examples of
synthesis we’ve examined. In each of these, power and information are
sharply divided between a relatively small elite (pre-Revolutionary French
nobles, corporate and government officials in the American South) and
a large and dispersed group (peasants, African Americans). Counter-
narratives proliferate despite and because of official denials and even, in
the case of pre-Revolutionary France, official surveillance and censorship.
In other words, these arguments and perspectives function both as a way
for marginalized people to make sense of a brutal and brutalizing world
and as a kind of form of solidarity. Calling it an act of solidarity, however,
does not make it less epistemically valuable; the solidarity comes through
collective sense-making in a difficult or obstructed environment. Sebastian
Jobs (2014) characterizes this sort of sense-making as “uncertain knowl-
edge” (4); while questions may be unsettled or deeply disputed, the talk of
the marginalized is simultaneously epistemic and political. When we orga-
nize information into narratives, or metaphors, or stories, we remember it;
Walter Ong articulates these features of orality, and recent psychological
research (Mesoudi et al. 2006: 415) suggests that the coherence of gossip
stories is what gives them greater adhesiveness in our memories.
The organic nature of gossip facilitates this kind of epistemic move-
ment. Jennifer Coates’ Women Talk (1996) contains excerpts of women
gossiping about the subject of “strong women” with a whole host of
specific examples from themselves and family members (253–258). The
conversation begins vacuously as well as invitationally: “thank god I’m a
woman” (253). Because the women are speaking at leisure, they bring up
counterexamples to this bland truism, and shift to a Hegelian moment
of antithesis, concluding that women perpetuate men’s weakness (255).
It ends on what can only seem a note of irony—by announcing that the
difficulty of being on one’s own is a “complete and utter myth” (257).
The conversation may be less ironic, though, when viewed in light of the
various positions the participants take: that women are better than men,
it’s great to be a woman, women are too strong, women are to blame for
men’s inadequacy, women have to be strong because otherwise nothing
gets done, women are misled into thinking that “strong work” is dif-
ficult (257). These positions are obviously formally irreconcilable, but if
we think of these opening and closing moves (women are better than
men, the difficulty of living on one’s own is a myth) the entire conversa-
tion becomes dialectical. The synthesis of gossip is not just that differ-
ent pieces of information are collected but also that different people’s
ideas and experiences are compared. Indeed, the conversation works as
one of many instances from Coates’ book that illustrates Medina’s idea of
polyphony, as well as the value of intimacy; the women can speak freely
because of their shared background (they do not fear being mocked or
dismissed for uttering clichés celebrating their womanhood), but they
also do not arrive at total uniformity of position. The early anxiety about
strong women somehow emasculating men can only be ludicrous if that
which supposedly makes women strong is in fact easy. In other words,
their meandering conversational path between general and specific uses
specifics to challenge what passes for general cultural truth.2 Conventional
analyses of gossip that focus on a single story told to a silent or uncritical
audience miss this sort of social engagement of information.
In its organic or embedded quality, gossip as synthesis demonstrates
the way in which gossip is often erroneously cordoned off as if its work-
ings are entirely separate from more public or aboveground conversa-
tions. Coates’ recordings demonstrate the ways in which gossip navigates
realms; more recent scholarship of workplace gossip substantiates this.
An extended study of a large organization undergoing a change in their
CEO revealed just how integrated the gossip was into other forms of
communication. “Gossip itself is situated, or in other words embedded,
in other forms of both formal and informal communication. No evi-
dence was found of gossip occurring in isolation from other forms of
communication” (Mills 2010: 234). I would suggest that part of why
gossip works synthetically, to help us make connections, is because it
itself is synthetic activity; it is integrated within our more formal and
public conversations.
3.3 Evaluating Gossip as Knowledge
Part of what makes people nervous about explicit discussion of gossip

and rumor as contributing toward knowledge is surely the very sense of
looseness that marks these ways of speaking and thinking. The very idea
of explicitly acknowledging that some of what we call knowledge may be
70 K. ADKINS
founded on loose talk seems to undermine the very idea of knowledge

whatsoever—how can we say we know something, when it is merely, to
use Bacon’s words, “gossip of the streets”? Knowledge is differentiated
from mere belief exactly because it is grounded; gossip and rumor, by
(recent) definition and some scholarly attention, are marked precisely by
their ungroundedness.
Concomitant with concerns about the lack of grounding for gos-
sip and rumor is a sense that conversation shared by trust and intimacy
may not be conversation that is particularly rigorous in its evaluation.
Indeed, Cass Sunstein’s recent work on rumor (2009), while providing
many instances of reason to be concerned here by documenting some
of the sociological phenomena that facilitate rumor-spreading (such as
polarization), itself is a testament to this predilection. The subtitle of his
book offers “falsehoods” up as an effective synonym for rumors, and the
book defines rumors as false claims of fact that nonetheless spread (6).
Nowhere does the book consider the possibility that some rumors may
be true. This concern isn’t merely cherry-picking; Sunstein’s book, while
effective and cogently argued, draws much of its strength from a presen-
tation of the vast ills of false rumors—personal, financial, social (people
can lose faith in government institutions). He cites research that people
often believe rumors because they confirm prior beliefs, or support deep
emotions, positive or negative (wishes or dreads); and indeed, if rumors
and gossip are spread based upon nothing more than confirming deep-
seated emotions that are uncritically held, that would be problematic.
But we’ve just seen some examples of gossip and rumor being spread
for epistemic reasons, or as Maryann Ayim (1994) would describe, as
inquiry. More crucially, the very same social dynamics Sunstein identifies
(informational cascades, group polarization) work in the case of spread-
ing true rumors, and rumors in which their spreading might have helpful
effect. For instance, rumors about massive layoffs coming in one’s com-
pany, the spreading of which happens due to confirmation bias (demor-
alized employees griping to one another and only spreading dire news)
and group polarization (nobody’s talking to managers or supervisors
because their information is regarded as suspect) in this circumstance
helps employees be better prepared to seek other jobs and continue to
feed their families. Their advance notice of coming layoffs (as Smeltzer’s
research indicates occurs) is surely helpful in terms of giving employees
time to prepare. Instances like these suggest that Sunstein’s concern over
these dynamics is overstated and selective.
Regardless, it is still important to consider in what manner and to what

extent gossip gets critically evaluated (or even suppressed). If gossip is sim-
ply always credulously repeated (if not maliciously elaborated upon), then
surely concerns about its reliability would overwhelm even the weakest
case we might want to make for its value; the noise-to-signal value would
simply be too out of kilter. But conversely, if we can see criteria of evalu-
ation being applied to gossip as it is being spread, it suggests, again, that
gossip is yet another tool in our epistemic toolbox. I suggest that there are
implicit standards for gossip’s reliability that come from its background in
intimacy. I have noted that the playful, loose way in which gossip occurs is
a contributing factor to its generation of information and ideas; the care-
free nature in which gossip occurs can lead to more creative or connective
thinking. This feature, of course, cuts both ways. It is true that due to the
informal and playful nature in which gossip occurs, we may not evaluate or
interrogate its claims as formally as we do knowledge claims in more offi-
cial settings (seminar rooms, academic journals, courtrooms). However,
this is not to say that gossip is a knowledge free-for-all. The reliability or
lack thereof in gossip draws in part from the relationships that nurture it.
People don’t gossip in a vacuum; they gossip with those they trust, and
that trust is itself based on background experiences. A gossip who regu-
larly spreads false or misleading information is a damaged interlocutor.
Secondly, gossip isn’t discussed in a vacuum; it is put into context with
what one already knows about a person, company, profession, or labora-
tory. Indeed, I would suggest that gossip’s origins and roots in intimacy
and friendship give it a kind of ethical claim. Gossips are, or should be,
accountable for their gossip, and to those with whom they gossip.
Let’s look at some examples of gossip being evaluated as it is being
spread, and in particular, of its credibility being challenged. In one of
many instances of official gossip, pre-Revolutionary Paris police moni-
tored café gossip and reported it to the government. One of these reports,
written in dialogue, quotes gossip of Louis XV’s potential affair. One reply
was, “I don’t think the king has any inclination in that direction, because
he has always been kept away from women” (Darnton 235). Rather than
credulously repeat and reinforce rumors, the officer applies basic inductive
reasoning. Some French newsletters, such as Grimm’s Correspondence
Litteraire, essentially functioned as gossip sieves. In reviewing the chro-
niques scandaleuses and libelles for their audience, they explicitly appealed
not just to literary style but also to persuasiveness of content, separating
fact-based rumors from raw invention (Darnton 220). Gossip is evaluated
72 K. ADKINS
for its coherence and reliability. Reliability isn’t merely a French concern;
one recent psychological study of gossip found that multi-sourced gos-
sip was valued more highly than single-sourced gossip (Hess and Hagen,
qtd. in Sommerfeld et al. 17438). Similarly, Sommerfeld et al.’s research
revealed that more extreme gossip had less impact on readers, suggesting
that readers were applying some native skepticism to evaluative comments
(17438).
On a more informal level, Turner’s analysis of rumors in African-
American communities demonstrates regular evaluation and sorting of
the truth value of the rumors by the participants who spread them. The
rumors around the Atlanta child murders, for instance, were spread in part
because the dominant theory—a single murderer—didn’t square with the
available evidence; the murders had too many variables in their commis-
sion (81). Several rumors around Klan ownership of corporations spread
in part because participants explicitly note that the businesses—Popeye’s
and Church’s chicken, Troop clothing—set up franchises exclusively or
primarily in black neighborhoods (86–94). Pertinently, Turner’s infor-
mants often hedge their bets in citing to what extent they believed one
rumor about a drug conspiracy as truthful, even as they spread it; “most
informants, however, said merely that the item was ‘plausible’” (190).
This undercuts the idea that gossip and rumor are simply spread uncriti-
cally. The explicitly political or consumerist readings many of Turner’s
informants put on these rumors make this relevant; in other words, even
as they hedge their bets about the plausibility of a major fast-food chicken
chain being owned by the Klan, and injecting its chicken with a steril-
izing chemical, informants will still justify spreading the rumors because
they foment a boycott of an unhealthy fast food whose franchises are dis-
proportionately housed in black neighborhoods (174). In other words,
belief in rumor or gossip isn’t uncritical or digital; the information is often
weighed and compared against competing views; and most critically, the
rumor and gossip can become a way to articulate political marginalization,
or what Medina would call epistemic friction. Maryann Ayim captures this
movement when she describes gossips working to test their gossip hypoth-
eses against the evidence they see about them (90). Epistemic friction
occurs for many reasons, among them the fact that ideas assumed to be
common can be challenged or criticized. Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers
(2012) track this phenomenon in medieval Flanders; they note that the
political gossip and rumor from the lower and middle classes used the
same language and terms as the ruling class, but rephrased or reorga-
nized it according “to what could be called a guild ideology” (50, 86). In
other words, our understanding of truth in some cases, particularly when
it comes to political speech, is located within specific ideological claims.
This maps well onto C.A.J. Coady’s analysis of gossip and rumor (2006)
as testimony; he notes that once one removes our predispositions against
it, gossip is as variously reliable as is all testimony. In addition, rumor, even
when exaggerated, can often serve as a marker for further investigation
(260, 269).
The mere fact that gossip can get scrutinized or evaluated, of course,
does not mean that it regularly does. Indeed, Tommaso Bertoletti and
Lorenzo Magnani (2014) issue a caution about the epistemic value of gos-
sip in the midst of their defense of it as abductive activity (a method for
developing theories to explain evidence against a backdrop of knowledge).
They note that because of the speed of gossip, and its origins within group
talk where groups share assumptions or perspectives, gossip can be epis-
temically sloppy or dangerous. It can “produce beliefs that instead of being
checked against the reality of things, are just put into action, thus achiev-
ing a just-so narration of the social group” (4055). This is a valid concern,
and one that we can see in action in some of the examples discussed in
Chap. 6. But it’s important to qualify this observation; these markers of
epistemic carelessness are not specific or distinctive to gossip. The group
homogeneity that Bertoletti and Magnani observe, for instance, is present
and often unnoticed in groups in which the homogeneity is seen as typical
or representative. The meta-blindness that Medina observes is comparable
to this tactic, when (for instance) sexist or racist remarks go unchallenged
because of assumptions that “everyone” sees things the same way. Indeed,
some of the political journalism examined in Chap. 5 has clear indications
of this homogeneity of viewpoint. The caution, then, is less specific to gos-
sip, and more specific to our social engagement.
3.4 Epistemic Imagination and Subversion

in Gossip
Gossip—in its selection, synthesis, and its evaluation—can be a way of

meaning-making, particularly for people who are often marginalized.
What these tools together suggest is the possibility that we have always
used gossip in knowledge-making. Gossip is used alongside, rather than
instead of or in opposition to more traditional means of gaining and evalu-
ating information. And in particular, gossip as a way of communication
74 K. ADKINS
helps us frame resistance to dominant views. Medina’s metaphor of knowl-

edge as polyphonic is particularly evocative here, given the oral history and
persistence of gossip. While we are always consciously or unconsciously
selecting what people, ideas, or objects to attend to, when we retrospec-
tively reconstruct what we think, and our reasons for it, Medina argues, in
effect, that socially we only hear a few instruments. We clean up our epis-
temic process after the fact. Traweek’s account of high-energy physicists
reinforces this view; she notes that scholarly articles often erase the gossip
from the claims and process by which ideas are established and verified
(122). A polyphonous approach to knowledge would not, it’s clear, be
a harmonious and lush Mozart symphony—there would be instruments
unfamiliar to European eyes and ears, a multitude of tones, melodies, and
rhythms, and great moments of inconsistency, contrast, and tension (cer-
tainly moments of cacophony). But just as composers and musicians from
across genres, cultures, and countries have influenced each other and gen-
erated new forms of music (not simply new songs), opening our ears and
eyes to new ideas and new voices can help us see more meaning in the
world, not less.
Gossip works in this fashion in part because one of its features that is
rarely reckoned within philosophical analyses of gossip—its porousness.
While individual gossip sessions occur in dyads or small groups, these
groups are hardly closed; people talk to multiple groups. Gossip travels
further and faster if it’s of wide interest. Even some of the most interesting
scholarly engagements of gossip (Bergmann 1993; Bertoletti and Magnani
2014) focus entirely on single-story or single-group iterations of gossip.
These accounts grasp the micro-functions of gossip by picking apart con-
versations in great detail, but limit its ability to effect knowledge on a
broader scale by ignoring where those conversations go. When we look at
the historical practice of gossip, we see that the stories that spread indicate
some of the ways in which gossip functions as a way to conceive the world.
For instance, Elizabeth Horodowich’s account of gossip in early mod-
ern Venice (2008) recognizes the way in which gossip crossed all sorts of
group boundaries. She notes that the unique geography of Venice (both
physically open and intimate) made it something of a gossip-trading hub;
conversation has had across all sorts of class boundaries, which actually
worked to promote political stability rather than to undermine it (129).
But first, this requires that we recognize the ways in which we gener-
ate meaning in full; as we really do it, not as we wish we did it. Further to
extend this idea of polyphony, I think we can recognize that gossip, in its
selective and synthetic functions, demonstrates internal polyphony in how

we come to knowledge. Our reasons, and reasonings, aren’t all the sani-
tized and rational ones we provide for public accountings. Medina argues
that lived disruptions—moments of encountering viewpoints counter to
our own, and getting a sense of how we are perceived by others—pro-
motes a kind of internal diversity (223). I am suggesting here that there is
an internal disruption in gossip, given that it is so widely practiced (includ-
ing as a path to knowledge) while simultaneously widely elided as valuable
for knowledge. What Medina describes as a resistant imagination, which is
“ready to confront relational possibilities that have been lost, ignored or
that remain to be discovered or invented” (299), I would extend. Our use
of gossip in knowledge doesn’t merely demonstrate relational possibili-
ties that have been ignored or undermined, it also demonstrates what we
repress or suppress in our own minds about what we recognize. Its loose-
ness gives us room to play with ideas as well as perspective. One of the
limitations of our current approach to gossip is that we tend only to recog-
nize loose talk, playful words, and gossip in the negative—when they are
done by those whose views depart sharply from the conventional, when
they are voiced by critics. I’ve demonstrated some ways in which unruly
talk can be constructive. In the next several chapters, we’ll examine some
case studies in depth, to see these power dynamics in action.
Notes
1. Robert “Bob” Ackermann first made this observation, almost
off-handedly, in a Philosophy of Science class I observed almost
20 years ago.
2. C. Edwin Baker (2004: 263) also emphases the social and dialogic
nature of gossip.
CHAPTER 4
Failure to Communicate: Gossip

as Institutional Conflict
My subject in this chapter is institutional gossip, which may at first seem

like a contradiction in terms. As we saw in Chap. 2, conventional defini-
tions of gossip focus on personal, often salacious or malicious narratives;
and indeed, scholarly analyses of gossip often focus exclusively on personal
gossip (Bok 1983; Westacott 2012). And yet, we can find many examples
of gossip and rumor occurring in or about institutions or institutional con-
texts (such as those in science, discussed in Chap. 3). More to the point,
even salacious and personal narratives, following José Medina’s analysis,
aren’t simply epistemic in nature, but simultaneously ethical and political.
Historically, as we have seen, gossip and rumor are deployed in subaltern
political communities: pre-French Revolutionary libelles and chroniques
scandaleuses fomented political discontent through their acerbic accounts
of royals’ hypocritical practices; subcontinental Indians challenged British
colonialist practices and plotted rebellion by gossip and rumor; dispos-
sessed African-American communities used rumor as a narrative to pro-
duce boycotts of companies with racist business practices (Darnton 1996;
Guha 1986; Turner 1993, respectively).
Because gossip is subversive, it is often a tool for subaltern communi-
ties, as we saw in the prior chapter. When it is often not simply or only
personal, but located in and about institutions, it can be a rich medium for
revealing, critiquing, or reinforcing power dynamics within institutions.
Before we turn to the case studies, though, it’s important to take seri-
ously the idea of gossip about institutions. Indeed, some commentators
would argue that this is a contradiction in terms, such as Scott (1990),

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47840-1_4
78 K. ADKINS
who differentiates gossip from rumor because gossip is explicitly negative

stories about a person, whereas rumor can be broader in topic as well as
more anonymous in transmission (142–144). This distinction (gossip is
about people, rumors are about events), which is repeated elsewhere in
the scholarship on rumor, I think isn’t fully accurate. Most basically, it
is too simple. But more explicitly, the roots and origins of the words are
relevant here; gossip’s origins are in intimacy, rumor’s in anonymity. It’s
this idea—the fact that gossip is grounded in intimacy, secrecy, privacy—
that I think is relevant (and also indicates why institutional gossip is not a
contradiction in terms).
To be explicit, the intimate talk of gossip is talk based on trust, which
means that secret gossip (gossip that is the sharing of confidences) is more
tied to a person or persons. Spreading gossip is risky in a way that spread-
ing a rumor is not; gossip revealed can damage the reputation not just
of its object but also of the person who spread the story. If we focus on
secrecy and trust as the distinction between gossip and rumor, it should
become pretty clear to anyone who’s ever worked why workplace gossip
happens, and not just of the personal variety. Workplaces have secrets, and
workplace decision-making is often the subject of great informal discus-
sion. But what is often called a rumor mill in corporations isn’t simply
that; rumors start out because secrets get leaked.
Contemporary research on institutional gossip is located primarily in
the fields of business and public relations, and mostly focuses on gossip
as a problem for managers to solve (in achieving or maintaining personal
or company reputation), as opposed to an epistemic mode–a way of fig-
uring something out (Smeltzer and Zener 1992; Baker and Jones 1996;
Kimmel and Audrain-Pontevia 2010). The common theme in all of these
examples is that of people with less access to official channels and authori-
tative views using gossip as a way of countering and challenging dominant
views and practices. Gossip is typically viewed negatively in these accounts,
as a threat to efficient use of company resources, and a drain on company
morale. The last few years, however, have seen some more serious study
of institutional gossip as a component of organizational management.1
Mike Noon and Rick Delbridge (1993) articulate small- and large-scale
effects of institutional gossip that can be constructive, pointing out that
gossip can not only strengthen networks in institutions but also provide a
voice for the voiceless, or even contribute to institutional change (33–34).
Kathryn Waddington’s recent analysis of institutional gossip based on her
study of nurses (2012), which argues that gossip is a crucial means of
FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE: GOSSIP AS INSTITUTIONAL CONFLICT 79
information-gathering, and that managers who ignore or dismiss persis-

tent gossip do so at their peril, is a refreshing counterpoint to this view.
The academy is an institution that is rife with gossip. Anyone with
merely passing familiarity with the academic world will agree that gossip
is prime grist for the scholarly mill; it keeps conferences, job meetings,
blogs, and listservs running.2 Academic gossip is employed for hilarious
effect in campus novels, and much of it concerns figuring out moving
pieces on the academic food chain—who’s moving to which institution,
getting a contract with which press, placing their students at which top-
flight schools. Campus novels so regularly utilize and rely upon campus
gossip that its omnipresence cannot be ignored. David Lodge, in particu-
lar, sends this status gossip up tremendously in his Small World (1995);
speculation about the availability and candidacy of a too-good-to-be-true
UNESCO chair is instantaneous, even in pre-Internet days, and positively
Machiavellian at times.
But gossip is more than a mere index of status; it is also the milieu in
which debates about what counts as meaningful work, and who counts as
authority, get full (if not always fair) treatment. We saw instances of this in
the previous chapter, with Traweek’s discussion of high-energy physicists.
Indeed, Max Gluckman’s description of how village gossip works almost
perfectly maps onto the workings of the academic or working world. Take
this representative quote: “struggles…are not fought openly in committee
meeting until crises are reached. Instead, differences of opinion are fought
out in behind-the-back tattle, gossip, and scandal, so that many villag-
ers, who are actually at loggerheads, can outwardly maintain the show
of harmony and friendship” (1963, 312). Just substitute “colleagues”
or “coworkers” for “villagers,” and this appears to describe the working
world with real accuracy. Indeed, Chris Wickham hilariously demonstrates
the relevance and importance of academic gossip when he contends that
someone attempting to construct a history of a university based on official
minutes will be incapable of constructing a meaningful account of what
happens, or what it means (17). His Wittgensteinian observation is that
university minutes simply lay out official decisions: rules, course syllabi,
student numbers. They say nothing about how people act about these
decisions, their importance, how they were arrived at, or their contested
meaning; in short, they are troublingly decontextualized. For the con-
text and meaning, Wickham tartly observes, one must spend time in the
faculty lounge, doing the fieldwork of gossip (16).3 Wickham’s point is
only amplified when we consider power dynamics in institutions like the
80 K. ADKINS
academy. Those in a minority position in their academic field—whether

demographically or intellectually—often resort to gossip as a safe space in
which to challenge received views of the field (and the legitimacy of those
who hold such views). The academy thrives on the advancement of ideas;
unconventional ideas can sometimes be quirky one-offs, but can at times
up-end a whole host of received ideas about the discipline, and lead to a
whole host of new research programs. Thus, gossip is first and foremost
presented but discounted in the academy, and it freely intermingles ideas
with their thinkers. In addition, the academy is rife with power relations
that aren’t academic: provosts and vice presidents do battle over scarce
resources; in the United States, public universities are increasingly tuition-
driven as state support withers; the teaching labor force is increasingly
casualized; universities are increasingly expected to justify their existence
on market-based economics and narrowly utilitarian views of education;
shared governance has been withered away by increased administrative
bloat and top-down management. In such an environment, gossip about
the economics and politics of universities is to be expected, and is often
bottom-up and subversive in nature.
As such, gossip can be particularly precarious.4 Gossip scholars have
long noted its liminal status: whether in literature or politics, it is a crucial
device, but one that is simultaneously denied legitimacy, even by those
who practice it. Two recent case studies of institutional gossip demon-
strate this liminal status: subversive gossip is all too visible and fragile
because of its position (done by those on the margins). By contrast, the
surveilling, conservative gossip produced by those in power is rarely even
recognized as such (because they are merely repeating what “everyone”
already thinks). This gives the empowered a double advantage—they have
an additional rhetorical tool to deploy that is frequently challenged when
those on the margins, who most need weapons, use it. In this chapter, I’ll
be examining two recent episodes of academic gossip that I think demon-
strate this double effect.
Chronologically, the first case is the “Perestroika” conflict in the
American Political Science Association (APSA), an underground move-
ment challenging the legitimacy and lack of viewpoint diversity in polit-
ical science; and the second (and ongoing) case is the conflict around
the Pluralist’s Guide to Philosophy and the Philosophical Gourmet Report
(PGR), two competing rankings of graduate programs in philosophy.
Both conflicts have the same root issue, which is both methodological and
demographic. In both disciplines, certain ways of practicing the discipline
have been historically dominant (in political science, quantitative analy-

sis, behavioral analysis, formal modeling; in philosophy [at least in the
Anglophone world], analytic metaphysics, and epistemology). Alternative
methods and areas within the discipline (in political science, political
theory, area studies, qualitative analysis, postmodern and poststructural
analysis; in philosophy, feminist theory, philosophy of race, non-Western
philosophy, and Continental philosophy) exist, but didn’t get scholarly
attention (articles from these methods and area weren’t present in top
journals).
Both disciplines also have long-standing issues with internal racism and
sexism. The American Philosophical Association (APA) responded to mass
and public criticisms of its sexism by starting its Committee on the Status
of Women in 1969 [sic]. And yet, in 2009, shortly before the Pluralist’s
Guide conflict, women held a mere 17 % of tenure-track jobs in philosophy
(NCES 2009). In 2001, when Perestroika began, women were merely 24
% of APSA members; in the last decade, people of color made up only 20
% of APSA membership (Sedowski and Brintnall 2007; “APSA Election,
Membership, And Governance Data” I.A.6, respectively). There were per-
sistent allegations in both fields that a relationship of overlap but not iden-
tity existed between the methodological and demographic issues. There
were also structural factors that perpetuated hegemony: each discipline
also had election structures for the professional associations that actually
eliminated the possibility of competition between slates, and hence com-
peting methodologies (Posusney 2005; Wilshire 2002).
While these case studies may sound like the classic academic gossip
that Henry Kissinger dismissed as vicious battles over trivial rewards, it’s
important to recognize the structural stakes at work here. When both
conflicts arose, the economics of the academy nationally were undergo-
ing serious transition; from a mostly tenured and tenure-track faculty
stream to majority-adjunct faculty force, with university presidents and
Boards of Trustees, often from the corporate world, scrutinizing faculty
lines and occasionally whole departments for their fiscal contributions to
the health of the school. Thus, reputations matter more than ever in aca-
demic departments, particularly those that seek to attract graduate stu-
dents who will be successful (and for the graduate students who want to
earn PhDs in hopes of joining the academy). Who is in the academy, and
what questions are considered up for academic consideration (using which
methods) becomes an even more urgent question when the economic
strictures on the respective fields are tightening. In both conflicts, there is
82 K. ADKINS
also a persistent theme of relevance, a suggestion that a discipline that is

methodologically and demographically narrow has less to say to the world
it inhabits.
They are rich cases to study in tandem. Both occur not simply in the
same broad profession (the academy), but in neighboring disciplines (phi-
losophers and political scientists consider similar questions, and regularly
cite work from both disciplines). They occur very close together in time,
and both are primarily in the same country (this is as close as a scholar of
gossip can get to the fabled “separated twin” study model). The issues at
contention are similar, and the history of the issues (as informally regis-
tered by the gossip) are relatively long-standing. Both case studies feature
explicit linking of demographic problems in the disciplines (who does phi-
losophy and political science—heterosexual Caucasian men) to method-
ological questions in the discipline (what the disciplines study—narrowly
focused and technical questions of interest only to fellow specialists).
Finally, both cases surfaced enough to be discussed nationally; the gossip
spread beyond people who were directly or indirectly affected.
However, the crucial distinction in these case studies is that in one
instance (Perestroika) the gossip contributed relatively quickly to insti-
tutional change; by contrast, in the Pluralist’s Guide case, institutional
change occurred much more incrementally, and with much greater resis-
tance. I contend that we can see two distinct but related reasons for this.
In the first place, the philosophy gossip was much more directly tied to
a single person’s (Brian Leiter’s) professional and philosophical reputa-
tion. Therefore, discussions about methodology and demographics were
invariably brought back to testimony about reputations. Second, this
personalizing of the debate also meant that what I call invisible gossip
had disproportionate weight. Invisible gossip is gossip circulated by the
empowered, which is not registered as gossip because it reflects conven-
tional thinking.
4.1 Perestroika
In both the Perestroika and Pluralist’s Guide cases, gossip about the pro-
fessions and their problems long predates the public outcries. The opening
salvo of the Perestroika debate was an anonymous email sent in October
2000 that used the language and tone of gossip to excoriate the structure
and methodological monism of APSA and its lead journals (Monroe 2005:
9). This email has the conversational tone and implied intimacy of gossip;
famous political scientists are taunted by nickname. To be specific, Harvard

political scientist Sidney Verba is referred to as “Vee,” and mocked for his
assumed ignorance (as a specialist in methodology) in a major work on
methodology. Humor is part of the email; the author exasperatedly sug-
gests that APSA’s main journal could simply create a category of “incom-
prehensible” for some journal articles, as a way of including postmodern
analysis. There are repeated references to the “coterie” that rules APSA,
and the “East Coast Brahmins”—there’s no need to name names, because
anyone who reads this email should know who’s being implicated. This is
the political science version of a “blind items” column, and exactly com-
parable to Gluckman’s analysis of village gossip (1963).
But as with the best gossip, the email isn’t simply name-calling; it quickly
(if crankily) raises 11 questions for political scientists to ponder. The issues
the email raises covers a wide range of structural inequities within the disci-
pline—the absence of many subfields from major political science journals,
the utter absence of demographic and disciplinary diversity within offices
of the APSA and editorial boards of its journal (American Political Science
Review [APSR]), the mandatory linking of a subscription to APSR with
APSA membership (which is unavoidable for any political scientist), thus
enhancing its market, the informal boycotting of national APSA confer-
ences by comparative politics scholars in lieu of smaller or regional meet-
ings. In other words, the email points to the ways in which the appearance
of a pluralist and healthy political science discipline is belied by the facts;
high subscription numbers and big national meetings themselves do not
indicate a lively discussion of issues within political science. Irony aside (an
email whose subject header calls for the “globalization” of APSA manages
to misspell “Perestroika” not once but twice), the email makes for com-
pelling reading. Indeed, as Larry Diamond’s comments at a 2002 APSA
meeting make clear, when he talks about years of “troubling reports” from
graduate students about collegial and faculty pressure to study one way
only, and the anonymity of complaint about Perestroikan issues, it’s clear
that the substance of the Perestroika complaints were long-standing fac-
ulty and grad student gossip fodder.
4.2 The Pluralist’s Guide

The “woman problem” in philosophy is long-standing. The numbers we’ve
seen for representation of women in the field are comparable to those
found in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) d
isciplines;
84 K. ADKINS
but even those disciplines have been making headway in recruiting and
retaining women graduate students and professors.5 And yet, despite years
of an official APA committee intended to advance the status of women in
philosophy, and the creation of an online and ongoing catalog of pervasive
and repellant sexism in philosophy, there is still no systematic response to
the issue.
The lines of authority in philosophy (what programs are best) have
long been established through an online guide produced by legal philoso-
pher Brian Leiter. Although the APA used to produce a biannual guide to
graduate programs, they ceased publication in 2000. Academic philoso-
phy is a small enough field that mainstream guides, such as that produced
by the magazine US News and World Report, are simply not very helpful
or informative. The academic magazine Lingua Franca used to produce
a very detailed guide to graduate programs in the humanities and social
sciences (including not just overall rankings but rankings by subspecialty),
but it also ceased publication in 2001, when the magazine folded.
The PGR, begun by Brian Leiter in 1989 and sponsored by Blackwell
as of 1997, has become the dominant source for tracking graduate pro-
grams’ prestige, so much so that terms like “Leiter-top-five [or ten]” or
“Leiterific” are now used colloquially to indicate status. Crucially, Leiter’s
guide has also been the only major guide to graduate school in philoso-
phy. Brian Leiter also authors and moderates a philosophy blog that for
many years has been the online resource for news about philosophy and
philosophers, Leiter Reports. Relevantly, Leiter’s series of rankings has
been criticized for its methodology and outsized impact for years before
the Pluralist’s Guide began. Richard Heck circulated an open letter with
175 signatures in 2002, noting that the Gourmet Report used a single
factor—scholarly reputation of the faculty—as a measure of strength of
graduate programs, utterly ignoring other relevant factors like teaching
ability, mentoring of graduate students, quality of students (Heck). Julie
Van Camp (2004) published a careful critique of its methodology for gen-
der bias; Zachary Ernst’s (2009) published a critique of its “snowball sam-
pling” methodology.
There have been other critiques, but Heck, Van Camp’s and Ernst’s
are especially useful to focus on, because their critiques are directly rel-
evant to our subject. All identify what Ernst calls a “herd mentality” (4)
in the Gourmet Report’s approach; because Leiter controls access to the
Advisory Board, and gets names for referees from people who are already
on the Board, unconscious bias and lack of representation (whether
gender-based, or specialty-based) result. Leiter’s initial public response

to Ernst’s critique in particular is defensive, and based on a false dichot-
omy; he sarcastically offers up the possibility of surveying “bus drivers
or accountants” to get a more accurate portrait of graduate programs
in philosophy, thus ignoring the meat of Ernst’s critique, which is not
about the fact that philosophers are surveyed about philosophy, but which
philosophers are selected, by whom, and by what criteria (Leiter Reports,
January 27, 2009, comment 5). In particular, Heck’s observation that
reputation among one’s colleagues stands in for professorial quality in the
Gourmet Report is suggestive of the ways in which the Gourmet Report,
while ostensively impartial and accurate (quantified assessments), does
little more than replicate and ossify conventional wisdom about big-name
people and programs.
Recognition of sexism in philosophy, in particular, has been more suc-
cessful informally than formally. The blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman
in Philosophy attempts to document issues of sexism in the profession
head-on, by inviting women philosophers to submit anonymous stories
of their treatment by colleagues. Its model seems to follow other online
shaming sites like harassmap.org; by anonymously calling out pervasive
and pathetic sexism, the site would raise enough awareness among the
profession to provoke change. The blog was started in 2010 and posts
multiple stories, almost daily, from women describing double standards in
philosophy. There are no identifying details. They range from the merely
appalling—countless stories of sexist jokes and assumptions, a speaker ask-
ing an untenured woman faculty member for a “graduate student [he
could] fuck” (“Show me a grad student I can f*ck”), to the legally action-
able—sexual harassment and attempted sexual assault (“Dear APA, Thanks
for the Memories” for the latter; various for the former). What is striking
is both the relatively long-standing nature of this blog, and the unchang-
ing nature of these reports. They depict a profession that is pervasively
disinterested in recruiting and fostering women in the profession, and a
profession that has little interest in feminist philosophy, or sees it as an
issue for women only. There are many postings recounting either dismis-
sive attitudes toward feminist philosophy, or assumptions that any ovary-
possessing philosopher must ipso facto specialize in feminist philosophy.
Indeed, in considering the blog as institutional gossip, it’s worthwhile to
note the complete anonymity of the blog, and the absence of identifying
details in the stories. As gossip, then, the blog’s subject is not any single
philosopher or department; the real subject of the gossip is the profession
86 K. ADKINS
of philosophy, and its resistance to change. Philosophy as a discipline, and

its sexism, is exposed by this blog.
In addition to the relative visibility of informal charges of sexism in
philosophy, more formal accounts of sexism in philosophy have steadily
gained ground. Sally Haslanger’s paper (2008), which presents data on
women’s relative absence in philosophy and authorship in philosophy
journals, as well as top journals’ lack of coverage of feminist philosophy,
gives some quantitative evidence for this as well. In short, this blog is an
online site for institutional gossip—the context that makes the quantita-
tive data in Haslanger’s paper all the more damning. Jennifer Saul (2012)
carefully reviews research on implicit bias and stereotype threat, and lays
out the ways in which those kinds of informal prejudicial structures can
make reputation-building even trickier for women, who are already out-
numbered in philosophy (260–261). This argument amplifies the meth-
odological criticisms of the Gourmet Report that we’ve previously seen,
making it explicit that reviews of reputation, particularly when done with-
out anonymity and under time constraints, make it more rather than less
likely to replicate stereotypical assumptions about women philosophers or
philosophers of color. Saul and Haslanger’s work, along with others, give
argumentative and empirical meat to the vivid and vicious stories on the
What It’s Like blog, and the gossip raises the stakes in the questions philos-
ophers like Saul and Haslanger raise. Crucially, reception to the blog was
strongly supportive; philosophers (including Leiter himself) didn’t spend
time debating the epistemic merits of an anonymous blog, but rather took
the effort of the blog at face value, and indicative of systemic problems
within the discipline (Leiter Reports, October 8, 2010; Wolfe, October
10, 2010).
Notably, there is a counter blog called What We’re Doing About What
It’s Like (started in April 2011), which highlights constructive efforts indi-
vidual faculty and departments are taking to change the climate for women
in academic philosophy. These posts are authored (faculty members and
department get positive recognition for making changes), which means
there’s an incentive for departments and faculty members to address the
issues. This blog, however, gets many fewer submissions. To be specific,
a comparison of submissions for each blog for the months of April, May,
September–December 2011, and January 2012, yields 53 submissions to
What We’re Doing, and 80 submissions to What It Is Like. More strik-
ingly, between January and May 2013, there were 30 submissions to What
It Is Like, and only one to What We’re Doing. A group of philosophers
attempted to challenge these rankings in 2011, by assembling an alternate

guide to graduate programs. The Pluralist’s Guide sought to provide both
alternative rankings of philosophy programs, and crucially, included a cli-
mate assessment of good, and bad, graduate programs for women. This
alternative ranking system would reflect the kinds of methodological and
demographic criticisms of philosophy present in the institutional gossip.
In other words, in the Pluralist’s Guide case, the gossip was more direct
and public in response to the problems of sexism than the Perestroika case,
which was more broadly focused.
4.3 Institutional Responses and Invisible Gossip

In both cases, there were attempts essentially to make the gossip public,
and formalize the criticisms, and it is here that the stories diverge. In the
Perestroika case, the initial email—originally sent only to ten individu-
als—was immediately and very widely forwarded around political science
departments, and an only slightly milder version of the email written by
Rogers Smith gained almost 200 signatories in just two months (Monroe
2005: 1, “Open Letter,” and Eakin 2000). It immediately became fodder
for explicit and public discussion of norms and standards in the profession.
Notably for our discussion of gossip, the open letter, while stylistically
departing from the original email, indirectly legitimated it as a conver-
sation starter, noting that “It is very unfortunate that deeply commit-
ted political scientists genuinely believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that
they cannot criticize the status quo safely without the cloak of anonymity”
(“Open Letter” 736). This remark both legitimates the necessity of the
Perestroika email and also recognizes the inevitability of institutional gos-
sip, particularly by those who feel marginalized in an institution.
More formal responses followed quickly. The April 2001 APSA meet-
ing featured two roundtables devoted to Perestroikan issues; panels on
qualitative research became incorporated into annual APSA meetings as
early as 2003. Within one year of the original email, prominent political
scientists from underrepresented methods were asked to join the APSA
governing council, Perestroika supporter Theda Skocpol became APSA
president, and APSA created a new journal reflecting methodological
diversity (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 741; “How Cult Internet Character
Mr. Perestroika Divided N.Y.U.’s Political Science Department,” New
York Observer). APSA created several new sections for their conferences
to expand methodological diversity, which quickly became popular; and
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ltimately, they opened up the elections of officers to APSA, doing away

u
with their old model of “voting” for unopposed slates nominated by gov-
erning councils (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 741).
While the Perestroika movement has been the subject of lively debate
in political science conferences and journals for the last 10 years, with
many voices cropping up on disparate positions about the movement’s
merits, logic, and effects, what’s also striking is where responses didn’t
occur. To be specific, the one person who could have perceived the origi-
nal Perestroika email as most personally offensive, Sidney Verba (who was
the one political scientist mocked in the email, for alleged ignorance),
never responded publicly to criticize either the movement or the author.
To the contrary, he actually incorporated some Perestroikan critique in
one of his courses (King, Putnam, and Verba). His public silence and pro-
fessional recognition of the dispute is truly noteworthy here. To be sure,
it could be for a variety of reasons that have little to do with professional
graciousness. He retired in 2006, so in 2001 was nearing the end of a long
and illustrious career. Alternatively, as co-author of a book on qualitative
methodology that is widely seen as standard for the field, he may have
seen his legacy as remaining more intact by silence than by public engage-
ment. Still, letting the dispute play out publicly without responding, and
incorporating Perestroikan analysis into a course, suggests at minimum a
welcome disciplinary openness to debate about the borders and identity
of one’s intellectual home.
By contrast, the attempt to publicize the criticism in philosophy met
with immediate, sharp, and public rebuke, most strikingly on Brian
Leiter’s blog. Once the Pluralist’s Guide was released, Leiter began post-
ing about it, far more frequently than on the other philosophy blogs. To
be specific, in 2011 Leiter’s blog had twenty-eight different posts focused
on the Pluralist’s Guide; by contrast, of the other major philosophy blogs,
Philosophers Anonymous had eight; NewAPPS had four, and The Philosophy
Smoker three. On his blog, Leiter’s summary of the top issues in the phi-
losophy profession for 2011 placed the Pluralist’s Guide as second in
importance, only below a major scandal about academic standards and
content being altered at a major philosophy journal as a result of ideologi-
cal lobbying (Leiter Reports, December 30, 2011k). Both are described
as “professional misconduct,” a serious charge. Leiter’s critique of the
Pluralist’s Guide is immediately to diminish it; the “SPEP Guide” he
repeatedly calls it, as if it is of interest only to a small subsection of the field
(members of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy).
By obvious implication, his guide is not partisan. Most of the postings on

the Pluralist’s Guide (which prompts active discussion on Leiter’s blog)
focus on the climate guide (a subsection of the original Pluralist’s Guide,
which focused specifically on programs that were more and less hospitable
to women graduate students), which, as What It’s Like, Haslanger’s work,
and Van Camp’s arguments make endlessly clear, is a long overdue project.
The language is also pretty aggressive, describing the guide as “scandal-
ous,” “misleading garbage,” “a travesty,” one of the Guide’s defenders as
a “witness for the prosecution,” and the recommendations of the Climate
Guide “obviously nonsensical,” “irresponsible,” and “destructive” (Leiter
Reports: July 22, 2011c [first two], July 27, 2011e, July 15, 2011b [final
three]). Most oddly, the critics of the Pluralist’s Guide keep stressing
that the climate assessment actually damages the status and prospects of
women in the profession.
To be clear, it’s not fair to say that the Pluralist’s Guide critics are sim-
ply sexist, or disinterested in questions about sexism in the profession.
Brian Leiter periodically posts about research documenting the under-
representation of women in philosophy; and in his comments about the
Pluralist’s Guide climate section, he repeatedly indicates that he thinks
there is an issue with sexism in academic philosophy. Several of his active
interlocutors publish on feminist philosophy. A second possibility is that
he has no truck with the kind of anonymous allegations contained in the
What It’s Like blog; but this too doesn’t square with the available evi-
dence. He previously referred positively to the blog, endorsed it, and even
sent his readers there.
Leiter and his many interlocutors critique the climate section largely
on its methodology; they claim it is faulty, random, irrational, non-
transparent. Interestingly, some of these criticisms are echoes of those
lodged by Van Camp and Ernst against the Gourmet Report. But more
tellingly, the group of criticisms together sound like is the age-old criti-
cism of gossip itself (gossip is unruly, irrational, doesn’t have to cite its
sources, has no transparency.) Indeed, two interlocutors explicitly describe
the methodology of the climate guide as in part consisting of spreading or
giving legitimacy to rumors (Leiter Reports July 13, 2011a: comments 23
and 27). Philosopher Miranda Fricker’s concept of a “prejudicial credibil-
ity deficit” captures well what happens here; by diminishing the trustwor-
thiness or reliability of the reporters on the Pluralist’s Guide, the report
itself loses legitimacy (27). This again contrasts to the implied methodol-
ogy of Leiter’s own rankings—a panel of philosophers voting on overall
90 K. ADKINS
and subdiscipline rankings—as more neutral and reliable. Apparently, one

set of reputation assessments is prima facie more reliable than the other, in
part because one set of informants is prima facie reliable and trustworthy,
and the other merely rumor-mongers.
The rumor critique is potent—reputations are being attacked with no
knowledge—and yet philosophers ranking departments is a less charged,
but no less potent, version of the same exercise. “Knowledge” of other
departments is largely limited to knowledge of publications; where it’s
more nuanced (say by talking with colleagues at conferences, interview-
ing graduate students for positions) is surely analogous to the kind of
conversational charge the What It’s Like blog gets. Indeed, this is the
case that Zachary Ernst makes in his critique of the Gourmet Report’s
methodology. But the methodology of Leiter’s own blog is open to the
same charges he levels at the Pluralist Guide. Leiter himself is fiercely
protective of his reputation; he’s quick to defend himself on his blog
against accusations of bullying. He’s equally quick to deny what hap-
pens on his blogs as gossip—his one comment on a flattering portrayal of
him in a Boston Globe article about is to challenge the paper’s description
of another of his websites as a source for gossip about the law profes-
sion (Bennett 2008). Leiter asserts that “professional news (not rumor)
is not gossip,” which implies that his blogs are simply reportage, neutral
description. Leiter repeats the conventional definition of gossip as per-
sonal only, usually sensational (Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports 2008).
And yet, Leiter’s own eminently sensible advice to students considering
offers from multiple PhD programs is, in essence, to get the gossip: he
encourages students to talk to current students from the PhD programs
to find out about “types” of problems (which are all problem faculty—
absent, nasty, sexist, factionalized). Indeed, Leiter emphasizes the ways in
which talk with students elicits relevant information that one doesn’t find
in more official ways, like via departmental websites or program admin-
istrators. Off-the-record talk between peers has its place. While keepings
things anonymous, he repeatedly introduces his accounts of very specific
issues in unnamed departments with comments like “I heard a story”
(Leiter Reports, “Deciding Between Admissions Offers”). His reports
of thirdhand stories are apparently prima facie reliable (and, because
anonymous, legally protected); this suggests that the problem with the
Pluralist’s Guide is less the fact that it traffics in gossip than that it names
names (of programs, if not individuals).
The Leiter blog’s response, endlessly, to the problem of underrepresen-

tation and sexist treatment of women in philosophy, is to call for the APA
to study the problem (Leiter Reports, October 14, 2009b [comment 34];
October 18, 2009c; July 13, 2011a). In addition to the obvious futility of
this suggestion (given the APA’s track record of inaction for the preceding
four decades), Leiter’s call comes at the very same time that he is justly
excoriating the organization for its inability to manage its website or con-
ferences with even minimal competence (Leiter Reports, August 3, 2011f;
September 5, 2011i; November 3, 2011j). An organization that cannot be
trusted to manage basic administrative tasks is surely not up to the politi-
cally risky and sensitive job of addressing systematic and pervasive political
injustice in the profession it represents.
The consistent responses to the Pluralist’s Guide demanding publicity
(public studies, uncritically posting statements from contented graduate
students at one of the criticized programs) are part of the problem here. If
gossip teaches us nothing else, it demonstrates that sometimes, what peo-
ple say on the record can be crucially false or at least misleading, and that
sometimes, off-the-record comments can be important as well as credible.
(Obviously, the reverse is true as well—one does not want to give uncriti-
cal credence to gossip, just as one doesn’t want to give uncritical credence
to a public authority making a claim simply because they do so publicly.)
Studies of rumor and gossip in the business world treat rumor and gossip
as things to be managed or controlled; and yet curiously, one of the few
studies that actually tracked the accuracy of some business rumors dem-
onstrates that a company’s rumor mill can be a more reliable disseminator
of truth than its vice presidents (Zener 1991: 133–134, 211, 219, 200).
But rather than consider the possibility that the pervasive gossip about
sexism in philosophy departments might affect all departments, includ-
ing the top-ranked ones, the online discussion of the competing ratings
descend into scholastics. There is regular questioning whether or not it’s a
problem per se that women are so vastly underrepresented in philosophy.
Indeed, several commentators explicitly note that the problem of sexism
in philosophy should be differentiated from the status of feminist philoso-
phy. However, not conflating the two issues is different from recognizing
that there is probably some relationship between the underrepresentation
of women and the relative absence and low status of feminist philosophy
in major conferences and journals. But of course, if those numbers are
placed against the context of the What It’s Like blog, some obvious causal
92 K. ADKINS
connections suggest themselves. Women are underrepresented in philos-

ophy; they are underrepresented because many people in the discipline
are hostile to women; and this underrepresentation has some disciplinary
effects other than the discrimination itself. To be explicit, some recent
research demonstrates that “intuitions,” the gold standard of analytic phi-
losophy, are deeply gendered; therefore, we attribute greater “common
sense” truth value to beliefs more commonly held by men than to those by
women (Buckwalter and Stich 2014: 313–322). This suggests that there
is deep epistemic bias in philosophy, analogous to the kind of moral-scale
bias Carol Gilligan documented in her work.
What the counter-response to the Pluralist’s Guide seems to miss is the
necessity of anonymity for the women who contribute to What It Is Like.
Anonymity provides important cover to permit someone to say something
critical about people who have largely unchallenged institutional power.
One of the intrinsic problems with the sort of climate surveys promoted
by Leiter is that they could only be useful in aggregate—PhD programs in
philosophy are small enough that any kind of visible or specific criticism,
even if anonymous, would be easily traceable back to a highly vulner-
able party. And if What It Is Like tells us anything, it is that the problems
women are facing in philosophy are widespread. Indeed, one of the many
ironies in this situation is that Linda Alcoff, one of the three main authors
of the Pluralist’s Guide, herself did a climate survey of exactly the kind
called for on the Leiter blog, almost two decades prior; she noted that
the survey’s conclusions about institutionalized sexism in the department
were met with a pitched critique of the survey’s methodology, and resis-
tance to any broader change (2003: 6).
By contrast, the very specific zeroing in on Alcoff on Leiter’s blog is
highly problematic. There were three principal authors of the Pluralist’s
Guide—Alcoff, William Wilkerson, and Paul Taylor—and yet the criticism
on Leiter’s blog in particular focuses only on Alcoff. She, and she alone,
is accused of “staggering” dishonesty (August 15). At one point, Leiter
went so far as to run a poll asking readers whether or not Alcoff should
resign as incoming president of the Eastern division of the APA (Leiter
Reports, August 18, 2011h). Naturally, the irony here is sharp—had Leiter
been successful in forcing Alcoff’s resignation, his publicly stated desire
for more APA action on the issue of underrepresentation would likely
have been even less addressed by the APA, for whomever would follow
Alcoff into the post would surely be disinclined to touch such a politically
hot subject.
4.4 The Power of Invisible Gossip

Given that the real subject of debate in these two conflicts is disciplinary
boundaries, what do we count as legitimate political science or philosophy
research? Who are the real (authoritative and credible) political scientists
or philosophers?—what’s striking is how relatively quickly and uncontro-
versially the Perestroika conflict attained some concrete, if modest, gains,
and how equally immediately the Pluralist’s Guide conflict produced only
resistance. Why is that, and what might we learn about institutional gossip
from this difference? Sidney Tarrow attributes the relative success of the
Perestroika movement to the fact that its controversy was always fractal in
nature—there was no single grand cleavage in the discipline that was crys-
tallized (so no easy divisions into majority/minority camps, where minor-
ity voices could simply be delegitimized from the outset [2008: 514]).
And yet this cannot be the real, or at least the full, story. In the first
place, the methodological division largely maps onto the demographic
division, in both disciplines; even though political science is noticeably
more diverse, at least in gender, than philosophy, the diverse folks are
much more represented in the delegitimated subdisciplines of political
science. Secondly, the same relationship of divisional and demographic
conflict is present in the Pluralist’s Guide controversy as in the Perestroika
controversy. Therefore, the establishment of a gossip narrative provides an
alternative read.
The differences in the responses to institutional gossip in these two
cases reflects the status difference in gossip. Particularly when we com-
pare the Perestroika case to the Pluralist’s Guide case, what we observe
is the way in which gossip by the empowered doesn’t count as such—it’s
simply ignored or erased. This tendency (only to call something gossip
or rumor when it’s done by the powerless) has a long trajectory: Patricia
Turner’s case studies of rumors in African-American communities has evi-
dence of this (1993: 99, 156). Even the first serious scholar of gossip,
Max Gluckman, differentiates gossipy discussions that inform academics
when they hire colleagues or award grant money as not gossip, because
it is not “idle chatter” (1968: 33). But this, of course, is a self-serving
distinction, particularly since Gluckman’s own papers on gossip in anthro-
pological work demonstrate that gossip is crucially utilitarian: one cannot
get a read on a community, know the social rules of the community, or
where one fits, without knowing the gossip (1963: 309). By contrast, in
the Perestroika controversy, even though the initial email is bitter and
94 K. ADKINS
informal in tone, its substance was immediately registered by legitimate

and senior people within the profession. Indeed, the open letter signed
by 150 political scientists largely embraces the particular questions Mr.
Perestroika raises, but makes them general and impersonal in tone—no
name-calling, no polemics, no insinuations of Orwellian power dynamics.
The gossip was made public, more generic, and authored. More strikingly,
faculty who were relatively high up in the political science power structure
not only endorsed the Perestroika call for change but also did so by explic-
itly asking for public investigations (Diamond 2002).
Finally, the interrelatedness of the two sets of questions—the demo-
graphic concerns with who does political science, and the disciplinary
questions of what kinds of political science gets published in the most
prestigious journals—were simultaneously recognized. The gossip could
have become and stayed personal (attacking the people at the top of
APSA), but in fact the public conversation became widely and explicitly
institutional in nature. And indeed, even the personal gossip in the ini-
tial blasts of Perestroikan anger was always safely institutional in charac-
ter; there were no suggestions of silent toleration of sexual harassment in
the Perestroikan critique. In this, the Perestroikan gossip was always less
explosive in nature. In short, the crucial move in the Perestroika case was
an early, and shared, maintenance of focus on the institutional gossip. The
gossip began as both personal and institutional, but quickly shifted to a
public conversation about institutional norms and practices. This is what
allowed for change.
By contrast, the Pluralist’s Guide conflict actually narrowed in several
ways. First, the two sets of questions raised by the Guide were immediately
separated by the critics. The long-standing and undeniable demographic
issue was acknowledged (to do otherwise would be impossible), but also
still professed to be mysterious in its cause (widespread, institutional sex-
ism apparently not being on the table for philosophical discussion). The
disciplinary questions (the persistent minimizing of feminist philosophy,
the sexist assumptions that all and only women do feminist philosophy)
were quickly ruled out as irrelevant. Lots of feminist philosophy was just
pronounced bad, and the status of feminist philosophy apparently has no
relationship to the persistent lack of welcome for women in the discipline.
The debate also narrowed from gossip about the discipline, to an argu-
ment about people, or more precisely, two people. The climate section
of the Pluralist’s Guide focused so narrowly on just a few suspect depart-
ments (three of the top four Leiter programs, as well as one lesser-ranked
school, were named as places inhospitable to women), that the broader

issues of climate in the profession were left unaddressed. This tight focus
also clearly invited defensiveness from Leiter Reports, as it suggested that
his most highly ranked departments were particularly inhospitable to
women. But more crucially, the fact that only three philosophers came
forth as publicly responsible for the Pluralist’s Guide (despite its not-small
advisory board) allowed critics like Leiter to paint the Pluralist’s Guide as a
personal quest for revenge from disaffected “party-line Continental” phi-
losophers, while simultaneously advocating the need for broader climate
assessments. A group of feminist philosophers issued a statement of sup-
port for the Pluralist’s Guide (“Statement About the Pluralists’ Guide”) in
August, but it got little public traction. Still later (in October 2011) there
was a public statement of support for the Pluralist’s Guide from one of the
organizations within philosophy (SPEP), but this was far too little, far too
late—the narrative had already solidified. The Pluralist’s Guide narrative
got redescribed as both a conflict simply between “good” and “bad” phi-
losophy departments (on both sides, thus setting up a cozy straw man—
who’s going to defend badness?) and a personal grudge match (also on
both sides—defenders of the Pluralist’s Guide stressed Leiter’s bullying
and excessive invective around the Guide). This difference in emphasis
allowed philosophers to focus their criticism on a single person, and thus,
reduce bigger questions of institutional practice to critique of a single
person. In short, they could gossip about Linda Alcoff or Brian Leiter,
depending on their alliance, while calling it criticism of methodology. The
story became about the Gourmet Report (which is ultimately Brian Leiter)
and its lone critic (who of course was not alone in her work, but singled
out for highly public criticism).
It’s impossible to ignore the gendered element of gossip in these two
stories. As we saw in Chap. 2, gossip has been tied to women, and as such,
taken on the most negative aspects of stereotypes of femininity: irrational,
disorderly, emotional, malicious, petty. In the Perestroika case, the gossip
was more initially anonymous, then immediately and publicly claimed by
women and men equally. In particular, Larry Diamond’s (as an interna-
tionally recognized political scientist) public acknowledgment of the exis-
tence and validity of graduate student gossip, legitimated informal news
networks as not purely gendered. By contrast, in the Pluralist’s Guide
case, the critical gossip started and stayed a women’s story, told almost
entirely by women. The critics were themselves primarily men. The endless
criticism of gossip as idle women’s talk is played out here: the Perestroika
96 K. ADKINS
narrative lost its tinge of gossip in part by losing its gendered status; the
Pluralist’s Guide story stayed the talk of women. Fricker’s analysis of epis-
temic injustice is again helpful. Given the fact that systematic dismissal
or undermining of testimony is so often along lines of social authority
(where those being dismissed are in socially subaltern positions), she sug-
gests that those aspiring to what she describes as “testimonial responsibil-
ity” must hold “reflexive critical social awareness” (91). That is to say,
those who are in powerful social positions should consider to what extent
their social identity is influencing their decisions about who is reliable and
trustworthy. The particular lack of consideration of their own privileged
social positions from the commentators on the Leiter blog is especially
striking. The difference in outcomes between these two cases suggests
that, no matter how much relatively public evidence or acknowledgment
of broad truth behind institutional gossip, its epistemic status is unfor-
tunately fragile and tentative. Indeed, the current state of both conflicts
demonstrates the challenges of genuine communication across epistemic
and political gaps.
To begin with Perestroika, while institutional change was seemingly
quickly and relatively uncontroversially instituted, ten years on, some sym-
pathizers with the Perestroikan movement are skeptical about its ultimate
success. Brian Caterino captures the concern in a recent symposium in
PS: Political Science and Politics. He notes that the Perestroikan leader-
ship’s focus on structural changes at the top (particularly in changing
elections and candidates for national office) perpetuated the idea of an
elite-driven profession (to win national elections, candidates had to be
from elite universities). This elides “notions of disciplinary power and
authority” (753), or the more basic methodological concerns that were at
the heart of the Perestroikan protest. The barbed comments about “Vee”
and the “Brahmins” weren’t merely about institutions, and at any rate,
Caterino implies, the Perestroikans have replaced one coterie of elites for
another. In their discussion of Perestroika’s inattention to teaching loads,
Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Rogers Smith provide support for this con-
cern. They note that the top journals still predominantly publish articles
from scholars at institutions with PhD graduate programs (though utiliz-
ing blind review), and suggest that the disparity in teaching loads between
R-1 programs, BA/MA institutions (to say nothing of the load of faculty
at community colleges, or those working as adjuncts) perpetuates a lack
of representation in the discipline (751–752). Gregory Kasza’s analysis of
journal submissions (2010) indicates a modest increase in m ethodological
diversity at the discipline’s top journals, but calls for multiple editors at
journals, to increase openness to diversity in style. Henry Farrell and
Martha Finnemore, in arguing that quantitative training is still paramount
in graduate education and journal submission for one of the field’s subdis-
ciplines, go further and cite “ubiquity of gossip among international schol-
ars” to substantiate their claim that there still exists bias against qualitative
research in international political economy (2009: 63). This article has the
additional benefit of reminding us of the omnipresence of gossip; while it
may peak at crisis points in which trust in official honesty is lacking, it never
goes away, and in fact is relied upon by scholars as context and comparison
for their work. Some scholars note that as of 2013, a leading political sci-
ence journal (Comparative Political Studies) still refused per stated policy
to accept articles that focus on a case study, as it is considered unscientific
(Schram, Flyvbjerg and Landman 363, footnote 10). Stephen Yoder and
Brittany Bramlett (2011) suggest that the lack of transparency in sub-
mission data—most journals don’t publicize submission data, turnaround
time, and so on—contributes to the weak growth in methodological diver-
sity, and that submission sunlight might help open methodological doors.
None of this, of course, is to say that the Perestroika protests had no
effect; they clearly had immediate effect, and there’s evidence of some
more decisive change (such as journal diversity and leadership changes)
that could develop in future. But Medina’s observations about the inevi-
table partiality and incompleteness of epistemic solidarity are evocative;
this incident reflects the ways in which even epistemically liberatory move-
ments function by adapting themselves to the terms and norms of the
conventional world. Even when it is received, recognized, and attended
to, the progressive power of gossip is often attenuated.
The epilogue of l’affaire Leiter is even more indicative of this attenua-
tion. The APA changed leadership, hiring a non-philosopher (Amy Ferrer)
as executive director in August 2012. This appeared to be directly moti-
vated less by criticisms around a sexist profession than widespread criticism
of technological and administrative incompetence; the APA’s website and
administration of its national conferences were almost uniformly belittled
across the profession as hopelessly technologically outdated and unhelp-
ful. And indeed, Ms. Ferrer’s background in public policy and nonprofit
management paid almost immediate administrative gains; within a year she
greatly improved the appearance and functionality of the APA website, as
well as the functioning of the conferences. However, she also appeared to
be paying attention to the debates about the representation of rankings; in
98 K. ADKINS
2013, the APA revived its guide to graduate programs, which had ceased
publication in 2000. While still resisting a ranking system, their systematic
collection and dissemination of a host of information about PhD and MA
programs in philosophy (including job placement for graduates, which
had been absent from the Gourmet Report), may, for once and for all,
render privately produced ranking systems obsolete.
But ultimately, what brought this conflict to what may prove to be a more
decisive point was once again a conflict about personalities. A recent and
substantive criticism of the Gourmet Report, by Carolyn Dicey Jennings,
consisted simply of an attempt to collect job placement data for graduates
of PhD programs. In her subsequent analysis (2014), Dicey Jennings noted
that when placement data was considered, some lower-ranked departments
actually performed better than some of the top-ranked Leiter schools. Leiter
responded quickly and aggressively, describing the rankings as “nonsense”
and “pernicious.” He stated that he removed his additional description
of Dicey Jennings that questioned her intelligence “as a courtesy to her”
(implying nothing about its merits or lack thereof; Leiter Reports, “More
Nonsense Rankings”).6 Simultaneously, Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins posted on
her blog a commitment to high professional standards of conduct, as well
as to challenging instances of unprofessional or uncollegial behavior, par-
ticularly toward those junior to her in the profession. Leiter interpreted this
commitment, in which no philosopher was named, to be a rebuke of his
behavior. His response, an email with a subject head responding to what he
described as her “threats,” led to Jenkins retreating from work and public
participation in the profession (“September Statement”). In September
2014, a small group of philosophers released a statement resigning from
any future participation in or support of the Gourmet Report as long as it
was under Leiter’s leadership (“September Statement”). The Statement,
initially signed by 21 philosophers, was within one month co-signed by
a total of over 624 philosophers (“September Statement”). In addition,
some online catalogs appeared of Leiter’s past patterns of truculent behav-
ior toward other philosophers, frequently more junior philosophers, often
women (“Statement of Concern,” Johnson, Philosophy Adjunct). Over half
(30 of 56) of the advisory board of the PGR sent a common letter to Leiter
requesting he resign from the editorship (“On the Advisory Board Letters
and Leiter’s Response”). The conflict, as with Perestroika, made national
news; the Chronicle of Higher Education covered the debate (Schmidt).
This ultimately led to Leiter choosing a co-editor (Berit Brogaard of the
University of Miami) and announcing that after the 2014–2015 report he
would step down as editor, but continue to serve on the Advisory Board
(Leiter Reports, October 10, 2014b).
There are a few different conclusions to be drawn from this episode.
On the surface, it would appear to bring some parity with the Perestroika
case; the pace of the response to the initial conflict, and its apparent accep-
tance by many in the profession, is almost a match for the Perestroika
conflict. However, it is in fact a much more personal (and hence, I would
contend, unsatisfactory) resolution. Both instances of academic institu-
tional gossip were always already institutional as much as if not more than
personal—they were about institutional norms and epistemic conventions,
as much as the (possibly poisonous) personalities at the top of their respec-
tive professions. The political scientists (possibly because they have famil-
iarity with the study of hegemony, and could recognize it when it was
pointed out to them, however intemperately) were able to address the
institutional challenges virtually from its inception, and made institutional
changes. By contrast, there have been no prominent public discussions of
the state of the philosophy profession. Indeed, the entire tenor of the most
recent discussions of Leiter has remained relentlessly, myopically, personal
in nature. The September Statement itself focuses exclusively on Leiter’s
behavior and tone in emails. One discussion on NewAPPS explicitly is
headlined, “This is not about the PGR,” and works assiduously to separate
evidence of Leiter’s behavior toward colleagues from what is described as a
“quibble” about the methodology of the PGR (Dutilh Novaes).
Leiter’s own response toggles back and forth between defensiveness
(he regularly describes the campaign against him as “cyber-bullying” or a
“cyber-smear”) as well as defending the PGR as a valuable service for the
profession. His online poll asking whether or not the PGR should con-
tinue explicitly asks whether or not the PGR itself should continue, not
whether or not he should resign from its management. In short, he reads
the situation as personal, and conflates the PGR with his participation in
it. There is good reason for this conflation. Much of his intemperate tone
in his emails isn’t simply about personalities, but about departments and
their quality. His description of one department as a “shit department,”
for instance, can hardly be described simply as the strong language of a
New Yorker, as Leiter would have it. It is the dismissal of professionals
as competent, by the person who has appointed himself as the manager
of professional judgments of philosophical competence. Even the more
strictly personal or individual slams, such as challenging a single profes-
sor’s competence, are also by extension also professional. Indeed, the very
100 K. ADKINS
nature of the PGR, which values graduate departments entirely by the

research quality of their faculty (and Leiter’s yearly lists of which faculty
are moving where, with occasional commentary as to how likely the move
will affect the reputation and ranking of the respective programs) is part
and parcel of a star system of philosophy.
In other words, personal slams can be simultaneously political and pro-
fessional. What gossip as a mode of conversation reveals is the way in
which these domains (personal and professional, private and public) are
always already overlapping. Institutional gossip happens because we do
not, in fact, neatly divorce institutions from their persons. When a particu-
lar institution (the PGR) is so entirely attached to a single person, despite
ostensive structure and protests to the contrary, there is good reason for
the gossip to exist as both personal and professional at once. But in a case
such as this highlights why the counter-narrative of the unofficial gossip
has to be so carefully worded. Leiter/PGR critics are explicitly and relent-
lessly mild in their wording. Van Camp explicitly aims her suggestions not
at the PGR, but at graduate students selecting programs. She begins by
describing the PGR approvingly as a “bible” of graduate programs. Dicey
Jennings explicitly notes that she is collecting placement data as an exer-
cise only, and not aiming it to undermine the authority of the PGR. Their
restraint, by contrast, is not matched by their critics, or by Leiter himself
(who has described critics, if he is not threatening to sue them, with such
labels as “deranged,” “crazy,” “sanctimonious arsehole,” “disgrace to the
profession,” or “noxious,” in addition to those we have seen previously).
The rhetorical restraint exercised by PGR critics, and the rhetorical
excess indulged in by Leiter, makes manifest what John Stuart Mill says
in On Liberty, about the dangers of legal limits to speech. He notes that,
if we make only intemperate or abusive speech illegal, legal remedies will
only be recognized and pursued by those with conventionally recognized
viewpoints against the minority. Those whose viewpoints are unpopular
must use “studied moderation of language” even to get a hearing, whereas
those whose views are already widely accepted can employ “unmeasured
vituperation” (62). It’s also important to recognize that Mill, rightly,
stresses the connection between formal and informal restrictions on
speech. His entire argument for a minimalist state is premised upon the
fact that social restrictions, because they are harder to limit and track, are
more insidious and thus pervasive than formal limits (2008: 7).7 In short,
Mill is aware of the fact that drawing a clean legal principle for open and
free speech doesn’t solve one’s speech problems; it merely solves one’s
legal problems with speech. What he doesn’t address is how responsible,

and irresponsible, uses of speech ought to be treated in the social sphere
(other than a basic call for expressed outrage at abuses of speech [70]).
Social epistemology demonstrates the ways in which speech can be used,
sometimes in seemingly small ways, to undermine viewpoints and speak-
ers who are already under threat. A final academic episode demonstrates
this tension aptly. Students of color at universities across the United States
protested in the fall of 2015 about systemic racism on their campuses.
(Motivating instances ranged from university structure—colleges and build-
ings named for slaveowners, persistent absence or low numbers of faculty of
color or a curriculum that reflected diversity—to specific personal instances
of racism on campus.) The protests at Yale University, in particular, drew
national attention. While several events were mentioned as leading up to
the student protests, a single email from a residence hall faculty member
challenging an administrative request for students to be thoughtful in their
Halloween costumes became the focus of national attention and debate.
The crux of the national criticism was that the protesting students were
immature and wanting to be coddled instead of educated (Friedersdorf is a
representative example). In particular, one cell phone video of a confronta-
tion between a house master and students in which several students shouted
down the house master and called for his firing was criticized extensively
as the students’ violating or abusing the very free speech they were enjoy-
ing. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kate Manne and Jason
Stanley made an argument that this criticism missed some relevant context.
They explicitly noted that the student concerns with the master (Nicholas
Christakis) weren’t simply in response to the Halloween email, but a pattern
of behavior from the house master and his wife (Erika Christakis, associate
house master and lecturer in child development, who authored the email).8
The Halloween email was less a direct cause, by Manne and Stanley’s analy-
sis, than a last straw. They stressed that the house master and his wife, in
focusing only on issues around freedom of speech, acted to exclude the stu-
dents. In other words, reducing arguments over racism to arguments over
free speech (may students say or wear something offensive) tacitly gives
permission for offense to continue unchecked and unchallenged, particu-
larly when a house master with administrative authority names freedom of
speech and academic freedom as the sole relevant principles. Indeed, while
Christakis’ email claims a desire not to “trivialize genuine concerns” about
representation and the value of respect in a single paragraph, the series of
rhetorical questions that then follows (“is there no room anymore for a
102 K. ADKINS
child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… or offensive?” “have

we lost faith in young people’s capacity… to ignore or reject things that
trouble you?” “what does this debate about Halloween costumes say about
our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment?”) pretty clearly
indicates values prioritization (Christakis).
While the email’s other focus is concern over administrative fiat and
direction over speech (in this way clearly echoing the kinds of concerns
raised by Mill in On Liberty), the most pointed criticism is directed less to
administrative moves than to the students and their motives. Its subject
header, “Dressing Yourselves,” is hardly subtle in its condescension. Indeed,
her implied analogies between a small blond child’s dressing as Mulan and
some of the contested costumes worn at Yale (incorporating blackface, and
aggressive stereotypes of urban blackness) suggests a complete disregard of
specific context and nuance in favor of a principle. Because of a commitment
to legal freedom of speech, there is no meaningful space, value, or priority
for a discussion of the damage that can and has been done by offensive use
of freedom of speech. While Christakis takes pains to urge the students to
speak up to each other and challenge offense when they see it, nowhere does
the email recognize or legitimize the ways in which that might be difficult
in the face of persistent campus racism. The focus on resistance to formal
restrictions and policies would be more understandable were the original
letter from Yale administrators written as a student conduct policy, instead
of merely an advisory inviting students to ask questions about the costumes
they choose, and including resources so students could educate themselves
on, for instance, the history of blackface (Email from the Intercultural
Affairs Committee). Both Christakis’ email and Freidersdorf’s analysis
suggest a more insidious villain here of implicit (and bloated) administra-
tive micromanagement of students. But both the mild, policy-free content
of the original email and its authorship suggests quite the contrary. It is
authored by the “Intercultural Affairs Committee” of 13 individuals, who
work in a disparate array of offices (such as Campus Ministry, as well as
Diversity offices). Even the most casual student of college administration
knows that the fiat power of committees such as these is modest; they are
as a rule voluntary, advisory, sometimes created merely to appease previous
rounds of public criticism, and hence, all too often ignorable.
In their analysis of the criticism of the student protests, Manne and
Stanley seek not to devalue a concern for freedom of speech, but to note
that we cry censorship and silencing asymmetrically, and most enthusiasti-
cally when speech is used to voice unpopular or minority positions. More
crucially for our consideration of social versus legal speech, they focused
on how we interpret and respond to speech when we ignore the context
of the speaker; we interpret critical speech coming from those lower in
hierarchies as “insubordination, defiance, or insolence,” whereas the view
from the top is “business as usual.” Quick impatience is challenged here;
“we often tune into the action only when people have reached a breaking
point… ignoring the history of the crescendo” (B4-B5). The piece is less a
legal argument than a social invitation for us to listen carefully to the angry
speech from the students (yes, even when the students shout obscenities),
to ask questions, to find out what we may be missing. The oft-repeated
truism that “the solution to offensive speech is more speech” is their
implicit point, with the crucial modifier that the more speech should pri-
oritize listening to people who are claiming to be regularly demeaned and
silenced. Their position about angry speech—it is a signal that there’s
more to the story than what is being reported—is analogous to how gos-
sip is often utilized. We turn to it because we’re not figuring out what we
need to by other, more conventional means.
The piece drew critical response, particularly from Brian Leiter (November
15, 2015b). Leiter’s main point is that Manne and Stanley obscure what
are legitimate free-speech issues in the piece, by remaining silent on what,
to him, is transparently illegitimate (the students calling for the firing of the
house master and his spouse, a lecturer at Yale). Indeed, Leiter takes pains
to dismiss the contextual argument out of hand as irrelevant; “sometimes
‘sounding reasonable can be a luxury,’ but not at a university: it’s how the
whole place works.” Perhaps in part because this dispute took place at a
well-funded Ivy League University, Leiter (along with Friedersdorf) seems
particularly irked that students would dare to challenge their treatment.
Leiter takes pains to note that students of color at Ivy League institutions
“enjoy unprecedented attention and solicitude”; in an odd non sequitur,
Friedersdorf lists all the luxurious amenities of the residence hall in which
the conflict took place, as an indication of how galling the protests are (as
if one cannot experience injustice or discrimination when one lives in a
dormitory equipped with a grand piano). Leiter’s blog piece is marked with
his trademark acerbity; he describes Manne and Stanley’s piece as a “white-
wash,” and dismisses the possibility of racist speech and action as violent.
His follow-up response to critics (November 16, 2015) is even sharper; he
calls one philosopher “deranged” and “not very smart,” refers to those in
agreement with Stanley and Manne as “cattle” or members of the “herd,”
and describes Jason Stanley as helping to generate a “climate of fear.”9
104 K. ADKINS
The core of this dispute is actually pretty straightforward; none of the

participants is challenging the validity or primacy of free speech. What
they are disagreeing about is whether or not social constraints matter in
affecting who speaks, when, and whether or not speakers actually get a
fair hearing—indeed, it’s fair to say that the thrust of Manne and Stanley’s
piece is really about our moral obligations to listen to speech that annoys
us. It’s certainly understandable for a free-speech absolutist position like
that of the Christakises, Leiter, or Freidersdorf to get defended, and vig-
orously. As Leiter rightly notes, that is indeed how the academy works.
But the message of the original administrative email—asking students to
contemplate their own values and practices, and to inform themselves of
history in the process—is also how the academy works; these goals are
not and should not be opposed. The goal of the academy isn’t simply a
discourse free-for-all, but discourse that is thoughtful, informed, collegial,
and ideally, dialogical. These values work in tandem in the academy, and
by extension, in public discourse. While it’s perhaps unsurprising that a
free-speech defense ignores the ways in which preconditions like racism
can actually work to limit free speech, the fact that the free-speech defense
is made largely via name-calling is distressing. As Jason Stanley notes in
How Propaganda Works (2015), democratic discourse can be undermined
by “the very vocabulary of liberalism” (51). One might hope that people
would be able to be thoughtful and collegial about the possibility and
extent to which racist assumptions can persist, and limit or undermine
speech. But diminishing the credibility of those who raise the position, not
by challenging the specifics of their view but by reducing them to crazy
and unintelligent cattle, marks off the objection as unworthy. In other
words, this dispute isn’t simply about name-calling, but name-calling as a
device that works to silence alternative viewpoints.
It’s worth ending on this note, as it emphasizes why the Perestroika
scandal demonstrates good things about the state of political science in
the Anglophone world, and the Pluralist’s Guide debate represents more
disappointing realities of the Anglophone world of philosophy. Once the
Perestroika email was released, debate began almost immediately (both for-
mally and informally), and continued for the next 15 years. The debate has
always been lively and full of discord: there is a distinct lack of unanimity
on the merits of the Perestroikan position, and the efficacy of the reforms.
But what’s striking, in the end, is how generally civil the entire discussion
has been. Even the sharpest critics of the Perestroikan position don’t sug-
gest that even raising the questions is damaging to the profession or the
discipline, or that counting who gets jobs or published in which journals

is nonsense. While it’s true that the Perestroikan gossip was on a whole
less personally pointed than the PGR gossip and thus safer, there were still
personal critiques and barbs contained within the Perestroikan gossip, and
yet the political scientists, on the whole, got down to the work of collective
self-scrutiny and self-regulation. The very fact that so much of the philo-
sophical discussion has been drearily meta—whether or not it’s even worth
it, or sensible, to have the discussion—speaks poorly of what is widely seen
as a marker of a profession (its practitioners’ ability to self-regulate). This
is largely due, I contend, to the dominance of invisible gossip in the philo-
sophical debate, and perhaps in the profession. The invisibility of gossip,
and its working undercover to undermine already marginalized viewpoints,
suggests some unfortunate limits in the extent to which it can work to
breach epistemic gaps. Professional gossip is often about serious issues in
the profession, as we’ve seen. The conversation can be expanded, by rec-
ognizing the existence of the gossip, inviting people in, and listening to
uncomfortable viewpoints. By contrast, it can be constricted, by demon-
izing the gossip and the gossipers as irresponsible and dangerous. The fact
that, in at least one case, meaningful professional debates were minimized
as trivial gossip through the venue of invisible gossip is particularly hard to
swallow. Making invisible gossip visible (calling it such and recognizing the
way in which the empowered are using a clandestine tactic they decry and
demean when it is used by those with whom they differ) is a crucial step in
making the epistemic playing ground more level.
Notes
1. For some representative examples, Kurland and Pelled (2000) artic-
ulate a model for institutional gossip. Van Iterson and Clegg (2008)
apply these ideas to a case study.
2. Refreshingly, Maryann Ayim (1994) is one of the gossip scholars
who, while defining gossip as personal in subject, still considers aca-
demic gossip as fair game; she includes in a long list of gossip subjects
the question of someone’s fitness for chairing a department based
on their temperament (92).
3. I think there is good evidence to extend Wickham’s observation to
other institutions; writing a history of the US Congress, or a Fortune
500 company, or other institutions would be meager and incom-
plete if one were limiting oneself to official records.
106 K. ADKINS
4. For a direct example of the precariousness of academic gossip, see

the case of Professor Ekow Hayford, who was fired from Stillman
College (Alabama) in 2008 for “malicious gossip,” which appar-
ently took the form of asking questions about the president’s late-
ness in issuing faculty contracts. The AAUP’s report is instructive.
5. Data on philosophers of color is even more stark; recent analysis of
NSF surveys of earned doctorates indicates percentages from 1.9 %
(black or African American) to 6.3 % (Hispanic or Latino), with a
total percentage of philosophers of color for 2010–2014 at under
15 % of the total group of earned PhDs in that period (Schwitzgebel).
This number is of earned PhDs only, not of people holding tenure-
track jobs.
6. A more recent critique of the methodology of the Gourmet Report
by Brian Bruya (2015) claims several paths of bias in methodology,
but has met with criticism of its own methodology.
7. Indeed, Mill himself so chafed at being the object of London gossip
for his relationship with fellow writer Harriet Taylor that he effec-
tively withdrew from public life for several decades. It is this subtext
that informs On Liberty, which is as much an argument for a vigor-
ous and pluralist social sphere as it is a political argument for limited
government.
8. Indeed, in a later discussion on Daily Nous, Stanley, a Yale professor,
made explicit that student rumors gave context to his concern about
the bigger picture that was being missed in the press coverage. See
Lebron.
9. This clash is interesting, not least because Stanley and Leiter had for
over a decade enjoyed a highly collegial relationship. Stanley served
on the PGR Advisory Board and occasionally contributed to Leiter’s
blog. Leiter regularly promoted Stanley’s scholarship, and referred
to cordial conversations between them going back as far as 2005 and
as recently as June of 2015. However, Stanley was one of four
Advisory Board members who drafted a letter to Leiter asking him
to resign from the Gourmet Report (which then got signatures from
over half the Advisory Board members), and publicized this (see
Johnson). It’s striking that since then, Stanley has come under regu-
lar criticism from Leiter (including a dismissive review of his latest
book, How Propaganda Works).
CHAPTER 5
Rumors Help the Enemy! Gossip in Politics
This chapter considers some episodes of political gossip. While many

political memoirs and histories treat it as a truism that gossip is a running
backstory in politics, political gossip is rarely seriously examined, and in
particular, in its relationship to “official” or sanitized news and discussion.
Such an examination is long overdue. Classic political theory often treats
public space as idealized in its rationality (pace Rawls); however, I want
to look at the specific ways in which gossip and rumor demonstrate how
off-the-record gossip can shift (either to narrow or to expand) our sense
of the politically possible. Gossip, as intimate, evaluative talk originating in
relationships of trust, operates in several capacities. It reveals fractures or
conflicts between viewpoints, and it often helps us mediate or make sense
of differences or tensions in overlapping communities of interest. In the
previous chapter, we noted the ways in which academic gossip, as a pri-
mary example of institutional gossip, works artificially to narrow the range
of scholarship that is seen as legitimate, as well as to keep the demograph-
ics of the disciplines of philosophy and political science unreflective of the
larger university population. José Medina’s claim that epistemic injustice
is simultaneously an ethical and political problem might seem only tenu-
ously demonstrated to those who are skeptical of the practical effect of
the academy, who believe that academic lines of pursuit and inquiry are
minimally connected to “real-world” political problems. However, when
the kinds of strategies and power moves we saw in the world of academics

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47840-1_5
108 K. ADKINS
are present in the world of electoral politics, we have a straightforward

demonstration of the way in which gossip is present, and working simulta-
neously on epistemic, ethical, and political fronts.
In politics, gossip functions differently for communities in power, as
opposed to those who are disempowered. We saw in the previous chapter
that gossip can be used as a tool to diminish others’ authority and credibil-
ity; what we colloquially call the “backstory” behind official decisions can
make the reasoning clearer (and in the cases of the academic gossip, some-
times reveals the absence of rationality, or the presence of bias). While
casual skepticism toward newspaper accounts of political developments is
common, in this chapter we see the particular hypocrisy of our contempo-
rary attitudes toward gossip. Gossip and rumor are publicly decried and
condemned as sordid, unworthy of our time, and demeaning of our mor-
als, intellect, and culture. Yet underneath, they are relied upon as essential
tools of politics. Indeed, to condemn someone as a gossip is to diminish
him or her politically, recalling and amending W.H. Auden’s amusing line
that the person who repeats gossip, ruins it. It is not merely the repetition
of gossip that ruins it in politics—for repeating good gossip, as we will see,
gives one access and influence in politics and political journalism—but
being openly tagged as a gossip that is ruinous.
But more troublingly, we also see instances of gossip being used, invis-
ibly, as a means of political and epistemic silencing: ideas and credibility
of those who challenged received views get diminished and demolished
via the rumor mill. There’s a particular challenge here, in that the secrecy
of gossip means that the privileged can employ it, without authorship or
authority, to take away credibility, and by extension authority or author-
ship, from others. José Medina argues that “[d]emocracy is not only about
voting but also about talking” (5), stressing that effective politics depends
upon effective communication that reflects divers and diverse perspectives.
Elizabeth Anderson’s concept of “shared reality bias” (2012) illustrates
some of the challenge of effective democratic communication: it requires
people from deeply varying perspectives being able to recognize their
viewpoints as viewpoints; in other words, as ways of selecting and fram-
ing information that necessarily delegitimize some ideas and observations.
When we primarily talk to people who see the world quite similarly to
us, this shared reality bias becomes more problematic; someone who sees
things differently (particularly when the stakes are high) is harder for us to
recognize as an interlocutor. Our own inability to see our ideas as framed
within sets of assumptions affects both our ability to critique ourselves and
RUMORS HELP THE ENEMY! GOSSIP IN POLITICS 109
our ability to engage with others. With this shared reality bias, both the
talking and the decision-making are subsequently diminished. Selective
naming of gossip as gossip (and therefore unreliable, trivial, diminishing),
particularly when it is done by the disempowered, as well as the continu-
ation of invisible gossip by the empowered, perpetuates a double disad-
vantage on full and vigorous political life. Because of the hypocrisy of our
contemporary attitudes toward gossip, I argue, the ability of people in
power to gossip invisibly, and to use gossip as a tool to silence those whose
views do not fit mainstream attitudes, persists. Politics as narrative—
fitting ideas, people, and conflicts into tidy stories—is thus controlled and
contained.
In recent years, journalists and political columnists have excoriated the
presence of scandal in American politics. The first two case studies, of the
Gary Hart and Bill Clinton scandals, will explore the shifting roles and
attitudes around gossip in these scandals, and how these relate to our ideas
about the private and public realms. Exhaustive postmortems of the Gary
Hart scandal (Matt Bai’s All the Truth Is Out [2014]), and the various
scandals of the Clinton presidency (of the many relevant sources, Jeffrey
Toobin’s The Vast Conspiracy [1999] and Jeffrey Rosen’s The Unwanted
Gaze [2000]) have bemoaned a national obsession with gossip—in par-
ticular, prurient gossip about politicians’ sex lives—as a marker for the
decline of journalism, seriousness, and political substance. The Hart scan-
dal, in particular, demonstrates the basic hypocrisy of usage of gossip—the
assumption of its triviality. The Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, in particular,
pushes at the other end of this hypocrisy; it asks us if there is a point
beyond which gossip is not fruitful. Discussions of the Clinton scandal
invariably raise questions around privacy. Because gossip is grounded in
intimacy, and because gossip skips across communities of interest or iden-
tity, Anita Allen’s (2003) concept of accountability as a balance on privacy
can be helpful for us in determining limits on gossip.
These first two case studies are, of course, notorious, and widely writ-
ten about in the press. Part of my interest here is looking at gossip in its
context—as I have argued previously, too often gossip is considered out of
its historical or political context, which forces it into terrain of irrelevance,
trivia, exaggeration, or malice. When we look at these recent scandals and
their coverage contextually, taking both a wide view and a long view reveals
much more congruence than dissension. Examining the scandals in their
immediate political contexts (other simultaneous scandals and political
pressure points) as well as in historical context (political gossip in American
110 K. ADKINS
political history), while demonstrating some relevant changes, in large part

demonstrates the constant appeal of subterranean strategic campaigning.
In particular, journalistic or political distaste for gossip as a source seems
to be highly selective and inconsistent, which further undercuts the crisis
narrative perpetuated by Bai, Rosen, and Toobin. Gossip has been explic-
itly embraced as a political tactic by venerated and disparaged national
American political figures (Thomas Jefferson, Richard Nixon); but more
to the point, it is a constant, if subterranean presence in American politics.
Effective politics often relies upon well-established gossip channels.
Indeed, gossip’s close cousin, anonymous sourcing, is a long-standing
tradition in American political journalism. The value of anonymous
sources, of course, is that they allow political insiders to trade information
without compromising their position or access. But anonymous sourcing
depends greatly on the integrity and the standards of the reporters, and,
more crucially, it is difficult to confirm or verify anonymously sourced
information. Anonymous sourcing actually becomes the story during the
second Iraq War. In other words, when we examine political gossip in
context, it’s hard not to conclude that professional disinclination toward
gossip is directed more at its outing—its evident forming of the story.
The third case study, that of the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame by
the Bush White House, will help us focus on the relationship between
the increasing use of anonymous sourcing, or what we might call official
political gossip, and its extension into direct and targeted uses of gossip as
reputation destruction mechanism. As long as gossip is safely undercover
or behind the scenes, it is a safe and reliable source for political journalists.
And journalists still have invisible influence over the political narrative.
The revelation of gossip as a political tactic makes the power divisions and
full range of political tactics open for public view.
A caveat: this chapter is almost entirely focused on the United States,
and on the last half-century. I chose these case studies because my own
familiarity with both the episodes and the context in which they emerged
made them inviting to analyze. However, I recognize that the single-
country focus clearly limits some of the applicability and scope of the anal-
ysis (not to mention reader interest). For instance, the US Constitution’s
First Amendment, which prohibits government establishment of religion
and governmental intrusion in the press, offers a much stronger legal
defense of critical press and anonymous sourcing than press protections
in some other countries. I would suggest that these limitations are bal-
anced, at least in part, by the strength of examining three instances of
gossip occurring in a single country, relatively closely together—compara-

tive claims about how expectations over gossip and publicity do or don’t
change are easier to see when the cases are both geographically and tem-
porally closely connected.
This is not to say, of course, that there are no distinctions or differences
whatsoever to be drawn in how gossip gets used and abused in politics.
There are differences, and there have been changes—as the chapter on
gossip in the social media age will demonstrate, there are some meaning-
ful changes happening because of technology. But we must be careful not
to make too much out of technological changes. Plato’s Phaedrus features
Socrates bemoaning the rise of writing as representing the fall of knowl-
edge and thinking (275d); humans lazily relying on written records would
lose the prodigious facility for memory that produced, among other things,
the Odyssey and Iliad. It’s important to note that Socrates here connects
the work of memory with the work of thought; writing reduces our brains
to passive transcribers, Socrates contends, merely passing off the image
of the thing for the thing itself. While it’s certainly hard to imagine the
feats of memory common to the ancient world, it also seems clear that the
direst of Socratic prognostications have not yet come to pass. More spe-
cifically, political gossip often works to synthesize, as Chap. 3 described.
It connects seemingly disparate dots to provide context that might be
missing from conventional viewpoints. We will see this most clearly in the
analysis of Gary Hart. To the extent that technology results in lopsided
or siege analysis, we can and should be willing to criticize the excesses.
They reduce, not augment, contextualized and nuanced discussion. But
this should not be to dismiss the validity of gossip in toto (again, there are
simply too many instances of it being a relied-upon political necessity).
These invisible uses and abuses of political gossip have clear implica-
tions for deliberative democracy. Political ideas and arguments that stem
from underrepresented groups get undermined from their inception, as
irresponsible rumors; this serves to add status to dominant ideas (by com-
parison, they look more rational and neutral). This tactic also serves falsely
to reify distinctions between social groups; it reinforces divisions not just
of power but also of credibility. Because gossip as backstory happens invis-
ibly, and is, I would argue, inconsistently and hypocritically analyzed by
the press, these unfair strategies can continue.
I will pause briefly for some general political context for those unfa-
miliar with American politics. The three case studies all involve scandals
affecting US presidencies. The United States has a divided government,
112 K. ADKINS
but its system of checks and balances (each of the three estates of govern-
ment—presidency, a representative Congress, and a Supreme Court—can
check the other two in various fashions and to varying degrees) means
that the US government works most effectively when its president and
Congress can negotiate with each other. The American political calendar is
meant to facilitate this negotiation: presidential elections occur quadrenni-
ally, while members of the two houses of Congress stand for election every
two or six years. The advent of presidential primary contests in 1912,
televised debates followed by social media, and the increased fundraising
expectations for national and regional elections has both stretched out the
campaigning calendar and increased the scrutiny for candidates.
5.1 Gossip as Surprise: Gary Hart

Political gossip can be surprising in many ways. Its scale can seem ill-suited
to the scandal, its content can seem entirely irrelevant. Its timing can be
surprising (how did people not know about Thomas Eagleton’s personal
struggles before he was nominated as Vice President, countless political
observers have wondered).1 The kind of surprise I want to focus on here,
however, is the way in which a gossip story heralds a shift in the political
landscape—a group gaining political voice or influence, so the backstage
opinions of this group now matter. The signal instance of this sort of
surprising gossip is the tale of Senator Gary Hart’s brief appearance as a
Presidential candidate in 1988. Hart’s abortive campaign is so prominent
an example of scandal as unnecessary political destruction that Barbara
Kellerman uses him as an example of intemperate leadership, which is par-
ticularly disdainful because lack of personal self-control is “unnecessary
… careless and wasteful” (95). Hart is also regularly, most recently by
Matt Bai, named as the fall guy for a nation grown suddenly lazy and
scandal-enthralled. The Hart scandal is regularly described as the turning
point in American politics from serious, thoughtful, and substantive, to
trivial, salacious, and gossipy. For my purposes, I think the Hart scan-
dal clearly illustrates the way in which shared reality bias can operate in
politics: the gulf between how most male politicians and journalists write
about the Hart scandal, and how women politicians and journalists react
to it, speaks to how deeply entrenched assumptions can be about how
“everyone” evaluates what does, and doesn’t, matter in a political candi-
date. The sense of gossip as synthetic that we examined in Chap. 3—gossip
reveals the “there’s more to this story” of someone, gossip puts sometimes
isconnected pieces together—is apparent in the Gary Hart story. The

d
story women told about Gary Hart through their gossip was more differ-
ent, and more nuanced, than the one told primarily by the male journalists.
Matt Bai’s All the Truth Is Out: Gary Hart and the Week That Changed
Politics (2014) crystallizes both the nostalgia for a politically purer time,
and the unselfconsciousness of the shared reality bias. Bai examines the
abortive 1988 Presidential run of Sen. Gary Hart (Colorado) as a touch-
stone in American journalism—the week that Hart’s long-rumored wom-
anizing went public is, for Bai, the week that journalism tipped definitively
away from substance and toward scandal. To reprise the scandal quite
briefly: Gary Hart was the clear frontrunner in the 1988 Democratic race
for the presidency. Hart, who first rose to national prominence manag-
ing George McGovern’s presidential campaign, was elected to the Senate
in 1974 (at a youthful 38), and immediately distinguished himself with
his foreign policy acumen, his intelligence, and his ability to work effec-
tively across the aisles. His first run for the presidency, in 1984, paid early
dividends (he led in polls and was widely seen as the future of the party),
before collapsing largely based on an effective debate one-liner (“Where’s
the beef?”) employed by the eventual, spectacularly unsuccessful nominee,
Walter Mondale. Thus, his run for the nomination in 1988 was widely
seen as something of a fait accompli, and indeed, Hart had double-digit
leads over all likely Democratic challengers in polls, and was beating the
eventual President, George Herbert Walker Bush, by equal margins, at
the time he announced (5). The utter and ignominious collapse of his
campaign, barely one week into its inception, and premised upon an
apparent affair with pharmaceutical saleswoman Donna Rice (most noto-
riously documented by photos of them near the ill-named yacht “Monkey
Business”), seemed on the face of it to be a total surprise.
Bai’s exhaustive interviews with journalists and careful fact-checking of
printed accounts of the scandal provides a powerful indictment of the state
of American political journalism. In the Hart case, hopelessly amateurish
stakeouts, speculation printed as fact, and a post-Watergate “get it first”
mentality all combined to bring seemingly the total focus of the nation’s
entire political press corps solely to the question of “Did he or didn’t he?”
Bai makes it clear that the costs of this shift—which in his account are
decisive—are serious. He gives persuasive evidence that candidates with
substantial portfolios of achievement will refuse to run solely because there
is something that looks like scandal in their background; that candidates
are much more image-managed (and staff-controlled), hence limiting the
114 K. ADKINS
scope and authenticity of the press vetting period of national candidates.

Candidates speak in carefully managed sound bites (often through spokes-
people [226, 228]), “programmed to speak and smile but not to interact”
(15). While more information is shared than ever before, Bai alleges that
much of the information is trivia, and that substantive debate about differ-
ences or development in thinking is erased (16–17).
Indeed, we might explicitly contrast this current state of journalism,
with tidy sound bites and well-managed candidates, against what Bai
describes as a previously more freewheeling social venue in Washington,
DC, where Senators like Hart not only regularly socialized with journalists
but would also even room with them during periods of marital separation,
as Hart did with star Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward (127). This
freer social climate, it’s clear, fueled a rich gossip ecosystem; Bai regularly
quotes awareness of Hart’s infidelities as being part of the Washington,
DC gossip or rumor mill (46, 69, 84, 86, 127, 147). It’s also clear that
the gossip mill is used both ways, by journalists to get information and
connections with candidates and by campaign aides and politicians, for
much the same reasons. Hart is quoted as being particularly troubled by
journalistic questions about his infidelity, because he has similar knowl-
edge about them, “thanks to the inevitable gossip among campaign aides”
(154–155).
There is certainly evidence that much of what Bai describes about
what we know, or don’t know, about candidates has shifted—they have
many more layers of political and image management protecting them
now previously. However, there are two moves Bai makes that seem to
miss part of the relevance of the Hart scandal, particularly its relevance to
our beliefs and practices about publicity and privacy. The first is the nar-
rowness of Bai’s political and historical focus. His theory as to why the
scandal shift happened when it did focuses almost exclusively on the men-
tality (and shifting logistics) within journalism after Watergate. Watergate
challenged journalists’ trust in presidents and political staffers; Watergate
also pushed journalism itself to the center of the political conversation.
Because of Watergate, Bai suggests, journalists were both ready to look
for and take scandal seriously (and by extension, so was a willing public).
The development of satellite dishes, relatively lightweight videotape tech-
nology, and 24-hour news stations simply acts as a ratcheting effect; we
can repeat non-newsy news endlessly, which thus legitimates it (33–34).
Bai repeatedly contrasts the post-Watergate milieu to the Kennedy/
Johnson years (when presidential private parts apparently roamed freely,
with knowledge and cooperating silence from the presidential press), to

his evident regret.
This demonstrates an insider’s view, giving total power to the standards
of journalism to determine political debate. Indeed, Bai’s absence of seri-
ous criticism of the ways in which journalists’ and politicians’ trading of
gossip and favor could problematically limit political discussion is strik-
ing. Bai’s journalism, while exhaustive, is entirely journalistic—he inter-
views journalists about their coverage decisions or lack thereof, and both
implicitly and explicitly, gives journalists control over the political narra-
tive. His nostalgia for how we ought to be able to trust reporters to police
themselves and thus control political narratives is evident; he describes his
own absorption of the methodology of classics of campaign coverage as
revealing “not just the candidates’ policy papers or their strategies for win-
ning, but also what made them good and worthy of trust, or what didn’t”
(14–15). So a narrative that candidates were suddenly and irresponsibly
personalized in American journalism is clearly false; personal qualities like
trustworthiness were already present in classic political journalism—they
were simply offscreen, entirely vetted and weighted by the journalists, and
not up for discussion. The invisibility of journalists’ own assumptions is
assumed as a necessity for good functioning; journalists, as professionals,
can be trusted to make sober, serious decisions—at least, until they can’t.
However, Bai himself later recognizes that this trustworthiness was not
always merited, even in the case of his idols; he notes that Ben Bradlee,
one of his journalistic heroes, was so close to John F. Kennedy that he had
difficulty being critical of his presidency (23). This idea, though, is not
explored by Bai—perhaps it would complicate the crisis narrative.
5.2 Gossip in Politics: The Long View

Most importantly, Bai’s account of the Hart scandal as a crisis in American
journalism, or a permanent and shocking turn toward the tabloid, seems
historically short-sighted. His description of the Miami Herald piece
exposing the affair is apocalyptic in tone; Fiedler’s reporting “captures, in
agonizing detail, the very moment when the walls between the public and
the private lives of candidates, between politics and celebrity, came tum-
bling down forever” (100). The phrasing here is worth attention: absolute
polarities (public and private, politics and celebrity) are both proposed
and erased; the Hart scandal is the decisive moment when we “forever”
abandon meaningful concepts of privacy and seriousness, for continual self
116 K. ADKINS
and media surveillance in pursuit of the trivial and the celebrated. But as
several accounts of gossip in American politics suggest, what is distinctive
about the Hart scandal is less that it was scandalous, than the rapidity of
its pacing and the directness of the effects. Gail Collins’ Scorpion Tongues
(1998) provides a general overview of gossip in American political his-
tory. She documents published rumors about politicians going back to
Washington and Adams (24–25). She also demonstrates the ways in which
gossip wasn’t simply a background issue, but often became front-and-
center in a campaign or presidency: gossip around Andrew Jackson’s mar-
riage to his landlady’s daughter threatened to consume his presidential
campaign (33–35). Anne Royall, America’s first gossip columnist, had a
long and controversial career advancing the republican cause with gossip
about politicians in her nineteenth-century paper The Huntress (Isenberg
89). Catherine Allgor’s Parlor Politics (2000) documents the way in which
John Eaton’s marriage to his landlady’s daughter almost cost Jackson the
presidency; the entire cabinet resigned in protest of socializing with a mere
“barmaid” (216–218). Jeffery Smith (2008) documents politicians’ com-
plaints about gossip in the press throughout the nineteenth century, and
in particular, the existence of weeklies like Paul Pry and The Huntress that
were designed to muckrake about personal failings of politicians (Smith
69). In the twentieth century, the Red Scare and the Lavendar Scare (peri-
ods of political panic in which politicians and celebrities were publicly
interrogated for their ostensive hidden ideological or sexual agendas) were
propelled by gossip.2 In other words, the scale and scope of the Hart scan-
dal has clear and consistent predecessors throughout American history.
Most relevantly for my argument here is the persistence of political gos-
sip: no decade in the existence of the United States is without its political
scandal stories, and a concomitant public appetite for them. Allgor zeroes
in on the role of gossip in the early days of the republic, and in particular
demonstrates how crucial a tool gossip was for Thomas Jefferson during
his presidency. Jefferson, who initially was underwhelmed by DC women
participating in politics, or as he phrased it, “mix[ing] promiscuously in
gatherings of men” (21), simply adopted the tools so ascribed to women
to advance his political aims. He regularly organized social occasions to
achieve political aims, indeed calling his parties “campaigns” (23, 26).
He designed the table to promote intimate talk, and used dumbwaiters
in lieu of serving staff so that dining companions could feel secure in
speaking frankly and secretly (24–25). He carefully kept track of what he
learned, and from whom, at these dinners, so much so that one scholar
describes his notes as a “gossip log” (25). He also took advantage of the
social custom of morning visits to achieve political ends, indeed tailoring
his messages and conversations to his audiences, whether male or female
(27–28). In short, Jefferson is an early and systematic example of an effec-
tive politician who recognizes that the channel of gossip provides valuable
information not available elsewhere, and that effective work across par-
tisan lines (Jefferson is a consensus-seeker, not an adversarial politician)
requires being able to learn from his network, in order to bring them to
his preferred ends.
Jefferson’s efficacy at gossip management is no mere idiosyncrasy of his-
tory; John Quincy Adams regularly asked his wife for gossip reports over
breakfast (Allgor 174). What she learned in intimate party conversation
was often greatly relevant to how he would work with his colleagues. Like
Jefferson, Quincy Adams also carefully tracked what he learned, and from
whom, at evening parties in his diary; it informed and assisted him in his
politicking (ibid.). In the twentieth century, Alice Roosevelt Longworth
mastered the gossipy conversation as political tool. She explicitly rejected
the convention of calling, which was still predominant, because its for-
mality and brevity foreclosed the kind of sustained intimacy (i.e. gossip)
that was politically useful. Her biographer Stacy Cordery (2007) notes
that Roosevelt Longworth needed the “backstory” to be politically effec-
tive, and that such a backstory could only be achieved in confidential and
quiet conversations (169–170). Indeed, Cordery notes that Roosevelt
Longworth (daughter of one President, cousin of a second, and wife of a
Speaker of the House), though herself never holding elective office, came
to wield enormous political sway because of her social abilities; “her home
was the place to be, to see and be seen, to spill secrets, to meet people, and
to broker deals that could not be made in Congress” (255). Like Jefferson,
she staged her home and managed the guest list to facilitate intimate and
productive conversation (260, 430, 432). Indeed, she focused her enter-
taining on dinner parties as opposed to cocktail parties, believing that
the liquor “interfered with the business” (454). Calling the conversation
“the business” demonstrates that the gossip was far from trivial; real work
was happening in these dinner parties. Her behind-the-scenes influence
was connected to her more overt influence; she was tasked by Republican
leaders to convert votes on the pending League of Nations, which she did
successfully (Peyser and Dwyer 116–118), as presidents, Warren Harding
consulted her on cabinet choices (128) and Richard Nixon relied on her
insider information (446). Perhaps because of her long experience as a
118 K. ADKINS
subject of gossip, dating from when she was a teenaged daughter of a

President (Peyser and Dwyer 46), she actually bettered the men when
she herself was the subject of potentially damaging gossip; while pregnant
with her daughter, she deftly handled widespread, and true, gossip that her
husband was not the child’s father (Cordery 314–315). While Roosevelt
Longworth’s reputation as a gossip no doubt hurt her—one double-edged
description from 1931 characterizes her as dominating Washington in part
by the “vitriol of her tongue” (Cordery 372)—her sheer persistence as an
influential Washington figure (to her death in 1980) indicates the political
value of gossip, even in its perilousness.3
In recognizing the power of political gossip, figures like Quincy Adams
and Jefferson are really responding to an earlier period in American his-
tory. Several scholars have noted the shift in the legal pursuit of slander,
and the ways in which speech was explicitly, and legally, targeted as pow-
erful and dangerous (and just as explicitly used by and against women).
Jane Kamensky (1997) notes that the Puritans “fetishized” the power of
speech (15), and that “court records of early New England are filled with
examples of preternaturally careful listening” (47). Gossip, in short, is a
crucial legal, not just political and social, tool in the colonial United States.
Christine Eisel (2014) recounts the trial and hefty financial punishment of
Elizabeth Woods and Joanna Poynter in colonial Virginia, for publicizing
gossip that undermined the credibility of public officials (17–21). Their
gossip, suggesting that public officials were hypocrites because they pri-
vately undermined community standards,4 is directly comparable to the
kinds of gossip Matt Bai so deplores. Woods and Poynter are no idiosyn-
crasies of history. Kathleen Brown (1996) notes that despite being merely
one-fifth the population in the seventeenth-century colonies, women were
involved in fully one-half of the slander cases brought to court (99–100).
While this might on the surface appear to vindicate gendered assumptions
about who gossips, Brown notes that men are involved in this socially
controlling gossip (307). Philip Ludwell is a direct example of this sort
of politically effective gossip. In the early eighteenth century, he effec-
tively uses gossip to bring down Virginia’s governor, Francis Nicholson.
Ludwell’s gossip is synthetic, in the way we saw in Chap. 3; he connects
the governor’s personal behavior (his rudeness and spite) to what Ludwell
sees as violations of policy or law (Price 64). Speech becomes private in the
middle of the eighteenth century (Kamensky 182–183), and is managed
not legally but via etiquette. While Kamensky argues that the end result
here is speech that is both less dangerous and less powerful (183), the
examples above would indicate that speech, and in particular subterranean

speech like gossip, retains its political power.
Indeed, the political power of gossip (for good and ill) is so widely rec-
ognized that during World War II, explicit anti-gossip poster campaigns,
featuring slogans like “Loose Lips Sink Ships” and “Careless Talk Costs
Lives,” were popular in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United
States (Taylor 73–74).5 Gossip columnist Walter Winchell eagerly par-
ticipated in the 1950s Red Scare; he was a source for leaked memos and
rumors about purported communists in Hollywood and Washington
(Gabler). The creation and popularity of the ads implicitly acknowledge
both the widespread prevalence of gossip, and the way in which casual talk
between trusted intimates isn’t always already trivia, but about things that
matter.
5.3 Gossip in the 1980s: The Wide View

We can see, then, the ways that Bai’s account of the Hart scandal as a
gossipy crisis in American journalism misses the extensive and more com-
plicated history of gossip in American politics. But the second failing of
this account as an insider’s view, uncritically taking the inside viewpoint,
is just as important. Attributing most of the causes to shifting standards
of journalism, as Bai does, ignores the ways in which gossip as backstory
reveals shifting political and epistemic norms. While Bai briefly mentions
“feminism and the ‘women’s lib’ movement” as one of the factors that
propelled the Hart scandal (33–34), he devotes no attention to exploring
its relevance to journalism, or indeed, interviewing any of the journalists
or political commentators who raised it as a relevant factor. This account
minimizes the crucial political shift of feminism in American politics; in
particular, what it diminishes is the fact that feminism in the late 1960s
through 1980s was focused on challenging conventional splits between
public and private. “The personal is political” was the feminist slogan of
second-wave feminism, and Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking work in The
Feminine Mystique was extended in the 1970s to feminist examination of
all sorts of previously off-limits topics, like domestic violence, rape, and
sexual harassment. Focusing on the Hart scandal in its immediate context
(in particular, compared to the scandals engulfing figures in the Religious
Right during these years) demonstrates the ways in which a recognition of
the relevance of private acts toward public claims of integrity wasn’t merely
a slogan or what Bai dismisses as “this incessant ‘character’ business” (32),
120 K. ADKINS
but rather, a recognition that deeply held and publicly proclaimed beliefs
should be consistently acted upon fully to be meaningful.
Most basically, Bai’s apparent nostalgia for the politeness of the Kennedy
and Johnson years ignores who was, and wasn’t, part of the national politi-
cal conversation. Part of the reason, no doubt, that Kennedy and Johnson
could cheat with impunity was because the political and journalistic world
of the early 1960s was so thoroughly a man’s world. While women legally
had the right to vote (if primarily exercised by white women before the
Civil Rights movement ameliorated racist voting laws), and of course a
substantial portion of women had been in the workforce, women were still
disproportionately not college-educated (US Census Bureau 1960), and
working jobs that gave them little political access or voice.6 The mere fact
of the occasional female Representative (1.7 %–3.7 % during the 1960s)
or Senator (a total of two during the decade) renders them unicorns
of Congress, not leaders of a recognized and relevant political faction.
Indeed, many of even these few female members of Congress were there
merely as temporary appointments of widowhood, standing in for their
deceased husbands until elections were held. In short, women exercised
little economic or political power.
It was in the 1970s that women started to graduate from college and
professional schools in meaningful numbers (US Census Bureau 1984),
join the workforce at all levels, and hence, begin to demand differences
in how they were treated by employers and spouses. The emergence of
national advocacy groups like NOW (founded in 1966, and brought to
political relevance with the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment)
mobilized women and feminist concerns as politically relevant. This is
part of the political context in which the Hart scandal happened. Where
it becomes relevant is with respect to Hart’s own position on women
and feminist issues. Part of Gary Hart’s identity as a politician is as a
feminist, he makes explicit appeal to women as a political group, and he
wants to portray himself as sympathetic and receptive to issues of concern
to feminists. At the very moment when the mantra of feminism is “the
personal is political,” it speaks of arrogance that he would assume that
his personal life is simply and utterly off-limits, particularly if his personal
life suggests some conflict between stated positions and actual practices.
Hart’s campaign for the 1988 nomination didn’t last long enough, but
his candidacy in the 1984 established him as someone with progressive
views toward women and an active interest in seeking their endorsement;
the New York Times noted that Hart actively lobbied for the endorsement
of NOW by stressing his support for the ERA, abortion rights, and fam-
ily-friendly workplace issues (Weinraub). It seems unlikely that the Gary
Hart of 1988 would have changed those views. Indeed, his speech declar-
ing his candidacy in 1984, while focusing on economic and international
issues, makes explicit mention of passing the Equal Rights Amendment,
the importance of women as full participants not just in the economy but
also in the political system, and finally, includes a section advocating for
leadership with integrity (Hart). The women’s vote had become relevant,
and publicly relevant, in the 1980s—Bella Abzug was active about lob-
bying candidates to take women seriously in 1984 (Perlez). The 1984
Democratic nomination of Geraldine Ferraro to the Vice-Presidency
was seen as a watershed moment for feminism, for good and ill—serious
debates developed around whether or not a woman could handle for-
eign policy or responsibility for nuclear weapons in the event of an inac-
cessible president (Clymer; Carroll and Ditmar 48, 61). Long-standing
myths about women as governed by their hormones—what we’ve seen
in the history of gossip—were clearly at work here. In sum, there are rel-
evant issues of hypocrisy present in the Hart scandal that simply weren’t
part of the political conversation during the Kennedy and Johnson years
(despite Kennedy’s creation of the Presidential Commission on Women,
which led to the development of NOW). Hart himself put some of those
cards on the political table, because of his own identification and political
positions.
To connect this explicitly to gossip, long-standing rumors about Hart’s
sexual behaviors become relevant when it suggests that there is more
context to Hart’s proclaimed respect for the intelligence and capability
of women than is otherwise present. Fricker’s analysis of why the emer-
gence of language around sexual harassment helps us here. She reminds
us of the value of naming: “so much of women’s experience was obscure,
even unspeakable, for the isolated individual, whereas the process of
sharing these half-formed understandings awakened hitherto dormant
resources for social meaning that brought clarity, cognitive confidence,
and increased communicative facility” (148). Recognizing shared experi-
ences as shared, and harmful, and providing language for them, is crucial
for public accountability. Absent that, an assumed shared narrative—in
the Hart case, that this was just private sex, and that there’s no connection
whatsoever between Hart’s private acts and his public testimony—pre-
vails. Indeed, we can see this divide sharply when we examine the views of
male and female journalists on the Hart scandal.
122 K. ADKINS
Hart himself is guilty of this double standard. He employs hypocrisy on

his accusers’ behalf as an active defense. He is described in many accounts
of the scandal as appalled by the double standards of his journalistic ques-
tioners, many of whom were apparently far short of the moral standard
on which they were critiquing Hart. Richard Ben Cramer (1993) repro-
duces Hart’s anger, at the pivotal moment in which Paul Taylor asks him
about the morality or immorality of adultery: “[h]e looked at the pack,
from face to face: guys he’d seen chasing anything that smelled female—
women reporters, campaign staff, stewardesses, cocktail waitresses, vol-
unteers—interns … children! High school girls! HYPOCRITES!” (469,
emphasis original). While the anger is palpable, Hart’s (and Cramer’s)
effective use of the tu quoque does miss one crucial piece: the journalists,
unlike Hart, had not been publicly positioning themselves as guardians
of high moral standards. Hart, and by extension Bai, are appalled that
journalists don’t interpret Hart’s claims of integrity as they do, appeal-
ing only to Hart’s high standards when it comes to foreign policy. Hart
intended his call for integrity narrowly, contrasting his work in foreign
policy with Reagan’s surreptitious trading arms for hostages with Iran
(93). Hypocrisy, on Hart and Bai’s terms, cannot be (over)generalized
without losing its meaning. But as legal philosopher Anita Allen reminds
us (2003), candidates can be held accountable for their private lives in
ways that don’t automatically extend to journalists; candidates are asking
for positions of power, and part of the job of good political journalism is
to analyze fitness for power (31).
It is worth pausing here for clarity on hypocrisy, as that charge is a
focal point not simply for the Hart scandal but also for all the scandals
in this chapter (as well as others). Because so many of gossip’s instances
and appeals rest on exposing hypocrisy, hypocrisy looms large in many
evaluations of gossip. Gossip tends toward the transgressive; while it can
be about public behavior (Wickham 11), it often reveals intimate secrets.
As such, it often functions in moments of dissension, tension, pressure—
where opposing forces or conflicting norms or impulses are in direct or
indirect conflict. Gossip is evaluative in practice, not merely a reporting
strategy; less charitably, it is described as judgmental. Thus hypocrisy is
a common subject, and it is on grounds of hypocrisy that gossip is so
regularly critiqued (its practitioners claim a moral high ground they them-
selves do not possess, saying scabrous things behind someone’s back they
wouldn’t dare say to the person’s face), or defended (gossip is a neces-
sary moral check on inconsistency). Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices (1984)
defends the place of hypocrisy in a liberal democracy, because it allows

for the kind of diversity and tolerance necessary for the development of
liberal characters (3). Indeed, she suggests that hypocrisy is a necessary by-
product of moral ambitions (2). Given that the basic concept of hypocrisy
has dishonesty at its core—falsely assuming virtue or morality—this claim
is counter-intuitive. But Shklar marshals considerable literary evidence to
make a case that hypocrisy is actually a convenient charge, and trap, for
the modern liberal democracy: it rewards purity and hostility toward com-
promise, a necessity for political liberalism (48), as well as those who are
fearful of external humiliation (Shklar 50). More worrisomely, for Shklar,
it can encourage us to focus too much on small evils instead of large (55).
She defends democracy as “hypocrisy at large” (68), and suggests that
absent at least some tolerance for moral, religious, or complacent hypoc-
risy, we would witness the fearful hypocrite and the angry hypocrite locked
in a perpetual, and pointless, dance of accusation and counteraccusation.
Shklar’s analysis is appealing, and has been echoed and endorsed by other
thinkers (most relevantly for this chapter’s analysis, by Richard Mohr, who
adopts her perspective on hypocrisy in the course of making a defense of
outing in his Gay Ideas). In making her case, she presages the sort of warn-
ing that Bai offers; in overly valuing personal consistency, we risk valuing
trivial consistency and shallow debate over meaningful examination of ideas
and practices, in all their human failings. However, it’s worth examining the
special place that personal credibility has in American political campaigning
in particular. American political campaigns of all stripes regularly feature
politicians routinely and eagerly trotting out their family members, their
sporting or hunting abilities, and their faith practices for promotional pur-
poses. The fact that these markers are so routinely trotted out, and not oth-
ers (say, a candidate’s knowledge of a foreign language other than Spanish,
or esoteric abilities or hobbies), suggests the ways in which candidates rush
to portray their personal lives as part of the campaign. They are not simply
auditioning their political and strategic skills; they are positioning them-
selves as safely and recognizably middle-American in appearance, if not
in actuality. Hobbies or practices that are dangerously costly or elitist can
become campaign liabilities; John Kerry was mocked in the press during
the 2004 national election for his fluency in French and for windsurfing.
So while there is good reason to recognize the ways in which hypocrisy and
inconsistency play a necessary role in political strategy and debate, hypocri-
sies that are actively promoted by candidates as selling points deserve some
suspicion, particularly when they are more central to a candidate’s positions.
124 K. ADKINS
More worrisomely, I think there is a deep, unstated sense of privilege or

complacency in this discussion and defense of hypocrisy, particularly rele-
vant when one examines Shklar’s source figures. Shklar admirably defends
a civil, pluralistic liberalism, where all comers to the political table are will-
ing to negotiate and embrace compromise, and where the most successful
participants are tentative and careful in their claims, and overt in their
differentiating between private ideas and public positions. By extension,
they are thus political hypocrites for Shklar, and effectively so: Benjamin
Franklin is her model of this sort of effective political hypocrisy. While
Shklar herself acknowledges political and status differences between par-
ticipants (slavery and the civil rights movement are among her examples),
she doesn’t spend time discussing the costs and effects these divisions
have on the very political ideas she’s defending. Applying Fricker’s analy-
sis here, it’s clear that the careful and tentative language of compromise
that politicians and philosophers like Franklin and David Hume employ
can be done in part because they do it when they have already achieved
a certain status and credibility excess. They don’t have to fight for rec-
ognition, respect or an audience; even their most carefully tentative and
partial claims will be attended to seriously—they carry with them serious
social and political clout.7 Fricker’s theory of credibility injustice reminds
us that ideas can be ignored or devalued before they even get a serious
political hearing; their defenders, whether fairly or unfairly, are judged as
not credible.
Martin Luther King, Jr. is a good example of this sort of language.
While the King who is remembered and celebrated today is pacific, unify-
ing, and nonviolent, this is a partial view of King—his goals of nonviolent
resistance were not always articulated through careful and tentative argu-
ment, but rather sometimes explicitly couched in angry denunciations of
very specific injustices. (Otherwise, of course, he would not have been
as effective a civil rights leader; he would have lost credibility with his
audience had he not recognized the legitimate sources of their political
anger.) While his most often recited quotes are moving and inspirational
in their tone, he regularly and sharply denounced slavery and poverty as
evils, in clear, theologically based, and angry language. In “Loving One’s
Enemies” (1962), he explicitly notes that forgiveness does not mean
“ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act” (57).
His language in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963) explicitly details
the indignities and violations of modern racism, in a way that is anything
but tentative; while he recognizes negotiation as a value (130), he argues
that negotiation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but that “nonviolent direct

action … create[s] such a crisis and foster[s] such a tension” that it forces
the community to negotiate (ibid.). In other words, when dealing with
not just power disparities but also communities in which participants are
not even recognized as legitimate political actors, political hypocrisy will
never achieve meaningful goals (or at minimum, on its own). And finally,
King’s language describing racism and economic inequality not just in the
United States but also globally is present in many of his writings; “The
World House” (1967) gives many such examples of direct, forceful, and
angry language. Shklar’s model of political discourse, then, would not be
particularly valuable for those participants; those who are in a marginalized
position, whose voices are unlikely to be heard, will not win an audience
by using such tentative language. This sharpens Mill’s point in On Liberty,
where he notes that those advocating unpopular positions can only get
an audience by sounding non-controversial. It also recalls Manne and
Stanley’s sharp observation about student protests that “sounding reason-
able can be a luxury.” By this analysis, reasonability is both a luxury and
a double-edged sword; it is easier to ignore those advocating unpopular
views when they speak in Franklinian politeness. For those who are in an
epistemically untrustworthy position, anger and absolutes may be the only
tones that get them audiences and political attention. More to the point,
the anger and absolutes are often residue of long-standing experiences of
being dismissed or disregarded. At best, in other words, Shklar’s call for
hypocrisy as a tool for civil and pluralistic compromise should remind us
of the way in which civility is something achieved, rather than assumed;
it is the pragmatic endpoint of a process that often begins in searing but
sincere anger.
Minimizing the context of credibility—who has it, how one gets it, the
extent to which it’s earned—permits Shklar’s defense of political hypoc-
risy. Mohr’s use of her analysis compounds this problem; his defense of
political outing (resting, as it so often does, on gossip) explicitly rejects
exposing hypocrisy as a justification. He denounces the use of hypoc-
risy as “politics on the cheap,” alleging that it turns our attention from
serious and substantial issues to trivia (23–25), echoing Shklar that in a
modern, complicated age, we simply cannot expect perfect consistency
from people. This extension of Shklar’s argument seems to present both
a false dichotomy and to ignore the places in which personal credibility is
explicitly or implicitly used as a support for political positions.8 Ferdinand
Schoeman’s analysis of privacy and intimate information, cited by Mohr,
126 K. ADKINS
calls attention to this issue. While Schoeman fiercely defends the impor-
tance of privacy, and by extension the lack of consistency between individ-
ual’s context-dependent social roles, he also clearly defends the revealing
of private information in cases where a person “misrepresent[s] himself to
those who, within the relevant domain, reasonably rely on his projected
image” (409). As we have seen in the Hart case, and as is even clearer in
the accompanying 1980s scandals of Bakker and Roberts, it is not unrea-
sonable to believe that personal image is part of the testimonial case being
made in favor of positions. Hart, in explicitly raising personal integrity and
character as a campaign issue, is implicitly offering himself up as testimony
for integrity in his person, even if imperfectly. While Bai (and by exten-
sion Schoeman and Shklar) would correctly remind us that we cannot
expect perfect consistency, and that there are substantive costs for looking
for microscopic failings in every realm and equalizing them, it is a false
dichotomy to then say that integrity issues aren’t ever relevant.
I will address the issue of privacy more lengthily later in this chapter,
during the discussion of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, but for now, it is
worth attending to the specific connection between privacy and credibil-
ity. Schoeman’s careful analysis rests on a Millian reminder that our private
selves are worth defending and preserving even, or especially, when they
serve no public purpose. In 1984, Schoeman presciently worries about
overly publicizing our private lives, and thus losing a space in which we
can take actions and think about ideas that matter only to us. His account
of personhood cautions us not to be egotistical, reminding us that we can
mishandle others’ intimate information because we don’t know them and
their complexities as well as we think we do (407). However, his analysis
and defense of the private realm contains the exception about deception,
because it’s clear that people can use their private selves to testify (directly
or indirectly) for a public position: people insert themselves into public
debates, and use their personal images as support. Indeed, Anita Allen’s
(2003) reminder that exhortations to privacy need to be balanced with
concerns for accountability (we are accountable to different communi-
ties and people, in different ways, over our lifetimes), supports this idea.
Public officials have a particular accountability to the public they serve.
Eliminating any meaningful realm of privacy for public officials would
of course be damaging to the public system; Allen tartly observes that
“self-righteous individuals may believe they have a political vocation solely
because they satisfy superficial criteria of moral virtue and look good on
television … unrelenting attention to and investigation of ordinary sexual
immorality distracts officials from their core policymaking responsibilities”

(159–160). But accountability for private behavior can be relevant, when
one takes a substantive and meaningful public posture that one privately
disavows. While Allen and other commentators rightly call our attention
to an overly narrow focus on sexual gossip in particular, this should not be
to claim that issues of sexual morality can never be relevant. Indeed, Allen
herself speculates that Kennedy and Clinton would have been far more
effective as presidents had they not spent so much time managing their
complicated sex lives, with the concomitant deception (160). But in par-
ticular, there are clearly some cases in which private sexual behavior is rel-
evant for a public figure, if it suggests that publicly stated strong support
for positions or constituencies is undermined by private pursuits. Recall
that Shklar’s defense of political hypocrisy in part rests on its furthering
of goals of civility and tolerance. Political hypocrisy, for Shklar, allows us
diversity in the personalities and practices in the polity. But note that the
hypocrisies unearthed by these instances of gossip are largely revealing in
tolerance. The public figures undone by gossip are undone in part because
they were not slow to issue lectures to others about what a morally or
politically proper life was.9 This sort of political condescension is not, for
instance, what we see in Benjamin Franklin, as Shklar rightly notes. All
hypocrisies, then, are not created equal, nor do all deserve our forbear-
ance. In sum, then, gossip’s role in exposing hypocrisy is relevant and
can be defensible. When the hypocrisy is not merely deceptive but can be
connected to one’s own advocacy of a position, the hypocrisy can reason-
ably be considered relevant. Gossip here is functioning as a means of norm
criticism and resistance.10
The language by which the commentators and Hart himself try to mark
these issues as off-limits is revealing. What is reflected in Hart’s language,
and more saltily in David Broder’s irritation that a fine political candi-
date has had his career ended for simply “screwing” (Bai 175), is a basic
dehumanization of women. “Screwing” is a mechanical term, more suited
to inflatable dolls and jar lids than to living humans; one doesn’t have to
imagine any particular person on the other end of that action. Indeed,
Broder’s language leaves a recipient completely unspecified, generic, and
thus irrelevant; the fact that he uses it without concern for its reception
demonstrates the strength of shared reality bias (clearly, no reasonable
person could disagree with Broder’s assessment). Hart’s own dismissive
language about his accusers is similar, and animal in its reductiveness; his
anger at journalists’ chasing “anything that smelled female” is equally
128 K. ADKINS
trivializing. The blind spot reflected in both of these articulations, and in

Hendrik Hertzberg’s “Sluicegate” column in The New Republic, in which
he bemoans a candidate of substance being taken down by trivia, or as he
calls it, “Islamic justice” or the “Gossip Standard of Probable Cause,” is
why these attitudes might finally not be tolerable to a wide swath of the
populace. Even if infidelity is common in American marriages (as numer-
ous surveys indicate), the vast and dramatic territory between those stak-
ing public high ground as feminist allies and rank objectification is hard
to ignore. Hertzberg can imagine only two possibilities for Hart, and the
convenient false dichotomy makes his argument. Either Hart is a misogy-
nist (but then why would he have women in positions of leadership in his
campaign? Hertzberg asks), or he is a man of substance who has a merely
and trivially private flaw. Of course, there might be an alternative perspec-
tive here: that while having an affair is certainly not tantamount to woman-
hating, regular infidelity with a series of women while actively positioning
yourself as a supporter of women suggests that women (or at least some
women) aren’t still fully seen as having equal claim to serious attention. In
this view, some women can be taken seriously, but too many, apparently,
are “bimbos” suited only for screwing. Fricker’s description of people who
defend sexual harassment as having a “cognitive lacuna” seems apt here,
and distressing—the contrast between the aggressive, highly sexualized
or animal language employed by Broder, Hertzberg, and Hart in their
defense of Hart is dramatically different from feminist responses that were
publicly aired during this same period. It suggests a simple refusal to rec-
ognize an alternative viewpoint (whether active or passive).
There are several prominent examples of this criticism. Most basically,
Hart’s campaign co-chair, Rep. Patricia Schroeder, spent several months
exploring a 1988 presidential run as an explicit response to Hart’s failed
campaign. Her anger over what she saw as his betrayal to his campaign,
and his absence of an apology to her for his behavior, was part of what
motivated her (Swift and Brazaitis 2003: 67–68). The fact that the
absence of his apology to her is listed as a motivating factor is relevant
here; it supports the connection between personal credibility and substan-
tive positioning. Schroeder put her credibility as a feminist politician very
publicly on the line for Gary Hart; the absence of a personal apology mini-
mized the value of her credibility. Florence Graves, whose long career as a
journalist later included exposing Sen. Robert Packwood’s chronic sexual
harassment of staffers, reminds us that the fact that more women were
working as reporters was a major reason political sex scandals started get-
ting meaningful coverage, and reached a crisis point in the Hart campaign
(2002). Questions about privacy, and the relevancy of sexual behavior and
attitudes, were suddenly live questions, as women started examining male
politicians’ behavior, often in unflattering comparison to the sexual harass-
ment and discrimination they were facing in their own newsrooms (up to
the point of filing lawsuits on discriminatory practices), as Nan Robertson
(1992) and Lynn Povich (2013) thoroughly documented. To that end,
it’s hard to ignore the fact that virtually all of the reporters and commenta-
tors Bai describes as overwhelmingly upset about the tabloid nature of the
Hart coverage are themselves men. Bai’s exhaustively thorough report-
ing on the Hart scandal somehow fails to interview Graves, Schroeder,
Lois Romano of the Washington Post (who asked Hart about the infidelity
rumors during before the scandal exploded [Safire]), or Suzannah Lessard,
who published in Newsweek an explicitly feminist defense of Hart’s outing,
exactly along these lines (1987).
Indeed, Medina’s concept of meta-blindness, or “insensitivity to insen-
sitivity” (75) fits well here; we can see it demonstrated in Lessard’s edito-
rial. She notes that Senator Ted Kennedy’s womanizing (to say nothing
of the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick) was already
a serious issue for feminists when Kennedy ran in the Democratic pri-
mary in 1980; Lessard’s piece on Kennedy’s infidelity was killed by the
New Republic because it was deemed unnewsworthy, and published in
the Washington Monthly. (New Republic editor Michael Kinsley briefly
resigned over the outrage, and wrote a tart editorial on the magazine’s
hypocrisy.) Lessard’s arguments in 1980 about Kennedy foreshadow her
arguments about Hart, particularly around the nervousness of women to
raise explicitly their concerns around philandering. She notes that most of
her respondents were only willing to speak anonymously to her, and that
they did not speak up to what Lessard derisively describes as the “wink-
ing, chuckling fraternity” of the male-dominated press (1980:10). They
consistently—and relevantly for the gossip scholar, off the record—told
Lessard that they were unwilling to make the issue public.
It is worth emphasizing this point, as it is crucial to my analysis of gos-
sip. One of my major contentions is that gossip functions as an epistemic
channel when mainstream paths to knowledge are blocked; we see this
alluded to in Lessard’s argument. She describes a classic double bind; to
come out against philandering was likely to jeopardize their standing as
serious, worldly political people (12). These observations reinforce the
credibility gap one experiences from the minority position; Kennedy’s
130 K. ADKINS
womanizing, which is widely known and repulsive to many politicians and

journalists, is unspoken of publicly because it is deemed irrelevant. To
the contrary, women raising it as a legitimate issue risk their political and
professional reputations. To gain political access and credibility, they had
to refuse to acknowledge some issues as politically relevant. This didn’t,
however, silence them—they simply spoke to each other (people who
would understand and recognize their perspectives and their irritation) off
the record, anonymously, as gossip. This demonstrates yet again the value
of gossip for people in marginalized positions; it is important for them
to articulate solidarity, to understand dynamics and patterns that aren’t
perceptible in privileged discourse space. In particular, women journalists
gossiped about Hart this because this information was relevant to them;
the sense of gossip as synthetic is operating here. These journalists do not
interpret serial philandering as an irrelevant bit of private scandal; it casts
important context, and contrast, onto proclaimed public intentions. The
backstory on Gary Hart is important to understand the full story; the pub-
lic picture does not give them an accurate picture of who he is as a leader.
Once women had reached a critical mass as a political force, however,
and with a backdrop of feminism that gave language and coherent context
to ideas and concerns, they no longer had to hide their views, and the gos-
sip moved aboveground. This was, as Lessard indicates, because it became
less risky to discuss it openly and with identification—gossip, particularly
for the subaltern, can be a means of self-protection when ideas are risky
and controversial. Given that it is clear that the gossip about Gary Hart
was widespread throughout DC, what Lessard’s observations indicate is
the sharp interpretive divide in the gossip; for many men, the gossip was
simply par for the course (keeping track of a “screwing” count); for many
women, it had a specific layer of importance, as well as risk. By contrast,
returning to the notion of gossip as synthetic, it is easy to see why women
would have viewed the Hart gossip differently than men. It is clear that
the stories about Hart were long-standing and widely shared. The incon-
sistency several of the women journalists note between the ideals Hart
purported and his behavior was also, regrettably, consistent with the way
in which too many of them were treated in their newsrooms and govern-
ment offices; too many of those in power who claimed authority over the
women were simultaneously diminishing them as professionals based on
their gender. In other words, the gossip about Hart wasn’t merely per-
sonal gossip; it put together pieces of the women’s personal and political
experience, and explained more of what they were seeing than what was
currently being published. What is surprising, in retrospect, is that the

going public took so long.
The durability of this epistemic blindness is striking. In 1980, Lessard
observes that while feminists are leery of Kennedy, believing that his
appointments of women would be illusory only (12), she notes that the
issue stays private largely because of numbers. “The feminist vote is not
very large, and very few feminists vote strictly according to feminist con-
cerns” she observes (14). But in 1987, Lessard explicitly marvels at Hart’s
own blindness to the public gains the feminist movement has made; she
describes him as believing he was “invisible” with respect to his well-
known reputation for infidelity, or as if “his life with women wasn’t real, as
if he couldn’t believe anyone else would think it meant anything.” Lessard
is observing meta-blindness here; a Gary Hart who cannot recognize
that anyone else might reasonably differ with his viewpoint, or see things
another way. The possibility that women might resist being compared to
unwitting prey for journalists is apparently unworthy of examination. Ellen
Goodman echoes this concern; in her May 7, 1987 column judging Gary
Hart guilty of “character suicide,” while she expresses concerns about pri-
vacy, she argues that womanizing can be a legitimate concern in political
campaigns, because it indicates a candidate’s “capacity for deception, vul-
nerability to exposures, fascination with risk-taking.” These are the stakes
of political gossip, and had been for long before the Hart scenario, as
our historical glance demonstrates. If Hart is guilty of blindness to this
shift, so clearly is Hertzberg (in 1987), and Bai (two full decades later).
It’s noteworthy that Hertzberg can only imagine “misogyny,” or hatred
of women, as a feminist explanation for covering the philandering, when
Lessard herself uses (and explains) the more complicated “chauvinism”
(patronizing or condescending treatment or attitudes) to describe why
philandering might be politically relevant. More distressingly, it’s striking
that, almost two decades later, Matt Bai admiringly concludes his analysis
by describing Hart’s tenacity in holding onto a grim determination of the
absolute public irrelevance of his private life as “character” (244). Some
viewpoints must continue to be minimized.
Bai’s dismissal of a tabloid press that instantly and uncritically jumps on
any juicy story, however irrelevant, is particularly undermined by a later
scandal. This also substantiates Lessard and Graves’ points about women
being cautious, not heedless, in sharing gossip. In writing about the Bob
Packwood scandal, where a longtime Oregon senator was forced to resign
upon revelations of his serial and crude sexual harassment of over two
132 K. ADKINS
dozen female staffers and lobbyists, Graves (1995) explicitly undermines

what Bai would later characterize as a tabloid press eager to jump on
and publish any scrap of unsubstantiated rumor. Graves emphasizes the
recalcitrance and slowness with which allegations were publicized, in part
because accusers were unwilling to go public, and in part because journal-
ists would explicitly make judgment calls about relevance of private behav-
ior to public performance. In short, the shift in perspective didn’t happen
radically or suddenly, and when it happened, it was subject to extensive
debate in newsrooms (as Bai recognizes happens in the Washington Post
newsroom [126]).
Finally, this dismissal ignores the fact that public figures from the
right (Jim Bakker, Oral Roberts) were critiqued and ridiculed for simi-
lar sorts of hypocrisies (in Bakker’s case, hypocrisies that were themselves
grounded in long-standing rumors). At the time, Hertzberg trivializes this
idea; he says “the feminist argument” (there is only one, apparently) is
undermined because Hart’s policies and acts are feminist (such as having
women in prominent positions in his campaigns). Hertzberg only bothers
to cover the Bakker scandal briefly, and retrospectively—he writes about
the competing Playboy and Penthouse spreads women tangled up in sexual
scandals with figures from the Religious Right. He dismisses both maga-
zines for their hypocrisy, but the very brevity of the mention and dismissal
in his tone indicate that sex scandals in the Religious Right simply don’t
matter—they are relevant only in that they reveal our own prudish hypoc-
risy around sexuality (Hertzberg 2005: 353). His refusal to participate in
prudery surely is the only reason he spends time describing the aesthetic
and production values of both photo spreads.
While it is easy and satisfying to read the Hart scandal as a sanctimo-
nious, if not hypocritical, desire for prurience that drags down a politi-
cal and journalistic culture along with it, the evidence suggests it cannot
be the total story. And not incidentally, taking hypocrisy seriously does
not excuse the various, and serious, lapses of journalism that Bai so thor-
oughly documents. To name a few, the Herald reporters conducted an
extremely amateurish version of a stakeout at Hart’s DC townhouse, and
falsely claimed that they’d only followed Hart because he’s challenged
them to (the much-quoted dare wasn’t in fact published until after the
Herald piece was in print). But Bai’s focus is on more than the technical
failings of journalism. He is making a larger point about the meaning of
this scandal and the degraded status of politics and political journalism,
but in so doing, he ignores a reasonable concern about the hypocrisy
of public figures. Indeed, simultaneous political scandals about hypoc-

risy from the other end of the political spectrum reinforce this fact. Bai
makes quick reference to the scandals surrounding Jim and Tammy Faye
Bakker (co-ministers of one of the many explosively growing Religious
Right megachurches during this period). Their significance, for him, is
largely that it reinforces (falsely) the legitimacy of scandal as a topic for
journalism. His single mention of the Bakker scandal is to describe “accu-
sations” of rape and adultery for Bakker, equally balanced by his descrip-
tion of Tammy Faye, “whose blubbering, mascara-streaked face transfixed
the nation for days” (38). This language ignores the substance behind
the Bakker scandal, which I will briefly address, and dismisses the scandal
as trivia of dubious content (“accusations” only). Its condescending and
sexist tones—apparently, Tammy Faye’s Bakker’s dependence on makeup
is just as interesting as a self-proclaimed moral arbiter failing to clear a
self-proposed and minimal moral bar—perhaps reveals more of Bai’s own
appetite for gendered trivia, than it does of the Bakker scandal.
Once again, examining context proves instructive. The Bakker scandal
was but one of two Religious Right scandals that immediately and very
publicly preceded the Hart scandal, and relevantly, they weren’t simply
(or even at all) about sexual practices. They were about hypocrisy in both
sexual and financial realms. The Jim Bakker scandal was only ostensively
about his affair with Jessica Hahn, which in fact had occurred seven years
previously, in 1980. Hahn alleged that Bakker had raped her, but this
accusation was apparently never seriously pursued by anyone. Bakker had
made Praise the Lord Ministries (PTL) into a money-making powerhouse,
and it was this work that drew the attention of a skeptical medial (Martz
and Carroll 11). His empire—a lucrative television show, a theme park
and vacation resort—was a financial house of cards, maintained with two
different sets of books to cover up his extensive use of corporate money
to finance his love of luxury (Martz and Carroll 6, 12–13, 37; Shepard
83, 110, 118). He was forced to resign his presidency of PTL Ministries
in late March 1987, right before the Hart scandal, and in 1989, he was
convicted of 24 counts of fraud and sentenced to prison; the new PTL
executive described Bakker’s conduct as “fiscal sin” (Martz and Carroll
59). Jim Bakker displayed the same ability to turn accusations on their
head that we have seen in earlier chapters; most particularly, to use the
accusation of gossip as itself an undermining move to limit his accusers’
credibility. He regularly refers to accusations against him, which were
regularly documented in the press, as hearsay, gossip, rumors, lies, or slan-
134 K. ADKINS
der (Shepard 121, 366, 406, 424, 476, 536). Indeed, Bakker attributes a
uniquely destructive power to gossip and rumor, saying during one ser-
mon that “[t]he only thing that will divide us around here will be petti-
ness, rumors, gossip, slander” (Shepard 206).11
If Jim Bakker’s scandal featured fiscal and physical sin neatly intertwined,
Oral Roberts’ brush with notoriety in this same period was straightfor-
wardly financial. Oral Roberts (fellow televangelist and founder of a self-
named university), in January of 1987, issued a thinly veiled threat to
his many followers, that if he didn’t raise $8 million by March of 1987,
God would “call him home.”12 Panicked supporters called his ministry,
and he exceeded his fundraising goal. He then doubled down on this
threat, suggesting that he would need to keep raising $8 million annually
to support his activities. This entrepreneurial approach to evangelism met
with prompt and scathing criticism; the New York Times praised Roberts
for “tak[ing] himself hostage without missing a meal” (Sackett), and the
combination of the Roberts and Bakker scandals were dismissively charac-
terized as the “fundamentalist follies” (Anderson 1987).
In other words, a charge of hypocrisy, whether financial or sexual in
nature, was serious. This is clear when we think of the political context in
which these organizations emerged. The Religious Right came to power
explicitly around legislating morality. Debate over the (failed) ratification
of the ERA (1972–1982) was the catalyst for the development of the
many grassroots organizations that developed into what we now see as
the Religious Right (Eagle Forum, Moral Majority, Focus on the Family,
Concerned Women for America). These organizations explicitly organized
because they perceived the ERA as a threat to Christian family structures
(Brown 21). Once the anti-ERA effort was successful, the groups with
national pull began using their influence to advocate for greater political
control over the private sphere; in particular, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority
was mobilized throughout the 1980s to empower a greater Christian
influence over national and state politics that breached traditional private/
public splits on issues such as the legal recognition of homosexuality or
abortion (Brown 156–157). Slogans such as “family values” suggested
explicitly that Christian values should be more, not less, publicly present,
and that the ills of American culture were due to ignoring or diminishing
the teachings of Jesus.
But the Prince of Peace, of course, lived like a pauper, had no wife
against whom he could have violated one of the Ten Commandments,
endlessly encouraged his followers to practice humility, charity, and meek-
ness, and threw only one documented public tantrum, toward money-
lenders in the temple using a house of religion for shameless and shameful
personal enrichment. In other words, Jesus’ own behavior and teachings
were about as opposite to the behavior of the American religious scolds as
one can imagine, in every facet of behavior. The fact that his most promi-
nent American public mouthpieces in the late 1980s were advocating for
a legislated morality that they clearly and transparently violated in their
own practices (the other prominent scandal here, that of Jimmy Swaggart,
was revealed in 1988, after Gary Hart had left the race) had to have been
covered by the press; it revealed a basic, and base, hypocrisy. Several of
Bakker’s followers were explicit on this point; they expressed their anger
at Bakker’s greed and lachrymose public weeping for endlessly increasing
amounts of donations while staffers and supporters were living on food
stamps (Martz and Carroll 61, 205).
All of these cases, considered together, suggest that in some ways, the
shifting relationship between the private and public realms is an impor-
tant change in the 1980s, and one that has yet fully to be recognized.
From both the left and the right, political groups were advocating that
private lives needed to be part of the public conversation—what happens
in the home may need public attention. ACT UP held their first public
demonstration, with their gripping “Silence = Death” slogan, about how
government policy on AIDS (neither recognizing the disease nor funding
research and prevention) was killing people in March of 1987 (Signorile
61). The slogan speaks to this hypocrisy around private and public: declar-
ing private lives utterly unworthy of public discussion or political engage-
ment was itself a public act. Funding for AIDS research and treatment was
so pitiful because prominent politicians didn’t see any advantage to ally-
ing themselves with the gay community (even, or especially, if they were
closeted themselves). In some instances, in other words, claiming a sharp
public/private division creates public hazard.
Ironically, Tom Fiedler, the Miami Herald reporter who broke the
Gary Hart story, himself weighed in on this debate when he wrote a col-
umn about the infidelity rumors the week previous to his Hart cover-
age (Fiedler). In the column, he tried to navigate when rumor coverage
was appropriate, acknowledging that even widespread rumors about a
candidate could have no basis in truth, and that there wasn’t necessarily
public news value in rumor coverage. However, he stressed that in some
cases a rumor could be relevant, and explicitly quoted a political scientist’s
observation that public revelations of Kennedy’s womanizing might have
136 K. ADKINS
damaged his political viability with women. This juxtaposition (conve-

niently phrased with a historical example) is all the more suggestive, given
the increased visibility women were getting as a political constituency.
Equally, however, it’s important to take Bai’s cautions seriously. In par-
ticular, his point that scandals can overtake every other aspect of a candidate
needs to be taken seriously. Bai approvingly quotes Hendrik Hertzberg’s
concern over scandal politics; Hertzberg argues that “everything else a
politician had done or been in his life would now be swept away, routinely,
by a single, sensational revelation” (175). Hertzberg’s worry here is con-
text—spending a disproportionate amount of time on a single act can over-
simplify and distort not just people and their characters but also what serves
a public best. Part of the reason these cases are troubling surely is because
of the all-consuming way in which they were discussed. My criticisms of
Bai for his ignoring of context surely has some application, as well, for
some of the more extreme take-downs of Hart, which ignore the context
of his actions (and why he might be blinkered on shifting circumstances).
The all-consuming nature of the Hart coverage has at least one clear and
unimpeachable victim, the candidate’s wife Lee Hart, and it is here that we
see the sharpest difference between political gossip historically, and gossip
as it is practiced in a thoroughly mediated age. Bai describes Lee Hart’s
surprise and horror over being trapped in her home, with a persistent pha-
lanx of reporters, cameras, and satellite dishes at the edge of the property.
Lee Hart, for obvious and understandable reasons, wants her marriage
to be completely out of the public eye; her repeated mantra seems to be
that if her husband’s dalliances don’t bother her, they ought not matter to
anyone else in the country. While Bai’s account spends much of its energy
focusing on the public harm to the nation by the loss of Gary Hart as
national politician, and to our national discourse by trivial obsession with
gossip, Lee Hart herself stands as a good reminder of the dangers of the
constancy of gossip in a mediated age—people who did not choose to be
part of a story (we can safely assume that politicians’ family members rarely
are eager for the constant media spotlight) can be dragooned by gossip
that is not about their own acts or reactions. Edwin Baker (2004) observes
that “reputation is truly valuable for a private person only among her close
compatriots, while for the public person it is also extraordinarily valuable
among strangers” (258). Lee Hart reminds us of the ways in which those
terms can get mixed with impunity with political gossip; people happily liv-
ing their lives in relative anonymity can become objects of public scrutiny
and judgment merely by their proximity to a political figure.
The Gary Hart campaign is seen as a watershed in American politics

because scandal, allegedly and single-handedly, takes down a promising
campaign and a substantial campaigner. Reading the gossip narrative seri-
ously suggests that underlying feminist frustration with public postures
that didn’t match private actions was a larger motivation than typically
credited.
5.4 Gossip at the Center: Bill Clinton

Marx’s famous line that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,
would sum up the Bill Clinton years of scandal well. If some commenta-
tors have come to see the Gary Hart scandal as a Shakespearean tragedy
in which an otherwise principled and substantive politician gets unex-
pectedly diminished from unseemly and sordid scandal, Bill Clinton was
never truly exempt from it, starting from his time as governor in Arkansas
(1979–1981, 1983–1992) throughout his presidency (1992–2000). But
if what was most noteworthy about the Gary Hart scandal was how sud-
denly the gossip took center stage to direct, and dramatic, political effect,
the sheer media persistence of scandal around Bill Clinton is startling. My
particular focus here—the Lewinksy scandal—should have seemed like a
non-starter. Clinton’s reputation for infidelity was so well established by
the time he ran for President that it was no longer the subject of gossip
(something surreptitious to be whispered between trustworthy intimates),
but conventional wisdom. Jeffrey Toobin notes that during Clinton’s 12
years as governor (which overlapped with Gary Hart’s public rise and
fall) “his personal life had provided endless public fodder for local gos-
sips. There were rumors of affairs and girlfriends, but the news media in
the state never followed up. For the most part, the local newspapers and
television stations played by informal journalistic conventions that limited
their coverage to Clinton’s public life” (4). Indeed, the Arkansas judge
overseeing the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, Susan Webber Wright,
is so aware of the pervasiveness of Clinton infidelity gossip that she notes
that “you’re not going to be able to find a jury with twelve people who
have never heard that Bill Clinton is a womanizer” (209). During the
1992 campaign, aides were specifically tasked with containing flatteringly
titled “bimbo eruptions,” and Bill and Hillary Clinton appeared on 60
Minutes in January 1992 explicitly to address allegations about infidelity.
Clinton drew a tight cordon around privacy during this interview, saying
that no one should have to respond to questions around fidelity to anyone
138 K. ADKINS
not one’s spouse, ever. Part of why this strategy was successful, it is clear,
was because Clinton not only tacitly admitted in the interview that he
had been an imperfect husband but also implicitly argued that indiscre-
tions were in the past (Hillary Clinton’s presence and strong advocacy and
support for her husband clearly stood in as support here). The image of
Bill Clinton as Lothario was tolerable for the American public, in short,
because it was presented as sanitized and behavior firmly in the past. In
other words, it appears that Clinton took a basic lesson from the Hart
scandal, about aloofness and accessibility. His demeanor in the 60 Minutes
interview was explicitly ordinary; he made several appeals to viewers about
the normalcy of his and Hillary Clinton’s marriage in all its flaws—they
endured challenges, as have many married couples; there were mistakes
and low points in their past, as there are in many marriages. Given that
Hart’s refusal to discuss infidelity was so clearly a mistake for his candidacy,
Clinton’s strategy of implicitly acknowledging a past pattern was smart. It
not only recognized the issue, framed it as purely private and one which
voters could empathize but also buried it as past and concluded, irrelevant
for a future Clinton presidency.
As has been well documented, the Clinton presidency was almost con-
stantly dogged by scandal, many of which appeared to fall short of the
“-Gate” appendages quickly ascribed to them. The Lewinsky scandal in
particular, however, is a striking departure from the Hart scandal, given
that the raw narrative at the center is the same. There isn’t a sharp dif-
ference between the perception of gossip between men and women in
the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal the way there is for the Hart scandal. The
first crucial distinction is that the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal became such
a tortured legal drama, playing out over years in as public a way as pos-
sible (with its nadir being the publication of the Starr report). It’s worth
remembering that the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal itself was initially a dis-
traction from or supporting player to a primary scandal, Paula Jones’ law-
suit against Clinton for sexual harassment, from his time as governor of
Arkansas. The Starr investigation (widely regarded as overly intrusive) was
initially designed as an attempt to determine a pattern of behavior, but
caused the Lewinsky scandal to eclipse the scandal of origin.
In addition, while the Hart scandal put personal hypocrisy on the public
table in a dramatic and significant way, part of what’s interesting about the
Clinton scandal is how little personal hypocrisy was explicitly discussed. It
is certainly reasonable to wonder how much it was an implicit subject of
the scandal; the protagonists of the scandal were quick to say that sexu-
ality was not their interest, merely “the rule of law.” This rationale was
perhaps more comprehensible when many of the same protagonists were
later revealed as themselves adulterers, often simultaneous to their eager
pursuit of Clinton. Clinton more directly, consistently, and loudly pre-
sented himself as a feminist ally throughout his candidacy and presidency
than did Hart; most famously, presenting himself and Hillary Clinton as
a “buy one, get one free” co-presidency, but more substantively, sign-
ing the Family Medical Leave Act into law very early in his presidency
(widely regarded as legislation that supported working mothers), as well
as appointing women to prominent positions in his Cabinet, and tasking
his wife with directing a massive overhaul of the nation’s funding and
provision of health care. Given Clinton’s well-established public record of
advocating for women’s issues and promoting women to public positions,
the comparative absence of discussions of personal responsibility in this
scandal, contrary to the Hart scandal, are surprising.
The legal merits and demerits of the scandal have been discussed
exhaustively, and will not be reprised here. But from the perspective of
the political relevance of gossip, there are two relevant points of interest in
the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. First is the way in which gossip becomes
legitimated as a source or channel of information during this scandal—in
this move, we can see a clear departure from the Hart scandal, where the
gossip was only hinted at, if repeatedly, in the mainstream press, until
the Fiedler investigation. While gossip has been a subterranean presence
throughout American political history, as I’ve demonstrated, gossip and
rumor become more legitimated during the Clinton scandal. But sec-
ondly, the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal has again challenged theorists and
politicians on the private/public split. While there is a difference between
the mere presence of private talk in public outlets about politicians (and
its persistence has been established in the early part of this chapter), the
Clinton/Lewinsky scandal raised questions from the opposite perspective;
at what point is it politically damaging to inquire about a public figure’s
private life?
The rise of The Drudge Report is the primary marker of the legitima-
tion of gossip as source. I should be clear that this legitimation is par-
tial, or arm’s length; while it’s clear that the Report becomes regularly
checked and openly cited with the Clinton scandal (even earning citation
in the Starr Report13), it’s equally clear that the citing is often distancing
in phrasing; it is regularly cited as a gossip, not news, source. In short,
journalists want to have it both ways; getting scoops publicized promptly,
140 K. ADKINS
without overly damaging their reputation. Matt Drudge’s online news

aggregator began in 1996 (initially as a Hollywood gossip site), and
expanded its focus to politics, emphasizing stories that were critical of
liberals, in 1996. It exploded in viewership in January 1998, when he
published his first item on the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. Crucially, the
focus in Drudge’s first item is less the intern story, than the fact that it was
investigated by Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, only to be killed as a
story (Drudge). In other words, Drudge’s initial interest was in alleged
media bias, and its role in a story’s publication or excision. Drudge alleged
that “his site received 2600 visits from White House staffers in the twelve
hours after his first Lewinsky dispatch” (Toobin 239). The rhetoric of
Drudge, and its reception in the media, shows the uneasiness with which
this shift took place. Drudge’s initial posting on Lewinsky (January 18,
1998) reveals his manner in which he plays both sides on shifting jour-
nalistic standards: he uses the language of journalism, complete with
third-party references (“the Drudge Report has learned”), breathless
language insisting upon a “World Exclusive” and claiming credit rights,
while keeping the substance of gossip (Drudge). No source is named in
the five-paragraph posting on Newsweek’s debate over publishing a story
on Lewinsky (Toobin 231). In other words, Drudge operates with the
language and rhetoric of both mainstream journalism and celebrity gos-
sip; claiming authority and credibility for himself, while resisting naming
his own sources. Bill Kristol legitimates the Drudge Report story on This
Week, after host George Stephanopoulos discredits it, “This is Drudge,
he’s a rumormonger” (Toobin 233). This influence has persisted, long
after the scandal’s demise; even a paper demonstrating that the substantive
influence of Drudge is overstated still acknowledges that his viewership
statistics are among the highest of Internet news sites (Wallsten 7). This
is a bit of an anomaly in the history of gossip; as we’ve seen elsewhere,
political scandal sheets in past eras tended to be more momentary, and
have relatively shorter shelf lives; as the issues or scandals that drove their
emergence faded, so too did their appeal.
As our long view of gossip in American political history has demon-
strated, gossip has always been present in discussion of American political
figures and controversies. It is sometimes more backstage than others, or
something that is simply hinted at as opposed to stated plainly. But its
presence is continuous. In this development, there are legitimate questions
raised around privacy, and what we might consider a follow-up question to
second-wave feminism: is the personal ever merely personal, and thus pri-
vate? Much of the philosophical literature around privacy is legal in appli-

cation, and stems from Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’ 1890 article,
“The Right to Privacy.” The literature is vast and complex, and I will not
attempt to sort through legal philosophy. I am, however, quite interested
by the ways in which gossip becomes such a stand-in for more sinister and
obvious violations of privacy (such as surveillance without consent), and
the way in which gossip, and its self-evident unattractiveness, is a motiva-
tor for debates defending a strong concept of the private. Phrased bluntly,
legal debates about rights, their limits, and their violations can sometimes
stand in for more amorphous and challenging debates about social expec-
tations and obligations. Indeed, Mill’s On Liberty is grounded on exactly
this substitution; his defense of a limited governmental authority over the
individual is explicitly made so that what he calls “social tyranny of the
majority,” which he acknowledges to be more insidious and less notice-
able, can be resisted. But of course the problem with this is that our social
obligations and entanglements, because of their informality, are much
more difficult to elucidate and name. Mill’s hope was that simply asserting
a backbone of strong individual rights to privacy would create social space
for individuality; we would be less inclined to judge others informally,
because formal judgments were so infrequent. But the constancy of gossip
in the United States after the assertion of a right to privacy, suggests that
social problems require a more social solution. When we focus so strongly
on our legal and formal rights of privacy, or their lack, we sometimes
neglect our expectations about our social obligations to ourselves and to
others. I want to extend Anita Allen’s analysis here, to demonstrate the
ways in which appeals to privacy that make use of gossip often contain an
unexamined privilege, and that too-strong assertions of a right to privacy
evade ways in which we are accountable to others.
The crux of Warren and Brandeis’ case for the value of privacy is one
that’s taken up by many other thinkers, and previously articulated by John
Stuart Mill: the idea that private domestic space has its own intrinsic value,
not one of ownership or property but one of freedom, and that when men
and women are unfree to think, speak, write, and act privately without
fear of public reporting and commentary, we sacrifice what they describe
as “inviolate personality” (205). Warren and Brandeis’ article spends a
substantive amount of argument time focusing in on the ills of gossip. Its
evils are so self-evident to the authors and their audience that they need
no examples or evidence, merely assertion; other than a few brief intro-
ductory or transitional paragraphs, the paragraph on gossip (taking almost
142 K. ADKINS
an entire page of the article) is the sole substantive paragraph without

any citation. All the classic stereotypes of gossip—it is trivial, harmful,
debasing—are present. Gossip is “unseemly,” “potent for evil,” “belittles
and perverts,” for the “prurient” and the “indolent” (196). Warren and
Brandeis’ concern is inclusive—they explicitly worry about the violability
of the purely domestic space (e.g. by servants being bribed to reveal pri-
vate information), as well as more questionably private space (social events
being reported upon too extensively in the press).14
Warren and Brandeis’ argument is generally taken to be motivated
by Warren’s unhappiness with press coverage of family ceremonies (the
Saturday Evening Gazette’s wedding coverage citing a lavish wedding
breakfast is regularly cited as an offender); the very smallness of the reason
has caused scholarly consternation over the years (seeming to be insuf-
ficient to create such high intellectual dudgeon). Interestingly, scholar-
ship that examines press coverage of Warren and Brandeis calls this theory
into question, and replaces it with two different possibilities that are more
plausible. First, press coverage of two Warren family funerals within an
18-month span report details that would not have been publicly avail-
able, and made the intensity of family grief something for public display;
and second, Warren’s marrying into a politically visible family—his wife
Mabel Bayard was the daughter of Grover Cleveland’s Secretary of State
(Gajda 17–25). As noted previously, Cleveland’s own history of political
scandal made him and his surrounding cabinet members objects of pub-
lic scrutiny. Given that Warren and Brandeis themselves recognize that
public figures have less of an expectation of privacy (particularly political
figures), the connections of the Warren family to such a public political
family may make some of the reporting, in retrospect, seem less intrusive,
and thus suggests that the gossipy news articles may in fact have been onto
something.
The central issue at hand, however, is the extent and selectivity to which
gossip is used as a justification for a rich concept of privacy. Warren and
Brandeis are not unique in their appeals to the ills of gossip; Jeffery Smith
(2008) provides extensive evidence for a consistent and negative focus
on gossip throughout the American nineteenth century; journalists and
essayists promoted what he describes as a “moral panic” (93), regularly
issuing jeremiads against unseemly, trivial, and distasteful gossip, whether
personal or political in nature. E.L. Godkin, who is cited by Warren and
Brandeis in their 1890 article, writes consistently and angrily throughout
the 1880s about the ways in which the publication of gossip debases jour-
nalism. He describes gossip as a “moral tuberculosis” (497 [1890a]), and

differentiates between noble curiosity that propels intellectual progress,
and “smaller, pettier, and more ignoble” gossip (66 [1890b]). The lan-
guage in all of these critiques, while dated in tone, is not substantively dif-
ferent from that used by our more contemporary worriers about a debased
state of political inquiry, and a gossip-obsessed press.
In particular, one of the implications of Warren and Brandeis’ argument
is that there is a self-evident association between gossip and trivia; gossip
is necessarily trivial invasions of privacy, public conversations should be
(if they aren’t always) important. Gossip “belittles by inverting the rela-
tive importance of things, thus dwarfing the thoughts and aspirations of
a people” (196). Gossip calls our attention to unimportant and irrelevant
details, which are trivial, private, domestic, harmless (among some of the
modifiers Warren and Brandeis use, ibid.). The implication here is that we
shouldn’t, for moral or political reasons, ever be interested in gossip; it is
simply irrelevant to our shared and public lives. Public figures are entitled
to less privacy, for Warren and Brandeis, not for substantive reasons, but
simply because they have public standing; even when they acknowledge
that commentary about a public person may be of legitimate public inter-
est, their description of the substance of that commentary is distinctly
trivial, and abstractly so: “peculiarities of manner and person, which in
the ordinary individual should be free from comment” (215). But the
argument from trivia is itself particularly problematic; as many examples
discussed previously indicate, gossip is often about matters that are cru-
cially relevant and in the public interest. Street talk about the royals’ sexual
practices before the French Revolution, to take merely one example, isn’t
simply discussion of sexuality, but simultaneously discussion of the politi-
cal legitimacy of the ancièn régime (this is the culmination of the divine
right of kings? One can imagine readers of those scandal sheets thinking
and saying). It’s hard, then, not to see Warren and Brandeis’ implication
of an obvious association between gossip and trivia as a kind of snobbery;
these sorts of subjects should be beneath people “of the first class,” as
they say.
Indeed, some of the surrounding context of the Clinton/Lewinsky
scandal makes the falsity of this distinction plain. Starting in 1990, jour-
nalists in the queer press began outing public figures.15 Michelangelo
Signorile, writing for Outweek, published an account of business tycoon
Malcolm Forbes’ “Secret Gay Life.” His background was in gossip, and
in his successive outings of public figures who hid their sexuality, and who
144 K. ADKINS
in their public life worked to decrease freedoms for GLBT people, he calls
attention to the negative effects of people staying in the closet. In particu-
lar, his outing of Defense Department spokesperson Pete Williams (who
defended the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” [DADT] policy for the military,
which allowed GLBT service people to remain in the service as long as
they were closeted) focused on the ways in which the ban was connected
to increased suicide rates, as well as abuse and expulsion, and loss of jobs
and means of support for hundreds of people (75). Signorile stresses the
way in which gossip and rumor are omnipresent in Washington (185), and
the ways in which the charge of gossip and privacy is used selectively. At
the very moment that newspapers were refusing to publish articles about
Forbes’ outing, they were publishing stories about Donald Trump’s infi-
delity and divorce—only some private behavior, apparently, is fully private.
Outing was a valuable, if controversial, tool for the gay-rights movement
in the 1990s; part of its value was that it revealed the inconsistent ways in
which parts of identified were scissored off and marked not just “private,”
but “irrelevant.” As Signorile drily notes, nobody complained about pub-
lished photos of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf with his wife, which outed
him as heterosexual (75). Sexuality, however, isn’t simply a marker for
bedroom activity; as Signorile persuasively notes, it’s a core part of one’s
identity. When power disparities mean that one is forced—either explic-
itly, via legal bans like DADT, or implicitly, due to social assumptions and
pressure—to remain in the closet, one is denying a core part of identity.
Gossip here is anything short of trivial, and it is not about privacy (because
too many closeted people weren’t freely choosing privacy here; it was a
coerced choice).
Millian defenses of privacy, like Warren and Brandeis’, rely on a bed-
rock concept of inviolable individuality. By contrast, Jeffrey Rosen’s The
Unwanted Gaze (2000) makes a positive case for privacy that draws from
the benefits of intimacy and interpersonality, which closely aligns with
what I take to be some of the virtues of gossip. Rosen, appealing to theo-
ries of personality and sociality from Walter Mischel and Erving Goffman,
defends the value of privacy as providing a space of intimacy where people
can think and speak freely, without worrying about public and overbearing
consequences. Privacy, for Rosen, “protects us from being misdefined and
judged out of context in a world of short attention spans, a world in which
information can easily be confused with knowledge. True knowledge of
another person is the culmination of a slow process of mutual revelation”
and is thus limited to intimates (9). This interpersonal account of privacy
has some intrinsic interest and value—it recognizes and values intimacy
not simply for its mere existence, or its absence of publicity, or its value
to a singular self (the Warren-Brandeis argument), but because we gain
something from and for others here. Privacy isn’t simply solitary; privacy
can be social; the value of privacy comes not simply from retreating from
public space, but being with others away from surveillance.
Unfortunately, Rosen’s advocacy for privacy suffers some of the same
privilege concerns apparent in Warren and Brandeis’ account. My con-
cern here is twofold. First and most basically, a digital sense of people
as having “frontstage” and “backstage” personalities (which, to be fair,
overly simplifies Goffman’s own position), and where intimates possess
“true” knowledge and casual associates do not, is too simple; while peo-
ple are of course not entirely consistent in their actions and thoughts
(hence much of the interest in gossip), it is fairer to say that personali-
ties are partial and overlapping. Frontstage and backstage interactions
inform one another; but more crucially, who we think we are when we
are frontstage is not often how we are received, and it’s worth contem-
plating that sometimes those around us, even if they don’t know us very
well, may be onto something when their perceptions of us so sharply
differ from our own self-perception. Citizens of the United States get
a near-constant, if tedious, demonstration of this when candidates for
elective office make inappropriate, excessive or offensive remarks in
front of microphones and repeatedly and clumsily redirect, reframe, or
half-apologize for them. This phenomenon is so constant, and so bipar-
tisan, it should not require specific examples. The same dynamic of dif-
ference in interpretation between actor and audience works, even more
crucially with backstage interactions, particularly if Rosen is correct in
their more freewheeling and uncensored nature. Literature on micro-
aggressions, and in particular, analyses of microaggressions where an
offensive remark is rewritten by its teller as a joke whose humor value
was missed by a starchily offended person, make this evident.16 While
this observation is basic, its importance speaks not only to the endur-
ing interest in gossip—we are interested in how and why people act as
they do—but also to one of the issues with an overly strict emphasis
on privacy. Rosen’s emphasis on privacy relies on a sense of ownership
of personality, that isn’t quite borne out. While he is not alone in this
line of thinking—it’s evident in Mill’s own writings about privacy in On
Liberty, as well as Warren and Brandeis’ idea of “inviolate personality”—
it is nonetheless problematic.
146 K. ADKINS
Phrased more simply, if our personalities are not so neatly divided

into frontstage/backstage, but more dialectical (because our actions and
thoughts are also constantly being received and reacted to by others,
and interpreted in ways different than how we intended them to be, and
because we ourselves respond to those interactions and reactions), it’s not
unreasonable that people may want to discuss someone’s actions or words
behind their backs (let alone speculate about motives behind a company-
wide memo or email). This is where Allen’s point about accountability
matters; for Allen, accountability and privacy need to balance each other,
because our behavior isn’t so tidily self- or other-affecting. Her under-
standing of accountability is implicitly dialectical, and explicitly contex-
tual. Allen notes that accountability is grounded in relationships (53–55);
we are accountable to other people because of explicit or implicit relation-
ships to them over time. When she defines accountability as an obligation
that can take several form—we must inform, explain, or justify our actions
to others—there’s an obvious suggestion that those are called for because
something ostensively inconsistent has occurred (16–17). Accountability
is a way of recognizing and making sense of inconsistencies.
This idea of accountability is extremely helpful when thinking about
gossip, both as a channel and as a way of addressing inconsistencies.
Accountability isn’t generic—we are not equally accountable to everyone
at all times—it is gradual, trust-based, and fungible. It is both an epistemic
expectation (we must explain ourselves, when we think or act inconsis-
tently, to others) and a moral expectation; we expect predictable behavior
across time from those to whom we are connected, and accountable, and
of ourselves to them. This sense of accountability maps well onto gos-
sip, and indeed, can help us differentiate between gossip and rumor: we
don’t gossip to anybody, but to people with whom we have some con-
nection, some relationship, and some trust. In particular, we gossip with
some expectation of privacy and secrecy (if the gossip will be spread, then
at least our name will be kept out of it as source). Gossip is also relevant,
because it is a form of raising questions of accountability. Allen’s dialectical
sense of accountability—it is a live issue when someone speaks or acts in a
way inconsistent with prior expectations—is also a basic feature of gossip.
Gossip wouldn’t be interesting if it weren’t (at least sometimes) about the
unexpected, or less expected. Finally, as I will discuss more explicitly in the
final chapter, gossip is relevant here, because Allen’s idea of accountability
can also serve as a check on gossip. If someone is not accountable to us in
a meaningful fashion, their relevance as a subject of gossip should be lim-
ited. But ultimately, these points about accountability in gossip also help
us see the ways in which an overly strict focus on privacy alone simplifies
our ways of knowing and being with others.
Allen’s theory of accountability as a balance to privacy is also relevant
to a discussion of gossip, because accountability is an expansive concept; it
has both formal, legal meanings (one can be procedurally accountable for
one’s words and deeds), and also looser, more social contexts. When we
say that a family member is accountable to explain themselves to another
(when I ask my daughters why the dishwasher isn’t loaded yet again today,
for instance), there is no formal accountability there. However, lack of
formality doesn’t render the accountability of an ongoing relationship
trivial. As my daughters are not yet teenagers, they don’t yet exercise the
option of rolling their eyes, refusing to answer, and leaving the room; they
respond to my question and eventually load the dishwasher. And as every-
one who has ever been in a family relationship no doubt has experienced,
even refusing to answer these sorts of questions, rolling eyes, or stamping
out of the room doesn’t eliminate the accountability, but merely defers it
to a later time or more sustained consequences. The requirement of the
ongoing relationship and its interdependence makes the requirement of
accountability one that has some staying, social power. While Clinton’s
level of formal accountability in the Lewinsky scandal may have been neg-
ligible, his informal or social accountability has relevance. This ultimately
is Allen’s conclusion about Clinton; while she critiques (as do many legal
observers) the overreach of the Starr report for going above and beyond
what accountability would demand (163), she both recognizes that there
are good reasons for public social concern over Clinton’s behavior; it
reflects his willingness to take extreme risks for relatively trivial and ephem-
eral benefits (163). She urges a more honest sense of public accountability
(particularly relevant, given the regularity with which infidelity occurs in
contemporary marriages), challenging people to adopt a more genuine
and empathetic way of discussing behavior (184). Medina’s point about
insensitivity to insensitivity applies here; the extremes of discussion around
Clinton and Lewinsky (particularly in the case of his accusers, many of
whom were engaging in the same behavior) reflects a willingness to ignore
one’s own failings for the satisfaction of public shaming.
The second worrying aspect of Rosen’s account of privacy is argu-
mentative bait-and-switch. That is to say, Rosen’s (following Warren and
Brandeis’) concerns over privacy often rely on a worst-case scenario, sur-
veillance without consent. In Warren and Brandeis’ case, it takes the form
148 K. ADKINS
of the publishing of private letters, or photographs taken without some-

one’s consent; in Rosen’s case, widespread workplace passive electronic
surveillance. Since Rosen’s book has been published, there are of course
other possibilities here (electronic NSA surveillance and drones being the
most striking), and I will discuss the manner and extent to which gossip
transforms due to technology more fully in Chap. 7. But here, I want
to call attention to the ways in which the absence of consent for illicit
surveillance (a transparently unethical practice in virtually all cases) gets
liberally mixed in with gossip, informal discussion of people and practices.
Surveillance without consent is harder to defend, and certainly merits
criticism in most if not virtually all cases. But oddly, gossip becomes an
argumentative freerider in this case—arguments against surveillance on
a privacy basis have a much stronger case than do those on a gossip basis
(where, for instance, someone is often reporting or discussing what one
has observed or heard from a trusted confidante). The case based on pri-
vacy is weaker, because the subject of gossip is rarely so purely private.
Even the most extreme examples from our historical look through gossip
(where servants are bribed or simply garrulous, and reveal bedroom secrets
from the wealthy or titled) are comparatively rare—what is more common
is the kind of casual and evaluative talk about friends’ social activities (of
the sort cataloged in Auden’s defense of gossip), in other words, activities
for which there can’t be such a strong expectation of privacy (because one
is at a party, for instance). And it is the combination of all sorts of gossip
as equally debasing, morally problematic, and wrong in these arguments
that is revealing. If the real argument is about triviality and debasement
(gossip brings out the worst in us), then that is an argument for ethicists
or sociologists, and not a legal claim about privacy at all.
The difference between a concern about surveillance and a concern
about debasement becomes all the more striking when we pause to con-
sider the social and historical context of the emergence of the American
concept of privacy is relevant here. Many scholars have recognized that the
emergence of a sensational and gossipy penny press occurred simultaneous
with the rapid growth of American cities, and developments of tenements
and dense urban life (Coyle 266–267, Smith 66). But what is less com-
mented upon is the fact that those working-class city dwellers living in
those tenements and boardinghouses themselves enjoyed virtually no pri-
vacy—apartments were small with thin walls, boarders often shared rooms
or slept in kitchens, and city dwellers enduring summer heat would take
to the outdoors (sleeping on roofs, playing in streets, or newly developed
amusement parks) to escape stifling confined spaces. In short, people in

the working classes in nineteenth-century America were almost constantly
under informal peer and public surveillance.17 The change was simply that
those with economic and social privilege were being formally, not infor-
mally, surveilled in the penny press. Indeed, the moralizing tone of much
of the criticism of gossipy journalism in the nineteenth century often takes
a distinctly class-based tone; it is the gossipy journalism about the wealthy,
who normally have an unstated privilege of privacy, that sparks resistance.
Writers complain about newspapers publishing gossip at posh vacation
spots, arguing that “the ladies and gentlemen of Georgia … had the ‘same
right to privacy’ at a resort as at home,” that the magazine Harper’s has
been debased into gossip about the wealthy, and (in the North American
Review) that “’hungry eyes peer into private houses’ to report on ban-
quets, balls, and teas” (Smith 71, 74, 76). The last phrasing is particularly
evocative; it implicitly recognizes that it is the surveillance of the poor,
with their “hungry eyes,” onto the wealthy, enjoying banquets and feasts,
that is particularly intrusive. It is equally noteworthy that these calls to
restore rights of privacy never recognize that the poor never had privacy to
begin with, so such restorations do little to change their lives.
The right to seclude oneself from public examination is not an abstract
right; it requires enough social and economic capital that one has to be
able to have and control space of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf reminds
us. This right is deeply contextual; women, people of color, and the poor
have had less ability to access privacy than have the privileged. As Nancy
Fraser reminds us, privacy defenses can be used as a shield by the most
privileged to occlude bad behavior; domestic violence and marital rape, for
instance, used to be dismissed as merely “personal” or “domestic” issues,
and unworthy of public discussion of legislation (73). The contextualiza-
tion of privacy is also not merely an artifact of history; people experiencing
homelessness have no effective privacy. Witness the recent Department
of Justice brief challenging laws criminalizing sleeping in public, noting
that sleeping is “life-sustaining activity” that the homeless often are forced
to choose in public (Statement of Interest of the United States in Bell v.
Boise). Sissela Bok notes that in many spheres of activity—employment,
education, mental health and public service—“those with fewest defenses
find their affairs most closely picked over” (147). The fact that the context
of privacy is unrecognized not simply by its Victorian defenders but also
by its contemporary defenders, is striking. It suggests that the real concern
is less about surveillance, but the fact that those of privilege are being
150 K. ADKINS
dragged down to the debased levels of those in the working class. This is
the true social evil that needs addressing; what it would take to give some
basic level of privacy to those who don’t enjoy it due to their social and
economic class, and the ways in which privacy arguments can be used as
shields to ignore debates about serious social problems.
This argumentative bait-and-switch is evident many places in the
Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. In the first place, Linda Tripp herself engages
in what would come closest to a violation of the Brandeis standard of pri-
vacy, when she records (over a period of weeks) Monica Lewinsky’s phone
confidences without Lewinsky’s knowledge of consent. While Tripp’s
behavior doesn’t actually violate the law (due to variations in state laws
about permissions), the effect of her behavior is the sort of betrayal of pri-
vate confidences that so appalls legal theorists. And indeed, as Laura Kipnis
(2010) contends, this is why Tripp becomes the universally criticized
villain of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair; even if most of us have betrayed
friends’ confidences (119), the calculated and mercenary nature of Tripp’s
betrayal seems different in degree. But Tripp’s systematic recording of
Lewinsky’s private words for future profit pales next to the turgid rehash-
ing of the affair contained within the Starr Report, published in newspa-
pers across the country. Almost one-quarter of the Starr Report’s narrative
(§§II–VII) is devoted to a tediously detailed recounting of each of Clinton
and Lewinsky’s sexual encounters, including such minutiae as whether or
not various partners climaxed, and who touched whom where. Starr’s
rationale for including this level of detail, premised upon challenging the
President’s denial of sexual relations, is contestable (Grunwald). But even
taking the Office of Independent Counsel at his word that this is merely
the unpleasant job of reporting just the facts, reading the Starr Report
reveals a regular reliance upon gossip-tracking. Starr reports the contents
of the White House gossip mill several places in the main text (64, 82–83,
85, 94, 96, 136). Some of the footnotes in the Starr Report demonstrate
the ways in which Lewinsky’s confidants were questioned about what they
learned when, and where their memories conflicted.18
The coverage of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair predictably struggles from
the same bait-and-switch. When Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter
who is twice scooped by Matt Drudge during the Clinton/Lewinsky
scandal, writes his account of the scandal, Isikoff’s double standard with
respect to gossip is clear. He employs it, and knows it’s a given in reporters’
newsrooms; he describes reporters as second only to Hollywood agents in
their professional capacity for gossip (74). But simultaneously, he holds
himself distinctly above people like Lucianne Goldberg (Linda Tripp’s

would-be literary agent) and Drudge; this is the arm’s-length legitimation
of gossip I referred to earlier. He disdains Tripp as “a nosy and judgmental
gossip” (based on reports from her colleagues, who somehow themselves
don’t qualify as gossips; 130); refers to Drudge variously as a “reckless
gossip merchant,” “scavenger,” a “menace” to responsible journalism,
and a “scurrilous” gossiper (ix, 144, 167, 155).
But what, in truth, is the distinction between Drudge and Isikoff? It
is not evidently one of accuracy; other than one Drudge item on Sidney
Blumenthal, the Drudge items Isikoff cites are all fundamentally borne
out by the evidence, if incomplete. Nor does it appear to be one of eth-
ics. Isikoff makes much of his refusal, during an October 1997 meeting
with Tripp and Goldberg, when he first learns about Tripp’s secret tap-
ing of Lewinsky, to listen to the tapes. Tripp begins to play a tape, and
Isikoff refuses, because of his principle as a journalist that he would not
tape someone without their consent (205). He notes that “taping without
consent may be legal in most places, including Washington, D.C. [since
Tripp lived in Maryland, her taping of Lewinsky was in fact illegal] …
But it was sneaky and had a bit of an odor to it” (ibid.). So while he
finds taping of Lewinsky sneaky and unethical, he says nothing to Tripp
about the behavior; in other words, his entire concern is with his own
participation. His second stated reason, that he doesn’t want to shape
the reporting (by continuing to talk to Tripp and Goldberg about what
Tripp discusses with Lewinsky) seems implausible, given that he contin-
ues to talk to them regardless; how is he less involved as part of the story
(through his talking and questions) simply by not listening to the actual
words? Finally, his direct advice to Tripp not to speak to a publisher about
a book in December 1997 (253) is revealing in its self-interestedness;
while he states good reasons for her to keep silent—she will compromise
her credibility—he acknowledges thinking “you’re also going to muck
up my story, you idiot.” So if the distinction between Drudge and Isikoff
is not primarily one of accuracy or ethics, the main remaining possibility
is simply one of openness. Drudge (and Goldberg) are open about their
interest in gossip; Goldberg describes herself as having a “tabloid heart”
(11), whereas Isikoff sees himself as relentlessly following a difficult, but
important, story.
Isikoff’s apparent double standard in his self-perception isn’t unusual
with this scandal. To review this quickly, Jeffrey Toobin, in his A Vast
Conspiracy (1999) evenhandedly analyzes the Clinton scandals, identifies
152 K. ADKINS
crucial strategic and ethical lapses made by the Clintons, and criticizes
almost every player in the Lewinsky scandal for mixed or self-seeking
motives, if not outright hypocrisy. Most substantively, Toobin identifies
the ways in which the Starr investigation relied on removed reports to
make a legal case against the president. Kenneth Starr lays as one of the
touchstones of his case that there were direct examinations of witnesses.
However, he is the only factual witness the house calls in its impeachment
investigation, and he didn’t examine any of the factual witnesses. So the
Judiciary Committee is basing its case on, as Toobin drily notes, “at best, a
thirdhand recitation of the evidence against him” (350). Starr team mem-
ber Sol Wisenberg asks Secret Service agent John Muskett many ques-
tions about what rumors he’d heard about Monica Lewinsky (why she
was transferred, were they caught in a compromising position). Toobin’s
analysis is telling: “[r]umors’ have no legal significance” (290). Another
Starr lawyer, Mary Anne Wirth, questions a White House steward, ask-
ing, “did you ever hear anything from any source, firsthand, secondhand,
eighteenth-hand … every hear anything that led you to believe that there
may have been some kind of social or physical relationship between Monica
Lewinsky and the president?” (292). Rumor pursuit was an unequivocal
legal strategy for the Starr team (rumor pursuit that, incidentally, turned
up little of substance; the answer in this case was an unequivocal no).
Toobin recognizes the ways in which gossip is used and abused not just
legally but also journalistically, for and against Clinton. During the scan-
dal, one of Lewinsky’s lawyers recalled how his daily phone calls to Starr
attorney Jackie Bennett were promptly followed up with calls from a Post
reporter, in which the reporter repeated to him the contents of the discus-
sion (284). The grand jury’s judge endorsed this view, concluding that the
independent counsel’s office was leaking information to the media (Starr
401). Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal makes explicit use of gossip to try
to distract press coverage during the Lewinsky scandal, describing him-
self as a “sorcerer’s apprentice” raising questions about Starr attorneys,
which then become journalist investigations into widespread and far-flung
rumors (Toobin 280). His critical portrayal of Lucianne Goldberg, the lit-
erary agent Linda Tripp worked with on a book deal, crystallizes Toobin’s
contempt for the idleness and triviality of gossip: “Nor was there a clear
pattern to Goldberg’s life. As she often said, she hated being bored, and
she loved ‘dish’” (Toobin 101).
Given his distaste for those who talk about others out of sheer boredom,
or who use such talk in thinly grounded legal pursuits (for Toobin makes
clear that Clinton’s dishonesty in the Lewinsky scandal falls far short of the
“high crimes and misdemeanors” standard for impeachment), his particu-
lar, relentless, and disproportionate scorn for Monica Lewinsky is impos-
sible to ignore. She is described as obsessed with her weight, whining over
unworthy and exaggerated slights for a person of privilege (84), entitled
(various), “obsessed” and “unhinged” (145), and testing Linda Tripp’s
endurance with her “inane chatter” (142). This is a panoply of unattractive
personal qualities, but striking in that they appear to sum her up entirely.
(There are no moments of praise for Lewinsky that might counter this tidal
wave of dismissal.) Note too, that Toobin’s tone about Lewinsky sounds
uncomfortably comparable to the tenor and subjects of conventional gos-
sip; negative harping about people’s unattractive qualities, which reduces
them to those qualities. Toobin’s low opinion of Lewinsky, in contrast to
those older and more seasoned around her, is clear when he describes a
lengthy conversation Clinton and Lewinsky had as what finally may have
“cured the president of his infatuation” (91). Lewinsky is apparently an
illness of which an unwitting president must be cured by exposure to her
ideas; by reducing her to an ailment, his phrasing also curiously excuses a
president (who knowingly embarked on highly risky behavior for which
he had previously been excoriated in the press, and which he had explicitly
foresworn). W.H. Auden’s imagined gossip transcripts in his classic “In
Defense of Gossip,” in which two friends greet each other and the imme-
diately begin eviscerating the appearances and behavior of mutual acquain-
tances, would not sound out of place mixed in with Toobin’s accounts
of Lewinsky. Indeed, at one point during his discussion of Tripp and
Lewinsky’s conversations, Toobin witheringly dismisses “basing a criminal
case on meandering girl talk” (196). Meandering girl talk is a waste of time,
unless one is picking apart someone who really deserves it, apparently.
But the sexist slam-book rhetoric is, while regrettably familiar, a sec-
ondary issue. What is primary in the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal for our
understanding of gossip is the ways in which gossip comes out of its politi-
cal closet and is a more public news source. This forces us to consider
limits of public speculation of private misbehavior, as well as the misalign-
ment of legal analyses of privacy versus social analyses. Anita Allen’s theory
gives us intellectual equipment to do this meaningfully, as she restores
context to behavior, and gives us a richer way to evaluate bad behavior (on
all fronts) than simple finger-wagging or shoulder-shrugging. Libertarian
accounts of privacy, while usefully (if disingenuously) employing gossip as
a scare tactic, are inadequate to the task.
154 K. ADKINS
5.5 Gossip as a Tool: Valerie Plame

Our previous two case studies represent classic political gossip; smutty
and damaging talk about somebody’s extramarital activities. By contrast,
the Plame scandal would seem ludicrous as a candidate for political gos-
sip; the scandalous tidbit that was eagerly passed around at dinner par-
ties is that two people were married to each other. But its emergence as
an important political scandal (and its philosophical interest) speaks to
the ways in which accountability toward behavior shifts depending on the
political context. Our previous two case studies incorporated accountabil-
ity primarily toward those under scrutiny for their behavior; the subjects
of scandals have various ranges of accountability (to their spouses, their
coworkers, for their public pledges). But accountability, of course, is a
two-way street, and it’s reasonable to ask to what extent those who gos-
sip should be held accountable for their gossip. The Plame scandal may
have started out as gossip about people being married, but its ultimate
plot was about where the lines of accountability are with gossip itself. As
I’ve stressed, the fact that spread gossip often becomes anonymous during
the course of its spreading makes this a difficult task, but it is still worth
considering. What’s noticeable in all three case studies is a relative absence
of critical self-examination on the part of the media; this is shared reality
bias in action.
The other shift in this case study is in who is doing the gossiping. As
the previous case studies have suggested, gossip appears to be a constant
accompaniment to official talk in the American political sphere. What
we saw in the previous chapter—empowered gossip in the academy that
works invisibly, unrecognized as gossip—has a clear corollary in the politi-
cal world, which is the anonymous leaking that takes place from the politi-
cal establishment to the press corps.
To summarize the Plame episode briefly: after the 9/11 attacks on the
United States, the Bush administration worked promptly on military strat-
egies of response. An invasion of Afghanistan happened almost immedi-
ately; equally promptly, the Administration began laying groundwork for
an invasion of Iraq. While there was no evidence that Iraq was involved
in the 9/11 attacks (none of the hijackers were Iraqi—most were Saudi
Arabian, an American ally), the Administration argued on several fronts
that Saddam Hussein was a growing menace both to his own people and
to regional security (the “preemptive strike” rationale), and most crucially,
that he possessed weapons of mass destruction. One of the key pieces of
evidence for this was that he had allegedly attempted to get yellowcake
uranium for enrichment in Niger. Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson was
an outspoken critic of the proposed invasion of Iraq. When the CIA was
asked by the White House to verify a report it had received in February
2002 about the uranium, Wilson (uniquely qualified, having worked as
a diplomat in both Niger and Iraq) was sent to Niger to investigate. He
found no evidence, and in fact the claim about yellowcake uranium was
excised from a Bush speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 at the request
of the CIA (Hurst 167). Nonetheless, the information was still included in
the 2003 State of the Union address, as well as Colin Powell’s testimony
before the UN.
When Ambassador Wilson protested this inclusion in a July 2003 op-ed
for the New York Times, the administration responded by making the sub-
stantive debate about character. Wilson’s wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame,
was outed shortly after in a Robert Novak column for the Washington
Post, which insinuated that her involvement in selecting Wilson for the trip
undermined both its origins and its integrity (Novak). As the subsequent
Fitzgerald investigation revealed years later, Plame’s identity was passed
to multiple reporters, over the course of a week, by Cheney aide Lewis
“Scooter” Libby, Richard Armitage (deputy to Secretary of State Colin
Powell), and Karl Rove. It was a clear testimonial strategy to distract atten-
tion from a policy misstep, for the administration did belatedly retract
the “16 words” from the State of the Union, and acknowledge that they
were not in fact grounded in solid intelligence and should not have been
included as part of a rationale for war. This diversion strategy was evident
early; Joseph Wilson learned that the Vice President’s office has decided to
do a “workup” on him—look at who he was and his agenda (Wilson 441,
Plame 228). Dick Cheney famously and ludicrously described Wilson’s
pro bono trip to Niger (a deeply impoverished country) as a “junket”
arranged by his wife. Belatedly, evidence of this party line (as repeated by
Karl Rove and Cheney aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby in eight different con-
versations with reporters over the course of a week) was discovered in the
Fitzgerald investigation; Time reporter Matt Cooper’s email to his editor
phrases the testimonial case baldly: “[Rove said] Wilson’s wife, who appar-
ently works at the agency … authorized the trip … Not only the genesis of
the trip is flawed an[d] suspect, but so is the report” (McClellan 258). The
fact that Cooper’s notes mimic what was in Novak’s column substantiate
the idea that similar conversations, and a similar theme or line of argumen-
tation, was being disseminated to multiple reporters. Most directly, at the
156 K. ADKINS
very moment National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was refusing

to publish a National Intelligence Estimate for reporters who were ques-
tioning the case for the Iraq invasion, “President Bush had already agreed
to ‘declassification’ of parts of the NIE so that Vice President Cheney or
his top aide Scooter Libby could use them to make the administration’s
case with selected reporters” (McClellan 172). In other words, classified
information could be used for prosecutorial reasons, but not on defense.
This episode also happened during the highly contentious run-up to the
2004 election, in which George W. Bush narrowly won reelection. Both
Republicans and Democrats seized upon the Plame scandal to demon-
strate the weaknesses of the opposing party. Late in Bush’s second term,
Lewis Libby was convicted on four counts of perjury, obstruction of jus-
tice, and making false statements. While President Bush commuted the
prison term, he did not issue full clemency (i.e. vacate the convictions).
There are two relevant moves in this sordid affair that are relevant for
the scholars of gossip. First is the moving of the political goalposts. The
immediate White House response to Wilson’s challenge of policy is to make
this a Wilson problem instead of a fact problem. We have seen this pre-
viously, with the Pluralist’s Guide/Gourmet Report scandal in philosophy.
This makes the issue personal, not institutional. This move demonstrates
the falseness of Fricker’s separation between testimonial and hermeneutic
injustice. Hermeneutic injustice (failure to recognize ideas as legitimate) can
be disguised or distorted by testimonial injustice (discredit the speaker). If
our failing to understand or recognize an idea as legitimate can be excused
because we discredit the speaker of the idea, that reinforces the connec-
tion and overlap between these two concepts, not their separation. The idea
and the speaker are one. Secondly, and equally, noted by the commentators
and biographers, however, is who was tarred by the accusation of gossip
(Lewis Libby) and who was not (Karl Rove, who was widely regarded as
instrumental to the Bush White House). Karl Rove’s ability to keep his own
hands clean during his 20-year history of waging these whisper campaigns
speaks to the ways in which gossip’s indirection can be dangerous. What’s
known as “classic Rove” is his ability to have the leaking and whispering
being attributed to third parties, not to Rove himself. Empowered gossip, to
be successful, cannot be recognized as such, but must be invisible. Indeed,
Rove himself defends the necessity of this tactic; a seminar he ran for College
Republicans in 1972 gave them this lesson from the emerging Watergate
scandal: “[scandal was not] a reason to avoid campaign espionage, but … a
caution to keep it secret” (Moore and Slater, Rove Exposed, 85).
Karl Rove has a long history of using gossip and rumor to win elections
and silence critics. Virtually all detailed articles or biographies of Rove (as
well as newspaper reporting on him throughout his career) make refer-
ence to his propensity for sneaky tactics, starting from his initial politi-
cal campaigns, when he was an 18-year-old college student. In particular,
his employment of whispering campaigns (directly, and indirectly, in the
form of push polls) has been a feature of several of the close races he’s
managed. To reprise briefly: John McCain, in the 2000 South Carolina
presidential primary, was the target of flyers and push polls falsely alleg-
ing that he’d fathered an illegitimate child of color; Ann Richards, in her
1994 Texas gubernatorial reelection race, faced persistent rumors about
her sexual orientation; Mark White, Texas Governor, faced accusations
that his staff planted a bug in Rove’s office during the tight 1986 gov-
ernor’s race, when all facts (such as the only six-hour life of the battery
in the bug) indicated that Rove himself had done this; Mark Kennedy, a
1994 candidate for the Alabama Supreme Court, was tarred via law school
gossip as a pedophile (in fact he ran a children’s charity, so there were PR
photos of him holding hands with kids at the charity). Note that all of
these whispering campaigns were obviously personal (and false) in their
content; these allegations couldn’t be made publicly and directly. The
whispering campaigns were acknowledged for their effectiveness inter-
nally: Bush’s media strategist during his race for the Texas governorship
said “it worked. It was always talked about. It was a subterranean text
of the campaign” (Moore and Slater, Architect, 39). The “subterranean”
qualifier there is crucial: when gossip is done by the empowered, it must
be invisible (or not directly connected to those in power) to be effective,
otherwise they lose credibility.
But since our interest here is not merely on those who source gossip but
those who receive and spread it, what’s equally clear and equally problem-
atic is that many practitioners of political gossip seem to have a finely cali-
brated internal measuring stick for the market value of gossip. An unkind
commentator might analogize this to the practice of chicken- sexing.
Several regular users of the leak or background system (Robert Novak,
Richard Armitage, Mary Matalin) differentiate between what they call
“just gossip” or “merely gossip,” or stuff from the Washington rumor
mill (e.g. things that aren’t to be trusted, and certainly not used, sim-
ply entertaining conversational fodder), as opposed to leaks they will use,
named as leaks. Indeed, Gail Collins’ observation that “reporting the fact
that rumors exist” became standard Washington practice in the 1980s,
158 K. ADKINS
and suggests how flimsy and self-serving this distinction is (218). Bob
Novak praises Rove as a credible source, because “he did not dispense
state secrets, confidential political plans, or salacious gossip” (Moore and
Slater, Bush’s Brain, 77). This is patently absurd, given Rove’s history, but
mostly relevantly, reveals Novak’s selective and self-serving sense of when
something is or isn’t gossip (when it will be used in a column). Being
tagged a non-gossiper gives one credibility. Geneva Overholser, former
chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, reaffirms this view, describing some of
the Plame conversations as “just gossip going around” (Moore and Slater,
Bush’s Brain, 97). Equally oddly, some of these practitioners are precisely
the ones who most credulously used the Rove/Libby leaks on Plame to
discredit Wilson. Ari Fleischer (Bush spokesperson) and Richard Armitage
(deputy to Secretary of State Powell) both repeated the Plame allegation to
reporters (Bob Woodward, David Gregory, John Dickerson). Woodward
described this as “just gossip” (Plame Wilson 256). Judith Miller describes
the Plame story as “juicy gossip, a conversation opener, and possibly even
a good story” (243). The progression in Miller’s description is striking.
Juicy gossip is casual, ornamental. A conversation opener—this reference
comes in the midst of Miller’s description of the challenge of working with
anonymous sources—suggests that she sees good gossip as transactional,
a means by which to soften up sources and get them talking. Gossip has
utilitarian, if indirect value. If gossip is also “possibly a good story,” some-
thing to investigate, then it has intrinsic value. She notes that “one offi-
cial I interviewed described Wilson’s trip as a boondoggle,” which both
echoes language coming from the Vice President’s office (he scribbled
“junket” on the side of Wilson’s op-ed), and strains credulity, given the
difference in luxury between Niger and Washington, DC. But if the story
is both juicy gossip and a good story, then the shiftiness of the gossip tag
becomes plain. Again, it’s only “just” gossip when it doesn’t get directly
used in an article.
This seems a plain example of shared reality bias. “Everyone” agrees
on what is or isn’t gossip, and who is or isn’t a gossip, even when these
are used selectively and shiftily: not calling Rove a gossip, yet taking his
leaks endlessly; Richard Armitage being described as a gossip, and equally
clearly being regularly pumped by reporters for information that they will
later use. Fricker’s primary example of hermeneutical injustice is sexual
harassment, and she treats it additively. Before the naming of harassment
as sexual harassment, women being harassed had no language to charac-
terize their experiences and the effects, and harassers and enablers had no
way of conceptualizing the injustice. Anderson notes that the transforma-

tion isn’t simply adding a term, an additive approach to experience, but
something like a Kuhnian paradigm shift—though she doesn’t use those
words, and calls it a cumulative approach. Here Anderson’s observation
fits with Judith Butler’s concept of rogue viewpoints (2009), the idea that
“under certain conditions, certain kinds of questions cannot be posed” or
can only be posed after conflict that recognizes ideas as initially unsayable
(776–777). This ideas suggests that in some situations (she is speaking of
high-stakes situations like those in states of war or national identity being
challenged), we simply cannot recognize some ideas or observations as
ideas worth thinking or saying. They do not fit our recognition of the
thinkable. This was self-evidently the case in 2003; the nation was mired
in a war that was failing to meet optimistic expectations for speedy success,
and was earning it political damage around the globe. The accompanying
presidential debate was almost entirely focused on issues on national secu-
rity, prime among them being the contention of whether or not it would
be disastrous to change executives in a time of war. Critics of the war
were regularly challenged on their patriotism. This coheres with a criticism
several commentators (notably Rebecca Mason and Linda Martin Alcoff)
frame of Fricker: a too-limited understanding of hermeneutic injustice, in
which it is agentless and purely structural, both diminishes the resources
of the marginalized (Mason 295) and limits possible responses (Alcoff
and Anderson). In particular, Alcoff’s closing challenge that “hermeneu-
tic democracy might yield new worlds, and not merely new words” (136)
demonstrates the value of Butler’s challenge. The sayable and unsayable
are not merely a digital relationship—we add a single concept to our epis-
temic vocabulary, but a paradigmatic one—we see and weigh ideas and
pieces of evidence differently, we make different connections than pre-
viously. Following the rogue viewpoint, as Wilson was, meant that his
viewpoint had to be discredited. Granting Wilson a wide audience would
challenge too many viewpoints that were already exhibiting strain. Plame
Wilson’s viewpoint and credibility were merely collateral damage.
The surprising longevity of Rove’s employment of this tactic is par-
ticularly troublesome in light of Fricker’s analysis of two aspects of epis-
temic trustworthiness: competence and sincerity (45). It may be clear
that Rove has a career of epistemic competence behind and ahead of him.
His knowledge of political and statistical arcana is widely admired, even
by his opponents, and has led to many remarkable and counter-intuitive
accurate electoral predictions—if also a few equally spectacular misfires.
160 K. ADKINS
However, it should be equally clear that he is epistemically insincere: he,

or his associates, will say whatever they need to get a win. Indeed, he’s
publicly recognized as employing gossip, yet excused for it: “Karl Rove has
gotten an unwritten pass on President Bush’s ban on gossip,” observed
one Washington insider early in Bush’s presidency (Watters 71). More
surprisingly, Scott McClellan, the Bush Cabinet member most publicly
humiliated by a Rove whispering campaign (roundly dismissed as stupid
for lying to the press, though in his defense, it was clear that he had been
lied to by multiple White House staffers), actually defends these tactics
when employed in a campaign by minimizing them merely as “tough elec-
tion campaigns” as opposed to what he experienced (what he describes as
a tactic “seeping into the conduct of governance” [44]).
This is where accountability matters. Allen’s idea of accountability rests
on a concept of aspired-to integrity and consistency; we are accountable
to people with whom we have long-standing commitments in part because
they expect predictable and consistent behavior and statements from us.
Allen is not naïve; she recognizes that we will fail in this expectation. But
that doesn’t mean the expectation has no purchase on our actions or
our statements; it merely carried forward an expectation that we address
inconsistencies when they occur, with those who have some expectation or
attachment to us. If we extend this idea to how we understand our expec-
tations of trustworthiness, carving out expectations from stated norms
of behavior when they serve our other desires—a journalist’s desire for a
hot scoop, an administration official’s desire for reelection and concomi-
tant job security—become obvious special pleading. The Plame scandal
was damaging to the Bush administration’s reputation largely because it
undermined the stated image of the Bush administration as disciplined,
businesslike, and ethical.
Similarly, one wonders why some of Rove’s rhetorical moves—dismiss-
ing Democrats as unpatriotic for being skeptical of the Iraq invasion—
didn’t meet with more skepticism at the time they were proffered. To
be sure, Rove’s ability to put a layer of deniability between himself and
a sneaky tactic gives him ostensive deniability; however, what’s equally
obvious is that when every significant campaign one runs is noteworthy
for its accompanying underhanded, dishonest, and vicious whispering
campaigns, such deniability is all but worthless. Rove’s own attempts at
deniability are thin: to the Fitzgerald grand jury, he initially denies talk-
ing to Matt Cooper about Plame. When the Cooper email is uncovered,
he amends his testimony and states that, “remembering any particular
White House phone call is like grabbing one drop out of a rain shower”
(Moore and Slater, Bush’s Brain, 103). However, such claiming of mem-
ory failure from a political brain so wired as to recall minute specifics
about demographic voting patterns in the 1896 presidential race is hard
to believe. Indeed, a cynic might make much of Bush’s first response to
Scott McClellan to the revelation of Plame’s identity: “Karl didn’t do it”
(McClellan 183). This kind of public skepticism could do much to tem-
per some of these rhetorically underhanded moves. Judith Butler offers a
helpful reminder of the value of skepticism toward conventional wisdom,
and generosity toward critics: “when we identify and cast out the rogue
viewpoint, we miss the point that every critical question is initially rogue in
relation to existing conventions” (795). The absence of mainstream press
scrutiny of these claims and behaviors at the time demonstrates the way in
which political debate was narrow.
However, the firmness of the dominant paradigm is such that, even
after successful prosecutions over the Plame outing, what finally cost Rove
some credibility has nothing to do with his long-standing and publicly
acknowledged penchant for whispering campaigns, but his competence as
a prognosticator: his widely off-the-mark predictions for the 2012 elec-
tion was mocked even by FOX host Megyn Kelly on the night of the
election. What is worrisome about this development is that it speaks to
how entrenched gossip is as an invisible political tactic for use by the
empowered.
The rumor tactic was used explicitly against at least one other critic of
the invasion (thus diminishing legitimacy to the defense that a personal
attack is justified because of the person). Scott Ritter, former Marine and
the last weapons inspector in Iraq, raised concerns around the likelihood
of Saddam Hussein having a weapons program, and was the target of a
“Rove-like whispering campaign,” among other things, being compared
to Jane Fonda (who notoriously criticized the US invasion of Vietnam and
earned the derisive moniker “Hanoi Jane”); wags asked when his exer-
cise video was going to be released (Bush’s Brain 316). It is important
to stress the political effects here: when reputations are besmirched, this
silences not just the speakers (they are diminished) but also those who are
or may be sympathetic to their views. This is the flip side of John Stuart
Mill’s prescient observation about polarizing and vicious political speech
in On Liberty, where he suggests that disinterested observers will be able
to separate the epistemic wheat from the chaff in vicious political talk.
His position is that the vicious talk isn’t directly necessary, merely an odi-
162 K. ADKINS
ous side effect of a free society. But the vicious talk, for Mill, is indirectly
necessary; it happens publicly, and fair-minded and moderate people will
be able to respond moderately. The problem with this analysis is that it
makes too little of the effect that power differences can have on talk, and
the ways in which the press and conversation aren’t spread neutrally and
evenly across all grounds. If the kind of disparity I’m arguing for exists,
where those already enjoying social and economic purchase get excessive
amounts of credibility and attention span no matter how repugnant their
views, it seems reasonable to contend that moderate bystanders would
have a hard time even hearing the dissenters. The dominant view takes up
all the oxygen in the room. And while Mill himself was all too personally
familiar with the persistence and power of gossip—his relationship with
Harriet Taylor was the talk of literary London for two decades and so lurid
that he retreated from much of public life—the fact that it had no effect on
his reputation for political or philosophical competence makes it perhaps
less surprising that he would be unwilling to limit speech. However, as this
more current example demonstrates, it seems reasonable to speculate that
those who watch reputations get savaged for raising critical viewpoints
would be less likely to enter the political conversation, lest they suffer the
same fate.
Fricker’s specific account of credibility excess and credibility deficit has
a relevant application here. She takes pains to note that credibility is not
something that is a good to be distributed; in other words, the injustice
does not stem from someone getting an unfair amount of credibility (more
than one deserves or needs; 19). Credibility is not a good that is in finite
amounts; one can always learn more. For Fricker, the concept of excess
and deficit apply as epistemological—the excess or deficit is dispropor-
tionate to the amount of evidence or knowledge one has (one is wronged
as a knower, Fricker stresses; 20). She characterizes credibility excess as
being erroneously “puffed up” based on prejudice (assumptions that
come from one’s status). We can apply this directly to Rove. Particularly
given his long-standing reputation as someone who is willing to conduct
whispering campaigns on behalf of a candidate (and not simply whispering
campaigns, but whispering campaigns featuring blatant falsehoods), his
epistemic credibility should be on exceptionally shaky ground. However,
his status (someone who can win campaigns) gives him unearned credibil-
ity. To the contrary, this seems to be a no-lose strategy for Rove; as the old
adage (which is repeated by some of Rove’s opponents) goes, “if you’re
explaining, you’re losing.” To address publicly the whispering campaigns,
as the only possible way to combat them, in fact simply publicizes them to
even more people.
Fricker’s point is that prejudice leads us, in some cases, to undeservedly
grant or withhold credibility to someone. (She is careful to exclude simple
error here.) Karl Rove has an enormous amount of prejudice in his favor,
that comes not simply from his various social group memberships (white,
heterosexual, ostensibly Christian, conservative, wealthy—what Fricker
calls identity prejudice) but also from his past track record.
Indeed, my basic contention about gossip—that it is most valuable as
an epistemic and political tactic by those who experience blockages to
knowledge, whether because of their social position or credibility, time or
information stressors in the situation, or because of circumstances of the
situation (e.g. circumstances where information is tightly controlled)—
clearly does not apply to Karl Rove, or to his associates. They are all well-
sourced and connected members of the Washington elite; they do not
suffer from people refusing to take them seriously. So their resorting to
anonymous tactics should raise alarm bells with journalists, as opposed to
casual excitement about “juicy gossip.” Indeed, it’s striking in this episode
that the person in the less-empowered position made his charges openly
and directly, whereas the response was indirect, anonymous, and aimed
straight at credibility, as opposed to substance. Joseph Wilson was not
a particularly well-known public figure at the time he wrote his opinion
piece, and was working to establish a consulting business, thus needing the
goodwill of Washington political figures. His opinion piece is descriptive
and transcriptive—what he did when, what he did and didn’t see—and
only ventures into conclusion in the final 2 paragraphs of a 20-paragraph
piece.19 Even these conclusions are basic; he asks for the administration
to release its evidence for the claims of uranium, so that Congress can
examine them. While it is clear that the substance of this conclusion is
strong—he raises the question that intelligence was twisted or ignored—
his conclusion is itself simply procedural, asking for public transparency
and oversight. By contrast, Matthew Cooper’s article in Time after the
op-ed’s publication explicitly notes that the Bush administration was tak-
ing “public and private” whacks at Wilson’s credibility and story. His
and Robert Novak’s column mentioning Plame’s status, of course, give
anonymity to the staffers attempting to discredit Wilson (whom we now
know to be Rove and Libby). Their columns work in hints and sugges-
tions; Novak describes Wilson’s report as being evaluated as “less than
definitive,” and it being “doubtful” that the report was seen by then-CIA
164 K. ADKINS
Chair George Tenet. Cooper notes that “government officials” privately

describe the Wilson trip as a “scheme cooked up by mid-level operatives,”
then immediately notes that Wilson’s wife works for the CIA in weapons
nonproliferation. In short, the journalists work in hints and suggestions,
never directly saying that Wilson lacks credibility, merely insinuating it
(according to their anonymous sources). Those in the most secure epis-
temic and social position get to elude accountability out of anonymity,
despite their many public sources of credibility. Is this justifiable?
5.6 Gossip, Leaking, and Anonymous Sourcing:

The Long and Wide View
As with the previous case studies, examining this gossip episode in its
context helps us illuminate why it is that empowered political gossip
endures and is defended. The specific context that’s most relevant to
the Plame scandal is the use of anonymous sources, particularly around
the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in the Iraq War.
How (or when) is anonymous sourcing different from gossip, and to
what extent do anonymous sources need to be accountable? Medina
gives us some helpful context here, when he discusses an act of either
random littering or ethnic aggression, depending on your purview. At
Vanderbilt University, following a 2005 fraternity party that featured a
roasted pig as part of the party menu, one drunken fraternity member left
the pig’s head on the steps of the Jewish student center campus (134).
In his discussion of this incident, the anonymity of the pig thrower, and
the concomitant privacy of the disciplinary process (due to federal pri-
vacy laws around student records [FERPA]) raise some concerns about
anonymity and accountability. Medina rightly notes that the university
administration’s handling of the case rested on accepting the student’s
claims of ignorance; the student claimed not to know that that build-
ing was a Jewish cultural center, that pigs had any special relevance or
importance to Jewish people, or that his act took place during the High
Holy Days, the most sacred period of the Jewish year (135). Medina, in
a move that is consistent with Allen’s analysis, suggests that such a claim
of ignorance is deeply problematic for the Vanderbilt community (more
so if the student in question was a senior, which is unknown, again due
to federal privacy laws). He rightly raises ways in which this statement/
action is not merely private or individual, but raises questions of epistemic
and ethical accountability to the Vanderbilt community (among other
communities), because “[i]t reveals that we are dealing with a social con-
text in which until recently people could live with the luxury of being
familiar with Christian symbols and utterly unfamiliar with all other reli-
gious and ethnic symbols” (138). This is a form of collective ignorance
that, in effect, the Vanderbilt administration is excusing into the future,
Medina persuasively argues.
The private and anonymous handling of this action, I would argue,
only amplifies this legitimation of collective ignorance; this action is being
written as only of interest or importance to the student in question, who
is treated as a totally private individual, despite having committed a very
public act of (at minimum) littering or vandalism, or (at maximum) an act
of ethnic and religious harassment. So anonymity, in this instance, is itself
problematic because it perpetuates not just individual ignorance and lack
of culpability but also social or collective ignorance and lack of culpability.
None of us are responsible, Medina argues, to meet a reasonable bar of
responsible social agency, such as knowing enough about the diversity of
the social world which we inhabit. Anonymity, in other words, provides an
unjustifiable cover, not just to bad actors but also, by extension, to their
community members. This example is small compared to the enormity of
a military invasion of a country, but it sketches out some of the dynamics
and dangers when anonymity is preserved. Particularly when the anonym-
ity is recognizable to us—when it reflects shared cultural assumptions, or
what Elizabeth Anderson calls a “shared reality bias”—anonymity, includ-
ing the anonymity of gossip, can extend epistemic and ethical harm.
While there is, to be sure, a basic disanalogy between academic admin-
istrators’ nervous handling of controversial student behavior and anony-
mous sourcing in newspapers, I see a family relationship in these issues
of anonymity and accountability. Medina’s implied, and uneasy, conclu-
sion, is that members of the Vanderbilt community have no choice but to
trust and accept the administration’s reading of the events—they have no
way of drawing their own conclusions or verifying information, because of
anonymity. This particular conclusion (that this act was utterly individual,
was totally disconnected to racist or anti-Semitic beliefs) also absolves
community members of responsibility (wrongly so, in Medina’s eyes); it is
the perhaps unintentional equivalent of a magician’s sleight of hand to dis-
tract attention from underlying issues. Anonymous sources in newspaper
stories, particularly stories about controversial governmental or political
moves, require a similar continuance of trust, and give information that
readers cannot verify or assess. Accountability, in other words, is most
166 K. ADKINS
c oncentrated and opaque in areas and issues where it should be more dif-
fuse and transparent.
To be clear, all leaking is not equal. There is a basic difference in terms
of agenda. The Pentagon Papers are a good example of justifiable leaking.
The 1971 release of the Papers (and the successful court battles waged by
the New York Times to continue their publication) demonstrates the basic
criteria. The leak was classic whistleblowing; anonymous sources released
information that was in the public interest. The case for the Vietnam
War was partially based on fraudulent or invented intelligence, such as
the covered-up and months-long attacks on North Vietnam before the
Tonkin Gulf incident in August 1964, which helped the administration
falsely present increased military resources as necessary for a response to
aggression (Sheehan et al. 240). In addition, strategic aims in the Johnson
administration—that the long-term goal of military action in North
Vietnam was to contain China’s power—were communicated in memos
in the Johnson administration, but never made public as a justification
for the war (Sheehan et al. 342). In 1971, when the toll of the war was
only increasing—military casualties were over 54,000 in January, when
the Papers were released (National Archives), and estimates of Vietnamese
casualties range from 1 million to 3 million (Hirschman, Preston, Loi,
807)—the revelation of this information propelled the anti-war movement,
and criticism of administration credibility, into greater levels of intensity.
The Papers’ sources’ need for anonymity is similarly clear-cut (authors
would lose employment if they publicly came forward). Interestingly, the
Papers’ origin—they were commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara—was also in anonymity; the RAND Corporation analysts were
promised anonymity during their research and authorship of the Papers
“so that they would be free to make judgments in the course of their writ-
ing” (Sheehan et al. x).
While the Pentagon Papers, and then of course the Washington Post’s
coverage of the Watergate crimes of the Nixon administration, were bench-
marks in anonymous sourcing in terms of publicity and public interest, it
has been a constant presence in newspapers, and dramatically increased
since the 1960s. A longitudinal analysis of the New York Times and the Los
Angeles Times (from 1885–1985) demonstrated that anonymous sources
were cited much more frequently after 1965, and that the caliber of the
sources become more centralized within government; what one could call
“unofficial official sources” (Barker-Plummer 20). Analyses of newspaper,
newsmagazine, and network television news stories in the 1980s found
rates of anonymous source usage at between 33 % and 80 %, depending on

the medium (Boeyink 234). Rates are higher when stories are more scan-
dalous: one analysis of anonymous sourcing in network news coverage of
the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal found over 70 % of news stories had anony-
mous sources (Esposito 7). Given that criteria for anonymous sourcing
are stated in stylebooks and media guides as strict in theory—anonymous
sourcing should be a last resort, when the story is important—there is
inexplicable dissonance between the stated norms of anonymous sourcing,
and its practice.
Not all leaks are so easy to understand. Critics of an administration
(who are themselves insiders) can leak information for reasons that aren’t
in the public interest. Or, as we see in the Plame scandal, those within
the administration can leak information that serves the administration’s
publicly stated agenda, but is extended beyond justification. Judith Miller,
then the star national security reporter at the New York Times, is a princi-
pal actor in this drama. Miller wrote several stories that heavily relied on
anonymous sources (some relying upon Ahmad Chalabi, the expatriate
head of the Iraqi National Congress who was on the payroll of the CIA),
and found herself at the center of the debate over the legitimacy of anony-
mous sourcing at the Times. Their striking apology for their war coverage,
“The Times and Iraq,” cited five articles as problematic or not meeting the
paper’s standards for source verification; Miller wrote or co-wrote three.
Miller, one of the reporters Libby talked to about Plame, was eventually
found in contempt of course and jailed for over three months because she
refused to testify about her source, citing First Amendment principles.
When Miller writes her memoir, she defends her reporting as necessar-
ily risky to get the story. She notes that since most of her informants could
have been fired for talking to her (as they had government classifications),
she had to cite them anonymously to get vitally important reporting out
there (199). But the value of context emerges here. For instance, Steven
Ritea observes in the American Journalism Review that the more accu-
rate Knight-Ridder news coverage of the fruitless hunt for WMD in Iraq
relied almost as heavily on anonymous sources as did the now-discredited
coverage in the New York Times. The difference, Ritea observes, is in who
was sourced anonymously. Knight-Ridder reporters made a point of talk-
ing with lower-level administration workers, whereas Times reporters,
notably Judith Miller, spoke with direct reports to President Bush and
Vice President Cheney. One Knight-Ridder reporter noted that talking
to first-level reports meant getting responses from people “pushing the
168 K. ADKINS
a dministration line,” whereas they “made a more conscious effort to talk

to people more in the bowels of government, who have a less political
approach to things.” In other words, gossip from lower-level sources can
in some cases be more reliable; you speak to people who have a direct
connection to what is going on, and less of a personal, political, or reputa-
tional stake to protect by careful phrasing or optimistic recasting of scant
information.
More directly, Miller has some of the same slippage on gossip that
Isikoff had during the Lewinsky scandal. She defends her national security
work as vital and in the national interest, but is missing the fact that the
leaks she laps up and for which she went to jail, were by her own descrip-
tion “juicy gossip.” Her defense on not giving Libby’s name, “I could
not answer questions from a grand jury about my discussion of top-secret
information without violating a pledge I had given Libby, who had given
me sensitive information in confidence” (243), sounds disingenuous, at
the least, when she simultaneously describes discussing this juicy item with
“just about everyone” (ibid.).
This is why it’s important to be careful when examining anonymous
sourcing. Jack Shafer, who tracks and documents anonymous sourcing,
excoriates uncritical sourcing, which increased in both the Times and the
Washington Post after each released statements in 2004 vowing to limit the
practice. He drily sums up the change as permitting anonymous sourc-
ing as long as sources are more elaborately identified (“an anonymous
source who has knowledge of the negotiations,” for instance). In his argu-
ment against sourcing, he identifies a skeptical worldview of politics and
the press, in which credibility increases with anonymity, as opposed to
decreasing. “Nearly all speeches, press conferences, press releases, inter-
views, and all other formal presentations are now thought by the press
to be clever lies. Meanwhile, back-corridor whisperings are thought to
be candid, spontaneous, surreptitious, and therefore true.” If this is the
case, it speaks ill of journalistic credibility, as it means journalists are ignor-
ing context. In other words, an off-the-record comment by an adminis-
tration aide that praises an initiative of the administration (or excoriates
the character of a critic of the administration) shouldn’t be assumed to
be more credible simply because it’s anonymous; it serves the interest of
those in power. A useful comparison here might be to Patricia Turner and
Gary Fine’s work on race rumors; they identify what they call “Topsy/
Eva” rumors wherein the same basic plot structure and characters fill a
rumor, but its meaning and importance are mirror opposites from each
other, depending on whether it is being told in a white community or

an African-American community. Their research around rumors spread
about O.J. Simpson, Rodney King, and Susan Smith indicate that similar
rumors in white communities emphasize violent black behavior, whereas
in African-American communities, the rumors emphasize the violence of
police toward African Americans (21–22). What is worrisome about this
development is that it indicates the ways in which worldviews become
incommensurable and irreconcilable. This is the dynamic that Jack Shafer
is describing.
Both the Plame leaks and the Pentagon Papers leaks were leaks about
the legitimacy of war; one could hardly imagine a more crucial topic of
national political conversation. But the crucial distinction between the off-
the-record leaks was that Plame’s identity was leaked by a ruling admin-
istration in an effort to discredit criticism of its acts; they were acts of
self-protection by an administration that had ample public and transpar-
ent defenses and chains of communication, working to constrict public
debate. By contrast, the Pentagon Papers were leaked by critics of an
administration conducting a war based on flawed, secretive analysis; they
were acts to enlarge a public debate, not contract it. Margaret Sullivan,
public editor at the Times, describes gratuitous use of anonymous sourc-
ing in words that should ring familiar by now. Unjustified anonymous
quotations, she argues, “allow people to speculate, offer personal criticism
or get a self-serving (often political) message out there without taking any
responsibility for it” (“Anonywatch Chap. 2”). This is a good description
of what gossip is at its worst. And to be clear, this usage of anonymous
sourcing, as a veil for personal or political attacks, is explicitly forbidden
in the Times’ own style guide, and indeed, it notes that reporters should
attempt to gauge the motives of sources offering anonymous leaks, and
make them explicit (if possible) in reporting, so as to avoid agenda-driven
coverage (187).
But the shared reality bias emerges here as a limitation; conventions
of when something requires anonymity, or doesn’t, and when it serves a
political agenda, or doesn’t, require teasing out. The Times sketches an
overly broad brush in their guide, noting that anonymity is most often
required for diplomacy, intelligence, or the criminal justice system (none
of which would seem to apply to the Plame case), and uses a ludicrous
straw person for an example of unjustified anonymity (a doorman citing
when a party ended [22]). This limited discussion implicitly condones
anonymity in stories about foreign policy, and also gives no guidance
170 K. ADKINS
for why someone might want anonymity, or why it might or might not
be reasonable to grant such a request. Absence any explicit discussion,
reporters are left to operate by convention and culture. As has been amply
documented, this leads to a permissive attitude toward anonymity that
only exacerbates gossip as unexamined news. In other words, while exco-
riating gossip and tabloid journalism when it comes to scandal reporting,
what anonymous sourcing (when abused) represents is the official legiti-
mation of gossip, and its silent insertion throughout mainstream news
coverage. Sullivan points out that the attempt to describe anonymous
sources more, and cite a reason for their anonymity, is at best a partial
solution: unworthy reasons are used (she notes several examples of people
being quoted anonymously because they didn’t want to embarrass them-
selves or a family member), and the fuller descriptions aren’t meaningfully
fuller than those previously used. Some skepticism, and an eye to context,
is relevant here.
5.7 Conclusion
What, finally, can we conclude from this long and occasionally unappetiz-
ing travelogue through American political gossip? Initially, there is good
evidence to conclude that the double standard we’ve seen before in gos-
sip is pervasive in politics; when we are spreading unchallenging stories
that reflect what “everyone” already thinks, we are either not gossiping
at all or we’re simply passing time. But when somebody is challenging
a popular or received view, gossip is no longer merely casual conversa-
tion; it becomes malicious, dangerous, and a menace. This double stan-
dard is chronic, and both epistemically and politically lazy. It helps us
reinforce our previous assumptions, and allows us to perpetuate shared
reality bias by minimizing or diminishing the credibility of those who
challenge our assumptions. The most recent US presidential campaign
shows some evidence of a promising new direction. South Carolina has
been the home of the most irresponsible whispering campaigns in the last
few presidential cycles. But in 2016, one of its prominent newspapers,
the Charlotte Post and Courier, debuted an interactive website, “Whisper
Campaign,” that asks citizens to submit examples of push polls, deceptive
signs, mailers, or phone calls. The website tracks and follows them, with
the presumption that making the whispering campaigns more transparent
may provide some disincentive for campaigns to engage in underhanded
commentary without accountability (“Whisper Campaign”). Of the 46
incidents reported, some of them recalled earlier whisper campaigns in

South Carolina.
The move from the Post and Courier recognizes the value that social
accountability can have against purely legal arguments. As José Medina
contends, democracy relies upon talking as much as it does on voting.
Gossip is simply the most basic example of a kind of talking we do that
is both literally and metaphorically sotto voce; it is often whispered,
repeated confidentially or anonymously, and only elliptically refer-
enced in the press as a serious topic of conversation (often referenced
as something to criticize or condemn). It is often a running sub-theme
to explicit political discussions about who we are and what we value.
But when it erupts into public prominence, as our examples have dem-
onstrated, popular and scholarly reactions are all too often simple or
digital; gossip is neatly opposed to journalism as bad is to good, devi-
ant to responsible, trivial to serious. Doing so allows us to replicate a
kind of Manichean politics and journalism; we assign and argue about
simple heroes and villains to conflicts. Anita Allen’s arguments about
how accountability should balance our debates about privacy are fun-
damentally social as well as legal; while she makes several claims about
how privacy is legally adjudicated, her legal argument is premised upon
an argument about our underlying social obligations to one another that
have bearing on us whether or not we are seeking advice of counsel. She
contends that accountability is a mark of respect; we matter enough to
each other (and, by implication, to ourselves) that giving an account of
ourselves to those who matter to us is an epistemic and moral responsi-
bility (196). Accountability isn’t simply the mark of an ongoing relation-
ship; it demands intelligence, rationality, and dialogic engagement. It is
a high social bar to clear.
Allen’s pragmatic theory of accountability has a family relationship to
Medina’s epistemology of resistance, not least because both are premised
upon points of dissonance and conflict that are recognized and negotiated
explicitly, over time, and imperfectly. Neither Allen nor Medina argues
for an idealized consistency or agreement across diverse communities;
they advocate for the recognition of communities of disagreement, and
means by which those disagreement are engaged respectfully. The disjunct
between how American political argument ought to happen, and its actual
practice, demonstrates a kind of epistemic and political immaturity. Simple
political narratives that displace and trivialize complicating political gos-
sip and that defer responsibility for political knowledge via anonymous
172 K. ADKINS
sourcing, makes it more, not less, difficult for us to sustain the kind of
direct democratic discussion both Allen and Medina advocate.
Notes
1. For those unfamiliar with US electoral minutia, Thomas Eagleton
was a popular and effective Senator from Missouri, who was nomi-
nated to serve as George McGovern’s Vice President, absent vet-
ting, for the 1972 presidential race. His bouts of depression and
hospitalization were revealed in the press, and led to his resigna-
tion from the ticket and embarrassment all around. This story is
effectively told in Theodore White, The Making of the President,
1972 (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
2. Andrea Friedman (2014) notes the irony that the chief architect of
the Red Scare, Senator Joseph McCarthy, used gossip as a main
strategy for spreading panic, and was ultimately brought down by
gossip (208–210).
3. 31 Roosevelt Longworth’s lifelong friend, rival, and cousin
Eleanor Roosevelt, while carefully managing a public reputation
for social justice and seriousness, herself used the tools of gossip
when convenient. She regularly disparaged Roosevelt Longworth
in letters to friends and husband FDR for her sexual behavior or
lack of purpose (Peyser and Dwyer 51, 98, 101, 283). Ironically,
when both women were writing newspaper columns, it was
Eleanor Roosevelt’s column that was praised for its “frank and
gossipy” style; whereas Roosevelt Longworth’s columns were
excoriated for their “dreary” discussion of politics, and compared
to legal opinions of Supreme Court Justices (208). Given Eleanor
Roosevelt’s long and extremely productive public career advocat-
ing for progressive social policies, this suggests that part of her
success may have due to her ability to use the rhetoric and lan-
guage of gossip to present herself as a non-threatening public
figure.
4. Woods’ gossip, which she was attempted to post as a notice on a
church door à la Martin Luther, was that the officials made and
sold mirkens (pubic wigs designed to conceal the effects of vene-
real disease) (17). In deeply religious colonial Virginia, an attack
on public figures and parish leaders for this sort of commerce
would have been extremely destructive.
5. This isn’t simply a phenomenon of the Anglophone world; Germans

produced anti-gossip posters during World War I (Taylor 69).
6. No more than 42 % of the civilian female population worked dur-
ing the 1960s, contrasted to 82 % of men (Bureau of Labor
Statistics, Table 2), and their work was far more likely to be part-
time than men’s work (Bureau of Labor Statistics, Tables 22–23).
In the mid-1960s, the Women’s Division of the Labor Bureau still
officially discouraged married women or mothers from working
outside the home (Collins [2009] 69–70).
7. Indeed, Franklin’s political clout was in part earned through his
business success as a printer, which he developed in part due to his
pseudonymous facility with gossip. This will be discussed more in
Chap. 5, but Franklin purchased his first paper from his prior
employer, Samuel Keimer, after Franklin waged an extended, witty
attack on Keimer’s character and pomposity in a rival paper.
Franklin’s barbed columns were written as “The Busy-Body,” not
under his own name. Franklin published a defense of gossip in the
Gazette in 1732, attributing to gossip political virtues (exposing
overly ambitious politicians), moral virtues (the value of shame,
and indirect self-knowledge when gossip gets back to its source), as
well as “knowledge of all mankind” (Isaacson 73–74). But two
years prior, he publishes under his own name tips for good conver-
sation that includes a clear excoriation of gossip as “ill-natured”
and “ungenerous,” done by “pests of society” (Isaacson 89). Given
Franklin’s well-developed reputation as a gossip, this sort of direct
hypocrisy seems rather sharper and more conveniently self-serving
than what Shklar praises as a political virtue.
8. Indeed, many Republican members of Congress who sponsored or
argued for various anti-LGBT pieces of legislation through the
1980s and 1990s on the grounds of “the defense of traditional mar-
riage” were later revealed themselves to be adulterers, closeted gay
men, or more shockingly in one case, a serial sexual molester of the
young men in his care as a wrestling coach and high school teacher.
Nonetheless, these Congress members had families who were
prominently displayed in their campaign promotional materials.
9. This analysis is consistent with Colin Wilson’s (1985) observation
that the “scandal-personality” has a wide gap between his private
life and his public persona (5); it is the cultivated image used to
advance a career and public aim that is undone in scandals.
174 K. ADKINS
10. C. Edwin Baker goes so far as to compare gossip’s work in political

norm resistance to Constant’s “liberty of the ancients,” a vigorous
participation in the use and misuse of political power (2004: 262,
fn 145).
11. In an interesting footnote, this tactic cuts both ways. Jerry

Falwell, who transparently used the Bakker scandal to gain con-
trol of the PTL machine, himself showed a selective attention to
biblical prohibitions on gossip. During the April meetings after
Bakker’s resignation, when leaders met to decide the fate and
leadership of PTL, Falwell persistently and explicitly raised long-
standing gossip of Bakker’s rumored bisexuality as a way of
keeping Bakker from returning to lead PTL (Martz and Carroll
143, 147). Indeed, Falwell complained about the media’s reti-
cence to investigate the rumors on Bakker’s bisexuality (Martz
and Carroll 152).
12. Roberts, of course, staunchly denied that this was a threat, arguing
that “[b]eing called home is what it’s all about.” As Martz and
Carroll drily note, however, “when he first reported God’s ultima-
tum, [Roberts] wasn’t hoping that his flock would hold back their
dollars to hasten his time of bliss” (49).
13. Referred to by President Clinton as the “Sludge Report” (Starr
Report 90).
14. John Peters (1999) calls our attention to the irony that the Warren
family owned the only major Boston newspaper to include a gossip
column (175, footnote 115).
15. It’s worth noting that this was a deeply controversial practice, with
many in the GLBT movement (as it was then known) strongly
objecting to it on moral or ideological grounds.
16. For some recent examples of this phenomenon, see Harwood et al.
(2012), Burdsey (2011), and Yosso et al. (2009).
17. This isn’t simply an American phenomenon. Melanie Tebbutt’s
excellent examination of working-class gossip in nineteenth-
century England notes that much of women’s domestic work was
done outdoors (cleaning the inside and outside of the house, doing
laundry), and hence they were constantly under informal and
persistent community surveillance, even extending to discussions
of bruises as stemming from domestic violence (80–84).
18. See footnotes 153 (270), and 181 (271), but especially footnote
34 (262), where no fewer than five of Lewinsky’s confidants are
asked about the exact nature and timing of the escalation of the
Clinton/Lewinsky affair, with the careful qualifier of one’s testi-
mony (being merely “pretty sure” of sexual reciprocity) duly noted.
19. To be clear, some of Wilson’s rhetoric after the Plame scandal
erupted was much less studied and moderate. Most famously, he
fantasized in front of a public audience about Karl Rove being
frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. But crucially,
his rhetoric didn’t ratchet up until after he began publicly respond-
ing to the whispering campaign, which had clearly negative effects
on his household and marriage. His rhetoric becomes more under-
standable when viewed in this context.
CHAPTER 6
Weaponized Gossip
We are in a small school for girls. One girl, angry at being punished by
a teacher, starts a false rumor about her teachers having an illicit lesbian
affair. The rumor spreads immediately to both girls and parents, due to
one wealthy and socially prominent grandmother; many parents pull their
children from the school, which imperils its existence and the financial
security of the hardworking and dedicated teachers. The teacher whose
reputation has been unjustly ruined, after spending months essentially
hiding from the public, commits suicide; her friend (whose heterosexual
engagement has ended over her fiancé’s mistrust) confronts the powerful
grandmother who spread the false gossip, and condemns her viciousness
and hypocrisy. This, of course, is a brief summary of Lillian Hellman’s
explosive play The Children’s Hour (1934). While I generally do not
explore literary sources in this discussion of gossip, Hellman’s play is a
good starting point for a discussion of what I will be referring to as weap-
onized gossip. It is effective in part not only because it is so widely known
but also because it so crisply illustrates why it is people see gossip and
rumor as negative and destructive. The gossip spread at the girls’ school is
factually incorrect1 and enormously costly. It is initiated out of malice and
revenge, by a character (Mary) who is chronically unsympathetic, some-
one who lies, manipulates, and commits violence. The gossip is spread,
the play insinuates, in part due to other agendas (Mary’s grandmother,
Mrs. Tilford, is greatly concerned with social appearance and reputation).

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47840-1_6
178 K. ADKINS
Mrs. Tilford spreads the gossip immediately and credulously; she does
not ask questions or talk to anyone involved. It directly leads to a sui-
cide, as well as the closure of a school, actions which cannot be undone.
In short, this play efficiently illustrates the social and moral dangers so
many people associate with gossip; it fixes false and malicious attention on
innocent people whose lives can be irrevocably damaged in the process.
But secondly, I think that the context of the play, its construction, and its
internal dynamics help us to see some of the factors that contribute to gos-
sip becoming damaging and dangerous. Gossip, as I’ve contended, isn’t
automatically positive or negative; it is the product of intimacy and trust.
But gossip can become negative—can be an effective force for reputation
destruction—in part because of the context in which it occurs. Excessive
gossip, overly negative gossip, paranoid gossip are, I believe, inevitable
consequences of avoidable features of our social world, such as excessive
insularity, turbulent power structures, an absence of trust in official or
reliable information. Recognizing these features, how they appear over
and over again in episodes of toxic gossip, and what they signify, is a
worthwhile task.
This chapter marks a turn in my exploration of gossip. The previous
chapters have largely been defenses of gossip; what gossip accomplishes
(epistemically or politically) that we either ignore or undermine, and how
we undermine gossip by rewriting or transvaluing it. Put another way, we
often fail to see gossip clearly, because we are too invested in the myths
surrounding it. We succumb to the mere word and its connotations, many
of which are comparatively recent. In particular, we ignore the ways in
which personal credibility isn’t simply a static quality to be observed, but
a variable asset that people can, consciously or unconsciously, manage.
Changing one’s perception of a speaker’s credibility changes how we eval-
uate their ideas. Recognizing the pervasiveness of gossip, especially by
those with epistemic credibility, challenges assumptions of blanket destruc-
tiveness. By looking at gossip episodes as they happen, and in particular,
by comparing them to their immediate context and historical analogs, I
believe we can come to a clearer picture of gossip; we can see gossip in
all its virtues and vices. The previous chapters have largely done recovery
work, demonstrating virtues of gossip that get no recognition, or damned
with faint praise. But of course, gossip isn’t always or automatically posi-
tive; indeed, the Valerie Plame case study from the previous chapter dem-
onstrated the way in which gossip can be a valuable channel to distract or
divert discussion (get people focused on a side issue), or an instrument
WEAPONIZED GOSSIP 179
of indirect or hidden agendas. In other words, there’s a kind of dishon-

esty in some gossip, generally referred to as “whispering campaigns,” that
makes it particularly morally problematic. More generally, as Linda Radzik
phrases it (2016), “the advantages of gossip are primarily for the people
who are doing the gossiping, while the harms of gossip are done largely
to those who are gossiped about. We cannot justify harming one person
simply by noting benefits to others” (191). Her concern is well stated.
Even if, as I’ve argued, gossip is frequently a valuable epistemic and politi-
cal tool, particularly for people who are marginalized, this does not give us
carte blanche for gossip. It’s worth examining gossip that is destructive to
better understand what it is, why it occurs, and why it is destructive. That
is the focus of this chapter. What is weaponized gossip? What are some of
the features or circumstances that facilitate it? How do we recognize and
resist it? To be explicit, my aim in this chapter is not to provide definitive
distinguishing features of weaponized gossip. The organic nature of gos-
sip, its agrarian means of being spread, means that one could find similar
stories or accounts with comparable features that have variant results; one
results in a reputation tarnishing, the other doesn’t. Rather, my purpose
here is forecasting: to identify some of the distinctive features within the
gossip itself, and its social setting and power relations that amplify gossip’s
destructive power.
Let me begin with a first pass at differentiating weaponized gossip from
its more innocuous if not constructive practice. One obvious marker of
weaponized gossip is its spread; gossip can destroy reputations because
it does not stay secret. But why does it spread so rapidly or so broadly?
Recall that one of the useful functions gossip can provide is in context—it
fleshes out stories of what happens and what it means, connects people’s
private acts to their public stands. By contrast, weaponized gossip often
functions to eliminate or minimize context: one detail, fact, or story
becomes all-consuming. If gossip is evaluative, intimate talk about some-
one or something, one of the markers of gossip in general is its looseness,
its lack of order, its direction. Jennifer Coates’ Women Talk, with its exten-
sive accounts of conversations of friendships, as well as Jörg Bergmann’s
Discreet Indiscretions, demonstrate the ways in which gossip moves from
topic to topic, sometimes circling back to an earlier topic, but often drift-
ing. Indeed, this is much of the work of Chap. 3, when I argue that part of
gossip’s epistemic value comes in its synthetic ability. Weaponized gossip
is more directly and consistently aimed at a single person or institution; in
particular, at a single behavior (or set of behaviors).
180 K. ADKINS
But all focused gossip wouldn’t be considered weaponized. Focused

gossip is sometimes a marker of situational urgency, when information is
short and there is perceptible damage occurring to people. As Shibutani
documented in his study of rumors at Japanese internment camps, intern-
ees’ justifiably urgent interest in finding out their fates led to regular and
intense spreading of rumors. In a much less charged and oppressive set-
ting, the website What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy demonstrates
the ways in which gossip and rumor multiply when people experience per-
sistent professional diminishment. The blog focuses tightly on sexism in
the philosophy profession due to long-standing institutional indifference,
but without singling out particular persons or institutions for reputation
damage. Weaponized gossip isn’t simply focused but it’s also of necessity
negative and instrumental. To be clear about this distinction, negative
gossip isn’t necessarily planned or directed (it emerges in conversation).
However, it aims to a specific effect, in contrast to gossip more generally,
which may be exploratory, inquisitive, or satirical. That effect is usually the
taking-down or diminishing of reputation. A classic example of a whisper-
ing campaign for a very direct personal benefit would be the campaign
Benjamin Franklin waged against printer Samuel Keimer in 1729. Franklin,
a young printer’s assistant and vociferous contributor to area papers (often
anonymously or under pseudonymously), yearned to own his own news-
paper. He wrote a series of pseudonymous columns as “The Busy-Body”
with one of the two Philadelphia papers (the Mercury). While the col-
umns claim merely to be satire and entertainment, and not to be aimed
at anybody, their true target was Samuel Keimer, Franklin’s employer and
owner of the other Philadelphia paper (the Instructor). Without naming
names, Franklin indicts the pedantic style of the Instructor from the ini-
tial Busy-Body column (#1, Franklin 93); and sends up the person of
Keimer as a crafty but pretentious man in #3 (Franklin 98). Keimer’s paper
gets specifically named and dismissed for its pretension in #5 (Franklin
108). Shortly after this series of wildly columns, Keimer agreed to sell the
Instructor to Franklin, and left the country. It’s hard to imagine a more
direct example of a use of gossip to achieve direct and personal benefit at
the cost of another’s reputation, and ironic given the posthumous reputa-
tion Franklin enjoys as a Founding Father.2 While in general the concept
of “whispering campaigns” is probably a bit of a misnomer—“campaign”
has connotations of organization and intention that are not features of
gossip—the concept applies to this episode with Franklin. But, in general,
gossip is unruly; its origins and growth are organic (in every sense). Those
who practice effective weaponized gossip husbandry, like Karl Rove, scat-
ter seeds in multiple and widely dispersed sites. Recall that White House
operative Karl Rove has long been associated with smear gossip and rumors
against political rivals. The most public instance, the revelation of agent
Valerie Plame’s name, wasn’t a targeted campaign but an apparently indis-
creet attempt to spread the word. Eight reporters were contacted about
Valerie Plame. For an early Rove-managed campaign, a local law school
was a favored site of gossip because it was apparently a gossip hotbed. The
commonality in both of these references is the way in which negative gos-
sip is spread liberally, with hopes that some will take root.
With the initial marking of conceptual territory from the introduction,
I want to stress that there’s no clear and digital marker between innocuous
(or constructive) gossip, and the weaponized variety. The polyphony in
gossip, its uses, and its (re)directions means that its exercise and interpre-
tation is negotiable. However, this caveat doesn’t eliminate the fact that
there are clearly many gossip episodes we can observe (both ones from
case studies in this book and those in the gossip literature generally) where
gossip gets focused, and more directly, on a single person’s reputation and
destruction thereof. My review of these episodes reveals some recurring
patterns, social and political structures that can become pressure points
that invite or facilitate this kind of more single-minded and destructive
gossip. It’s important to spend some time thinking about the factors that
create petri dishes for the incubation of destructive gossip. I want to stress
that typical scholarly analyses of the merit or malice in gossip focus on the
content of the statement. While I don’t want to ignore that,3 my interest
here is more sociological, on the features of the social or political environ-
ment that I think tend to contribute toward toxic gossip. In other words,
reviewing gossip episodes has led me to conclude that weaponized gossip
is often a symptom of a different and more systematic problem with how
we communicate, and who we trust, than with one or a few bad actors or
bad statements. Weaponized gossip, in other words, is often a marker of
underlying and unjust social structures, rather than merely a self-contained
problem to be addressed directly. While statement-level analyses of gossip
are helpful, their conclusions about unethical gossip statements aren’t,
in my view, helpful enough; if people are gossiping maliciously about a
supervisor at work because there have been a series of layoffs that have
been misleadingly handled via company communications, announcements
that gossip is unethical or that blaming gossip is ineffective are unlikely to
do much to stem the poisonous tide.
182 K. ADKINS
One of my basic contentions is that most gossip is premised on trust

and intimacy. We don’t gossip just with anyone; we gossip with those who
we trust with our reputations (it’s why we give them secrets). Even when
our gossip is motivated by unkind intentions—say the need to show off
that we are “in the know” with desired information—gossips must be
careful with their spreading, lest their own reputations suffer too much.4
Trust and intimacy are locked in a symbiotic relationship; the group we
trust is smaller than the group we know, and we trust them in part because
we have known them longer than other conversation partners. They have
had more chances to see us as our full selves—our complicated, more
private, and more fallible selves, as well as our public facades. Sissela Bok
provides both etymological and analytical framework when she reminds us
that the German word for secret or secrecy, geheim or heimlichkeit, origi-
nally referred to “the home, the hearth, and the intimate” (7), and only
later added specific connotations of secrecy.
A specific theme connects the first two conditions of weaponized
gossip, and it is the existence of social trust. First, we see that the
ways in which compromised trust and intimacy facilitate gossip- and
rumor-spreading. Both personally and professionally, when we regu-
larly engage with people about whom we have substantive suspicions,
and on whom we rely little (but formally must rely upon, because they
are family members, coworkers, professional supervisors, etc.), then
“official” streams of information become almost as a matter of course
untrustworthy. Smeltzer and Zener (1992) provide supporting evidence
of this, in their close examination of communication strategies in eight
organizations that did layoffs. In six of the organizations, office gos-
sip and rumors were major influences on when and how layoffs were
announced, and several of the layoff announcements were regarded as
anticlimatic or largely ignored, even if the rumors weren’t accurate (as
Smeltzer and Zener indicate was sometimes the case in their studied
organizations). This points to the value of social trust. Whether or not
subterranean information streams are sought out or happened upon,
they become more trusted on the folk level than information contained
in family newsletters, official memos, and the like. Indeed, fully one-
third of Smeltzer and Zener’s recommendations for improving com-
munication strategies are around how companies should monitor and
respond to rumors rather than dismiss them out of hand. Left unsaid
in Smeltzer and Zener’s analysis is what the proliferation of rumor and
gossip says about institutional trust, and the dangers of too absolute a
divide between public information and private reporting. I will return to

this topic in the conclusion of the book.
The mirror image to this compromised trust is community insularity,
which we can characterize as excessive or disproportionate trust. When
communities are too small and self-contained, when the like-minded
speak only or primarily to their compatriots, then we tend to attribute
automatic credibility to those who are, so to speak, of our tribe. We see
this in a variety of instances, and it is a literal enacting of Butler’s idea
about rogue viewpoints. Insular communities are often cognitively closed
spaces; ideas are less explored than rehearsed, and dispute and dissension
are discouraged. Defamation, whether indirect or direct, is a viable option
for dealing with rogue voices and rogue viewpoints. The public talk is so
dominant that it becomes cognitively oppressive; private deviations from
it are few, small, risky, and challenged.
These social dynamics of compromised social trust and community
insularity don’t spring up in vacuums. They typically emerge in communi-
ties with sharp and stark divides of power (social, economic, racial, gen-
der), or communities in which power is being renegotiated, challenged, or
undermined, and this turbulent construction of power is the third factor
I’ll examine in this chapter. I’ll review the ways in which power divides
exaggerate the likelihood not simply of individual gossip narratives being
used as linguistic and social weapons but also of the climate itself turn-
ing weaponized. When power and information become separate and hard
to reconcile, the tendency to see dangerous others whose presence and
ideas undermine one’s own safe and familiar ways of living and thinking
becomes much likelier.
Finally, weaponized gossip, because of its instrumental quality, can be
shaming. I will spend some time examining the practice of shaming gossip,
and the ways in which it is a dangerous tool. Contemporary analyses of
shaming (Jacquet 2015) defend it generally when it is corporately aimed;
critiques of shaming gossip (Radzik 2016; Ronson 2015) note both its
inefficiency and the disproportionate negative effect it can have even when
it hits its mark. The difference between these accounts highlights both the
greater risk of personally shaming gossip—it can be destructive in ways
that, as a rule, corporate shaming cannot—and reminds us of the impor-
tance of context. When we describe gossip as shaming or weaponized,
we cast agents into roles—victimizer, victim, collateral damage. Ronson’s
critique of shaming, in particular, ignores relevant context in some of his
stories, in favor of a narrative of victimization.
184 K. ADKINS
6.1 Compromised Intimacy, Compromised Gossip

The principal feature of weaponized gossip, I would contend, is either an
absence of intimacy or a restricted (transactional or utilitarian) trust. To
clarify this, I will adapt Karen Jones’ (1996) analysis of trust. Jones dif-
ferentiates technical trust (trusting a professional to have competence in
their area of expertise) from the sort of moral trust we have with a friend
(7). Technical trust is connected to a specific outcome; when I hire a
plumber to fix my toilet, I expect the job to be completed satisfactorily at
the end of her visit, and get irritated if she has to return for several visits
to complete the work. By contrast, moral trust is quality-dependent rather
than outcome-dependent. Moral competence, for Jones, is an expecta-
tion that the friend will both understand and display qualities like loyalty,
kindness, and generosity into the future (7). This kind of trust is both
cognitive and emotive, and looks backward in time as well as projecting
forward. Even when friends prove unreliable, we may modify our trust
in them rather than necessarily abandon the friendship (13). For Jones,
trust is connected explicitly to gossip; we have to know enough about the
character of our friends to share secrets with them, and count on them to
remain secret (21).
Functional trust, then, depends on preexisting relationships of some
duration. We entrust secrets to people when we know them well, and can
ensure they’ll keep them secret. If we look at some of the examples where
reputations were tarnished by gossip, one of the major common features
is in how limited the relationships were between the gossips. From the last
chapter, Karl Rove, Judith Miller, and Michael Isikoff, each demonstrate
the transactional way in which gossip is utilized in politics. The trust there
is entirely role-defined and limited. Their knowledge of their interlocutors
is limited to conversations that are entered into for purposes of news and
information management. Each of these people knows what people want,
and trades information accordingly. Miller’s economic language makes
this clear; gossip is a juicy story to get conversational pumps primed, a
nugget to exchange for different information, or a secret that could be put
into damning stories. Gossip is a market commodity here, and indeed, it’s
relevant that these are all instances of professional gossip—people using
gossip to advance their careers.
Immanuel Kant provides some language for understanding why this is
a problematic approach to relationships, as well as to gossip. In his second
formulation of the categorical imperative, he contends that it is a moral
absolute that we not treat people as mere means to our ends. The teach-
ing is simple here, and, crucially, it connects humans’ moral status to their
cognitive status; our ability to think for ourselves is what gives us moral
status and moral standing. We should be treated with dignity because we
can think for ourselves (even if we sometimes ignore that capacity). Using
people, treating them as tools in our intellectual or political schemes,
robs them of their autonomy and reduces them to instruments. Emrys
Westacott refines this usage of Kant for gossip; he notes that most gossip
doesn’t disregard the autonomy of its subject, because it quite often has
no effect on its subject (78). Gossip often remains essentially private; a
conversation between friends that stays put. While this is certainly often
true, it is also clearly often the case that gossip spreads, spreads quickly,
and does have effect on its subject. I contend that one common pattern
there is in fact a limited or transactional use of trust. Reexamining the
transactional language that many of the reporters in Chap. 5 unselfcon-
sciously used to describe their work (gossip is a juicy story, something
to be exchanged with a valuable source), we can see at least two ways in
which trust is too transactionally used. The journalist/source relationship,
in some of these instances, seems to be entirely transactional: information
is traded; the people at the heart of these stories are reduced to object
status.
One of our prior examples of gossip as knowledge demonstrates this
danger neatly. Peter Pauling plays a small but crucial role in the search for
the structure of DNA: his status as gossip source means that James Watson
and Francis Crick can keep tabs on Linus Pauling’s attempt to articulate
the structure of DNA. Watson’s descriptions of Peter Pauling suggest the
sort of dismissive or transactional view of Pauling as a source only. His
disinterest in having Pauling work in their lab is based on his assessment
of Pauling’s intellectual potential, which he describes in some detail in
his best seller, referring dismissively to his unimpressive grades during his
undergraduate career (89). Watson damns Pauling with faint praise; after
emphasizing Pauling’s underwhelming grades and Watson’s lack of confi-
dence in his abilities, he heaps extravagant praise on Pauling for his parties.
Watson’s further references to Pauling, as I’ve noted, mostly center on his
use as a gossip source for Watson and Crick, and say nothing about him
as a participant in laboratory life. In other words, Pauling is entirely an
object of exploitation for Watson and Crick: he is a gossip conduit, obe-
diently producing letters from his father recounting his father’s work in
chemistry, and a source for meeting attractive women. The one moment
186 K. ADKINS
we see Pauling having a reaction—when Pauling learns that Watson and

Crick have successfully built a functional model of DNA—Pauling is pre-
sented appealingly, excited for their achievement, and not concerned with
his father’s loss at the DNA race (128). While Pauling went on to have a
long career teaching chemistry at University College London, it is hard to
miss the way in which Watson’s presentation of Pauling is so thoroughly
dismissive of his intellectual abilities, and the way in which Watson treats
Pauling as a mere means to his ends, whether intellectual or social.
The relationship between a breach of trust and increased aggres-
sive gossip has been empirically documented in the world of business.
Researchers presented subjects (retail workers) with a hypothetical con-
tract offer involving good pay and job security, and in some cases reneged
on the offer without warning or justification. In all cases, subjects were
also presented an unrelated negative rumor about the company. Subjects
who perceived the reneged job offer as a psychological breach of contract
were more willing to spread the negative rumor to a journalist friend;
relevantly, their willingness to spread the rumor did not vary depending
on how likely they thought the rumor was to be true (Bordia et al. 2014:
372). This finding is particularly interesting because it suggests just how
influential compromised intimacy can be in the spreading of aggressive
gossip. Being willing to spread gossip that you don’t necessarily believe
to damage the reputation of the company speaks to just how damaging
breaches of trust are. A job offer is a promise that extends forward in time;
reneging on that promise without warning or justification demonstrates
not just that the company doesn’t weigh its commitments seriously but
also that it doesn’t take seriously the personhood of those with whom it
works. The abruptly worded rescission letter has no recognition of the
fact that the position is a reversal, that the employee who’d accepted this
offer would likely have made plans and had expectations based on the idea
of a continuing salary and benefits. The authors of the study rightly con-
clude that the primary motivation for the rumor-spreaders in this case was
seeking revenge on the company. This study suggests some of the merit
of the Kantian position; those who see themselves as disrespected and
disregarded by an employer have less hesitation about responding in kind.
Two studies complicate this viewpoint. One researcher’s in-depth
examination of workplace gossip around a CEO transition found that sen-
sitive or negative gossip only happened when there was substantial trust
between gossipers (Mills 2010: 234). A second, tracking workplace gos-
sip at a single company, had similar results; while participants gossiped
negatively and positively about others, they were more likely to exchange
negative gossip with those who were trusted friends (Grosser et al. 2010:
199). While it’s certainly correct to say that not all negative gossip counts
as weaponized (aggressively focused on a single person’s reputation), it’s
certainly equally fair to say that weaponized gossip is always negative. This
dynamic, at minimum, reflects some of the dangers and risks to gossip. As
we have seen in previous chapters, women are unwilling to discuss harass-
ment, even off the record or anonymously, if they fear that their reputations
might suffer. But where the trust is placed in these studies is also relevant.
Notice that in the first study (when people with a rescinded job offer
spread rumors about the company), the absence of trust wasn’t between
the gossiping people, but between the employees and the company. In
other words, the absence of trust is reflected in the topic and object of the
gossip, not the participants in the gossip. In these two studies, by contrast,
the presence of trust is in the speakers. The studies together suggest that
when we trust someone, we may feel free to speak freely with her, includ-
ing sometimes irresponsibly. The historical examples suggest that when we
don’t know someone well, we’re more at risk to use or be used by gossip.
6.2 Closed Circles

But even in conditions of genuine intimacy, gossip can still become
destructive. Most people have either lived or know of ruined friendships
or damaged reputations that resulted from shared gossip. My contention
is that the more insular the community, the more likely it is that gossip
can be successfully weaponized. In general, there is a connection between
insular communities and increased gossip. Sociologists have documented
that denser business networks result in more gossip than looser networks
(Rooks et al. 1992: 93, 99). But this is a general observation only, and
doesn’t speak to the likelihood that the gossip in smaller circles is not just
negative but also aggressively so. But for aggressive or weaponized gossip,
we can see many historical examples that bear out this connection.
Witchcraft gossip, while highly dramatic, is a phenomenon that crosses
cultures and eras, and demonstrates the enduring power of destructive
accusations in small communities. From the medieval era, the Malleus
Maleficarum’s use of gossip as both a symptom and a technique for
identifying witches speaks to gossip’s role in detecting and recogniz-
ing witches in Europe. In the United States, the flurry of witch trials in
Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 is perhaps the paradigmatic example of
188 K. ADKINS
gossip flourishing in a tight, relatively closed community, and being used

to destructive, sometimes fatal, effect. Late seventeenth-century colonial
Massachusetts was geographically isolated; small towns and surrounding
rural eras. Colonists were fearful of neighboring Native Americans. The
judges in the trials were related by marriage; colonial Massachusetts had
a very small wealthy and politically authoritative class (Schiff: 309–311).
Communities were close and mutually surveilling. As Cotton Mather
phrases it, “if the neighbor of an elected saint sins, then the saint sins also”
(Schiff: 97). Interfamily grudges were long-standing, and regularly worked
their way into lawsuits over livestock, spying, border crossings, and rape.
Two of the families central to the Salem crisis had been involved in a land
dispute going back decades (Schiff: 103–105). This atmosphere of mutual
surveillance and interfamily rivalry was a fecund atmosphere for gossip.
The cases against the alleged witches were often grounded in village gossip;
either explicitly (testimony that is thirdhand) or implicitly (named suspects
have something else disreputable in their background that calls attention
to them). Martha Corey, for instance, is an otherwise model citizen save
for having given birth to a mixed-race son before her first marriage (Schiff
97). When she is questioned, she challenges the accusations as gossip and
implicitly challenges her questioners’ credibility. But often, these attempts
to stem the gossip backfired; George Burroughs’ attempts to limit his
wives’ gossip ended up fomenting gossip about what it was he must have
been hiding (Norton 2014: 47). The village gossip of the Kwanga pro-
vides a contemporary analog to the Salem and European witch gossip. The
Kwanga gossip regularly, and often viciously, about each other, naming fel-
low villagers as committers of adultery or practitioners of sorcery.
Karen Brison speculates that the smallness and interrelatedness of the
community fertilizes the ground for gossip and rumor (119–112). In
a less emotionally charged context, Elias and Scotson’s examination of
village gossip in a midcentury English suburb supports this viewpoint.
The suburb is undergoing dramatic growth and change; the construction
of a new estate for lower-income residents challenges the relations and
class dynamics that had existed in the old village and the older working-
class area. In this context, gossip was periodically used as a marker and an
excluder of new residents from the old towns (126, 134). The change in
the village is its being opened to newcomers, and newcomers from dif-
ferent class backgrounds. The old guard closes ranks around them; the
residents’ small talk or “humiliating gossip” (183) is the arena in which
the changes are marked, and resisted.
A historical instance of some strikingly durable damaging gossip dem-

onstrates the connection between insular communities and damaging
gossip most clearly. Cynthia Kierner’s Scandal at Bizarre: Rumor and
Reputation in Jefferson’s America (2004) excavates the history surround-
ing an early Republican murder case; in 1793, Richard Randolph (heir of
a Virginia gentry family in rapid economic decline) was acquitted in court
of murdering a child born to his unmarried sister-in-law, Nancy Randolph.
The root gossip (that Richard was the father of the child, and either bur-
ied the miscarried or aborted child or murdered the child so that his and
Nancy’s reputation would not suffer) originated in the gossip of the fam-
ily’s slaves. Kierner’s examination of the Randolph case makes clear how
the gossip occurred due to and in response to the rapidly shifting social,
political, and economic circumstances of early Republican Virginia. But
most compellingly, she tracks the astonishing life of this gossip. While
the gossip that Richard Randolph fathered a child with his sister-in-law
originated with the household slaves, Kierner provides good evidence
suggesting that the original target of the gossip was neither Richard, his
wife Judith, nor Nancy, but the slaves’ owner and Randolphs’ cousin and
weekend host, Randolph Harrison. Harrison’s rapid selling of many of
his slaves in an attempt to reverse his economic decline, which fractured
families and communities, would have caused great anger and resentment
(66–67). Challenging Harrison’s integrity as a virtuous Virginia gentle-
man, by suggesting that incest and murder could occur on his plantation
without objection, was a clear and effective way to get revenge for his acts
as a slaveholder (38–39). The persistence of the gossip throughout the
next year led to the murder charges, which shifted the primary target of
the gossip from Harrison to Randolph; losing his reputation as a Virginia
gentleman would compromise his social and economic future.
Surprisingly, the gossip followed Nancy Rudolph for years, and across
state lines. While Richard was acquitted in 1793, due in part to a lack of
physical evidence but mostly to a brilliant and aggressive defense provided
by John Marshall and Patrick Henry, talk about Nancy Rudolph’s com-
promised sexual reputation persisted for 25 years. Kierner’s scholarship
reminds us of the smallness and insularity of Virginia society, as well as
the ways in which family reputations were intermingled (in part because
cousins intermarried). Gossip about Nancy Rudolph’s sexual morality and
feminine virtues followed her across cities in Virginia and Rhode Island,
and inhibited her ability to live peacefully, support herself as her edu-
cation and social position would otherwise qualify her to do, or marry
190 K. ADKINS
(111–115). Nancy achieved social and economic redemption when she

moved to New York to work as a housekeeper for a wealthy and politically
prominent New Yorker, Gouverneur Morris. But here again, the gossip
resurrected itself for transparently economic motives. Nancy’s late mar-
riage to Morris, and its production of a child, meant that the previously
childless late-fifties millionaire suddenly had an heir, and his nieces and
nephews would no longer stand to inherit his copious holdings. Kierner
provides substantial evidence both that Morris’ soon-to-be-disinherited
relatives were the generators of the latest round of gossip (for challenging
Nancy’s sexual morality could ultimately work to undermine the young
Morris’ claim to his father’s estate) and its life force (136–138). New York
society was clearly as insular as Virginia’s society; within two months of
the rumors about Nancy being resuscitated, her husband reported to cor-
respondents that prominent New York families were suddenly shunning
the Morrises’ social events (138). Side talk about reputation wasn’t merely
casual; it was important for an economically and socially homogeneous
group to protect its own identity.
There are cognitive costs to this sort of social insularity and homoge-
neity. Indeed, we have seen this insularity demonstrated in many of the
previous examples of gossip. Anderson’s idea of “shared reality bias,”
and Medina’s “active ignorance,” function best in conditions of effec-
tive, if not total, insularity, and group homogeneity is a direct way to
achieve insularity. A recent study demonstrates this empirically (Levine
et al. 2014). A group of economists simulated trading markets in two
different world regions, and created both ethnically homogeneous and
ethnically diverse simulated trading groups. Pricing was more inflated in
the homogeneous markets, despite all other factors being the same. The
economists argued that this was less friction and scrutiny of other traders’
information and ideas in the homogeneous markets; the homogeneous
group actually thought and traded less effectively because they examined
others’ information and ideas less seriously (18525, 18528). If one never
speaks with someone who has a meaningfully different view or life expe-
rience, or speaks but doesn’t listen or grant credibility to those whose
experience differs radically, then opportunities for reconsideration or revi-
sion of views are minimal. Kristie Dotson (2011) describes this state as
“reliable ignorance,” in which interlocutors consistently fail to take seri-
ously ideas or speakers that are unfamiliar to their presumptions. The
more totalizing the insularity, the more damaging it can be. As Sissela Bok
phrases it in Secrets, “when [secrecy] seals groups against outsiders, and
when it takes over entire lives rather than merely guards particular secrets,
it creates hothouse conditions that intensify and speed up certain aspects
of both growth and decay” (54). Bok is speaking of formal societies here,
but her distinction between a generalized aspect of secrecy and insularity,
versus a particular, applies to our analysis. The kinds of organizations and
institutions we have examined closely (academia, political communities),
particularly when they map onto lines of social power and authority, can
replicate this kind of hothouse atmosphere. One is in, or most decidedly
out, of the informational and access loop.
And to be clear, the dangers of insularity cut both ways. While many
of the historical examples of gossip in Chaps. 2, 3, 4 focused on ways in
which empowered gossip was either inaccurate or incomplete, the same
can clearly be true for gossip as counter-discourse. Patricia Turner’s anal-
ysis of loose talk within African-American communities provides help-
ful examples here. While, to be sure, the value in the rumors is often
in their evocative quality—they capture, often as metaphor, expressions
of physical or political alienation in vivid and repeatable stories like poi-
soned chicken—some of the stories range further from plausibility than
others. To be specific, one of the most persuasive stories was the tale of
the CDC kidnapping black children in Atlanta in the early 1980s. While
on the surface it sounds like a wild conspiracy theory, Turner reminds us
of the context. Immediately, there was a spate of disappeared black chil-
dren, amid recent revelations of a decades-long hidden experimentation
on black men leading to their disfigurement and death (Tuskegee), as
well as the unwitting usage of Henrietta Lacks’ DNA for wildly profitable
medical research and patents. In other words, the CDC appeared to be
capable of seeing black people as little more than unwitting subjects of
experimentation, with no regard for their physical well-being. Indeed, this
rumor has at least two clear historical forerunners. In pre-Revolutionary
Paris, rumors spread about poor people being kidnapped by the police.
While in truth, they were being deported as opposed to being kidnapped,
the effective difference would have been minimal for the affected fami-
lies. Similarly, an 1857 rebellion of Indians against colonial governance in
northern India were preceded by rumors of government extortion, forced
conversion to Christianity, and flour mixed with cow bones, which would
violate religious beliefs (Guha 1992: 255–256). In all three of these exam-
ples, a common thematic element is present in the implausible rumors: an
expression that bodily integrity of local people is perpetually disregarded
(if not outright attacked) by a hostile governing force.
192 K. ADKINS
These examples serve as a caution on subaltern gossip. When power

disparities are too pronounced, and absence of trust too stark, absence
of critical thinking and acceptance of groupthink runs both ways. The
issue, as I’ve demonstrated previously, is that only one set of rumor-as-
groupthink gets publicly identified as scurrilous rumor, while the other
slips conveniently under the radar. However, this doesn’t mean that
advocates of the epistemic value of gossip can afford to be uncritical. To
the contrary, it reminds us that Medina’s arguments about the value of
epistemic friction, and his model of an epistemic pluralism in which dif-
ferences are recognized and valued, applies to subaltern gossip in all its
manifestations. If subaltern gossip is too insulated, and the gossips speak
only to fellow outsiders, its epistemic and political effect is muted.
6.3 Gossip in Turbulent Times

Insularity can be dangerous because we can operate in cognitive echo
chambers. Cass Sunstein’s scholarship on rumors provides conceptual
support to this observation. Sunstein’s review of psychological studies
on rumor-spreading focuses on the influence of confirmation bias in
rumor-spreading; that is, our willingness to search out or give credit to
information that reinforces previously held positions. Our willingness
to believe rumors and gossip can be a version of Medina’s meta-blind-
ness; we can be blind to our own blind spots about knowledge, want-
ing to believe something because it coheres so well to our previously
held beliefs. This is a real issue, and indeed we’ve seen evidence of it in
some of the rumors and gossip we’ve explored previously (particularly
the rumors and gossip that emerge in periods of economic stress, such as
pre-Revolutionary France). However, it’s also worth noting that confir-
mation bias gets cited as a shaky or dangerous tactic most reliably when
it is used against information that is already unpopular or discredited.
Confirmation bias isn’t simply limited to people who have less access to
information or limited public credibility; it can be present if not flourish-
ing in communities where information and audiences are plentiful. The
Plame scandal during the Bush White House years speaks to precisely
this phenomenon. Reporters were quite receptive to rumors and gossip
that fed preexisting beliefs; conventional confirmation bias can present
as much of a chokehold on information flow as it can in more marginal-
ized viewpoints. The difference is that confirmation bias is less visible,
less recognized, when it is more spoken. Sunstein’s cautions about con-
firmation bias should apply to all of us, and in particular, on our most
deeply held convictions. They may be as much shibboleth as belief.
Information insulation is not arbitrary. Tamotsu Shibutani argues that
rumors spread better in times of unrest. His argument is less about inti-
macy than about ambiguity; during times of unrest or confusion (national
crisis, natural disasters), we seek out news and information wherever we
can. This makes us susceptible to rumors and gossip, and in particular,
vulnerable to gossip being directed. The insularity Shibutani treats so sen-
sitively in his sociological account of rumor is not value- or power-neutral.
Shibutani’s experience studying and tracking rumors actually began while
he was still a university student; his education at Berkeley was interrupted
by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and he was incarcerated at Tule
Lake internment camp from 1942 to 1944. While there, he assisted a pro-
fessor on tracking and studying rumors; the scholar (Dorothy Thomas)
recognized that Shibutani, in his dual role as researcher and inmate, would
have the trust of fellow inmates, and would hear information from them
that they might be less likely to share with outsiders (Inouye). Shibutani’s
careful arguments about the ways in which rumors have multiple publics,
that are divided by trust, its absence, and power divisions (70) have par-
ticular resonance in this context. In particular, Shibutani attends to the
economics of information. He notes that when stakes are high, as in natu-
ral or political crises, or people are in marginalized positions, they can have
a high demand for information that is often not met by the supply. Absent
a supply of reliable information (or an absence of trust in what is deemed
official or reliable information), people in high information need will seek
out information wherever they can find it (164–166). We can see this in
the Plame scandal. During a war that was begun under a time of national
insecurity (the United States had not been attacked on its territory since
1941), and under great political division, many commentators questioned
the wisdom of invading Iraq, which had no concrete connection to the
9/11 attacks; critics of the war in Iraq were demonized as lacking patrio-
tism. When information is short and partisanship is high, people look for
information wherever it’s accessible.
This analysis extends directly to gossip. Shibutani’s research is about
neatly opposed relations; government information is outright rejected
or resisted by rumor. And, indeed, there are instances of this in gos-
sip (Darnton’s and Turner’s analysis of peasant gossip in France, and
African-American gossip). But more often, we find a relationship of adja-
cency as opposed to one of sharp opposition. Power relations are being
194 K. ADKINS
r enegotiated, or there is a vacuum in power. These conditions are prime

motivators for gossip as a tool; when there is power insecurity, people will
look for and give credence to gossip from trusted sources over those who
may seem not just remote but also untrustworthy. Colonial Salem presents
a compelling illustration of the indirect ways in which gossip becomes a
tool. Women were formally voiceless in Salem; they could not vote or
serve on juries, and men were the magistrates and ministers who pro-
nounce judgment. But those offering the accusations of witchcraft are
virtually all women, and most of them are adolescents (whose futures are
up to their fathers and not them [Schiff 142, 403]).
One of the things that our historical examples demonstrate is that
while the power disparities revealed by gossip are often vast, the actual
subjects and conflicts within the weaponized gossip itself occupy adjacent
rather than remote positions. We can see this most prominently in three
cases, from different historical and social eras. The Randolph gossip from
early America that we’ve reviewed originated in slave gossip, so a classic
example of the voiceless challenged the voiced. But the lifespan of the
gossip (directly for 25 years; indirectly continuing for a full century after-
wards) was within the gentry themselves; this was a classic tussle about
membership in elite society—who deserves it, and who will fulfill its social
and moral expectations. The slave gossip, aimed perhaps at accomplishing
some direct political or economic damage, didn’t persist. In part this is
no doubt due to the voicelessness of the slaves themselves; because this
episode moved to the law courts, and slaves were denied legal credibility
(no matter how much their stories were listened to and used when con-
venient), the narrative became one that was fashioned and refashioned to
serve the purposes of Virginia society. Similarly, some witchcraft accusa-
tions that emerged in village gossip were aimed less at outright exiles, than
at those who were worrisomely close to the vulnerable. Lyndal Roper
(1991) examines seventeenth-century German witchcraft accusations and
finds a pattern where lying-in maids (women who were hired to care for
new mothers and their infants) are accused of witchcraft. Roper demon-
strates that the evidence and language repeatedly call into question the
intimacy of the relationship between the mothers and their maids, and the
ways in which the maids, who are both intimate in the household and held
apart, are targeted by gossip (218–219).
Jumping centuries, one of the contemporary instances of academic gos-
sip mirrors these dynamics of uncomfortable nearness. The dispute within
philosophy over its institutionalized sexism and racism first emerged in
gossip, and became concretized via anonymous websites whose contrib-

utors were pretty clearly from philosophically or demographically mar-
ginalized positions within the field. And when the narrative of conflict
solidified around a primary figure of dispute (Brian Leiter), combatants
regularly cited his online behavior toward those vastly junior to him
(graduate students, often female or of color, or untenured faculty at less
prestigious institutions) as aggravating examples. And yet, the behavior
that ultimately led to a public coalescing of criticism into action wasn’t
his behavior toward junior colleagues from marginalized positions, but
to a colleague at a similarly well-regarded institution, whose work was
produced by first-tier scholarly presses and journals. In other words, while
the rhetoric of the gossip echoed the more sympathetic view of a cyber-
bully who picks on the powerless (and indeed, there is copious evidence
demonstrating that Leiter had regularly done exactly that), the effective
gossip motivator was his behavior to a fellow member of the philosophical
elite (Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins). The philosophical elite ultimately rallied to
protect one of their own against another of their own.
To be sure, counterexamples to this pattern of gossip adjacency exist.
Pre-Revolutionary peasants were gossiping not about French tradespeo-
ple but about the monarchy. Medieval peasants in Europe did not gossip
about their landlords, though landlords were quite exploitative, but about
the state, which was safely removed (Wickham 21–22). But Sally Engle
Merry’s (1984) review of anthropological research on gossip and scandal
articulates a good reason for why it is that power relations of adjacency
rather than extreme opposition might be particularly fecund grounds for
gossip. She notes that the very wealthy and the very poor often have good
reasons for ignoring gossip. The rich can either compensate for or insulate
themselves from the gossip by the money (by an extravagant dowry for a
child with a ruined reputation, say), or simply ignore it—their economic
power gives them license to act indifferently from the gossip (283). The
very poor, often by virtue of their poverty, have less of an incentive to
counter the gossip; there is little to change about their situation (284).
In other words, power relations that are destabilized or under dispute
are fertile grounds for destructive gossip. We see this many places. David
Coast annotates the often wishful or speculative gossip that dramatically
increased in the court of James I of England; the increased turnover of
court ministers made strategic use of reputation destruction or inflation a
risky but often effective strategy to gain a high-profile position (339, 341,
349). Even when formal positions aren’t at stake, destabilized power can
196 K. ADKINS
result in a fertile economy of gossip. This is what Karen Brison’s ethnog-

raphy of the Kwanga (1992) reveals. The Kwanga live in small, egalitarian
communities, which means that reputations aren’t automatically assigned
by status, and can be constantly negotiated and renegotiated. The omni-
present gossip and rumor Brison observes is symptomatic of this situation;
because reputations are always fungible, they can be nudged in different
directions by subterranean talk. The complete absence of strong leader-
ship in the village combined with its small size acted as a gossip incubator
(239). When social or political conditions of life are shifting, it is easy to
assume that there is more to the story than what is openly stated, and to
look for and give credence to backstory explanations.
6.4 Shaming Gossip

The act of shaming is constant; as long as people live together in com-
munity, we are aware of our standing, and loss of status or face in a com-
munity can be a powerful incentive to action. Gossip can be an extremely
effective tool for shaming, due to its indirection. We can spread sham-
ing and shameful news about another, without having to confront them
directly. Particularly when gossip moves across power lines (whether those
of adjacency or high/low), gossip can become focused entirely on a single
subject, and its goal is clearly negative—to shame the outlier. People can
be targeted as outliers for a variety of reasons, but it’s worth pausing to
examine when and why we put people in conversational or virtual stocks.
The issue here is how we connect the epistemic issues (gossip directed at
individuals; character assassination [whether the assassination has epistemic
merits or not] with our actions). Two recent analyses of shaming draw
almost diametrically opposed conclusions; Jennifer Jacquet is an enthu-
siastic, if qualified, defender of public shaming (2015); Jon Ronson, by
contrast, is deeply dubious about the entire enterprise of shaming (2015).
Ronson’s analysis of shaming gossip stresses almost entirely its personal
character, and thus often ignores or minimizes the context in which sham-
ing occurs. By contrast, Jacquet’s analysis almost entirely focuses on its
political manifestations, and thus rarely recognizes the effects of shaming
on individuals, as opposed to well-heeled corporations. I contend that the
neat opposition in Jacquet’s and Ronson’s conclusions is not accidental;
because Jacquet focuses most on shaming of corporations or other collec-
tive organizations, she misses the personal effect that shaming can have.
Because Ronson focuses on shaming of individuals (and indeed, individu-
als who were generally not publicly known prior to their shaming), the
dangers of shaming are highlighted. Both accounts miss important con-
text within shaming.
My analysis of shaming gossip extends Linda Radzik’s recent valuable
discussion of the topic (2016). Gossip that is too zeroed in on a person
and the idea of punishment will be both ineffective as such and distorting
of the context of the situation. Radzik argues that the indirection of gossip
as a tactic—because the subject isn’t present for the gossip, the features
of social punishment don’t apply (199). It doesn’t apply consequences,
it’s not done with an intention of punishment. Radzik particularly stresses
the fact that the transmissibility of gossip—the impossibility of control-
ling when it is spread, and who spreads it to whom—means that gossip as
punishment can be used variably, and without proportion. In other words,
shaming or blaming gossip can become disproportionate, because it can
spread far beyond its original target (199–200). Radzik endorses gossip
that is not instrumentally aimed. Indeed, one experiment that stands as
a counterexample to Radzik’s analysis suggests ways in which her con-
cern for efficacy is well placed. In a recent economic experiment, Piazza
and Bering (2008) found that the threat of negative gossip about absence
of generosity was effective at changing behavior; players of an economic
game were much more likely to distribute allocations more generously
to others in response to the threat, than those who were unaware of a
threat of gossip (176). This finding doesn’t nullify Radzik’s conclusions
about the ineffectiveness of gossip for several reasons—first, because in
this case the gossip gets back to the actors in time for behavior changes.
It is this feature of gossip—too rarely does it get directly back to its tar-
gets—that Radzik is highlighting. But secondly, her analysis also suggests
that the efficacy of gossip as a behavior change agent is limited because it
is isolated. Piazza and Bering’s experiment is isolated; the allocation game
was enacted a single time. Repeating the game with the same players at a
later time would give some indication as to whether or not the gossip, for
lack of a better word, stuck—whether or not the perceived criticism actu-
ally had longer-term effect on players’ actions and motivations. A single
iteration of the experiment suggests only that an opportunity to directly
mitigate bad news about us is hard to pass up.
In some of the examples of shaming gossip we have and will see in
later chapters, I would argue, are not aimed at shaming the subject of
the gossip. To focus particularly on the gossip around sexism and sex-
ual harassment that we have seen (in the chapters on academia and in
198 K. ADKINS
olitics in particular, more examples to come in the conclusion), it seems

p
straightforward to me that much of the gossip occurs between women, to
women, and serves the purpose of warning or protection. In other words,
the goal is not to alert perpetrators of their bad behavior, if indirectly,
in hopes that they may reform themselves. At the risk of sounding cyni-
cal, much of the gossip among female journalists about Ted Kennedy and
Gary Hart, as well as the academics in philosophy, reads as weary, with an
assumption that the bad actors are incorrigible. Recall Susannah Lessard’s
observation, from Chap. 5, that she and other journalists were slow in
going public with the widespread gossip about Bob Packwood’s habits
of groping lobbyists and staffers; this was widely known in DC, but only
among women. The fact that a wider audience (read: an audience of men
as well as women) was thunderstruck by the revelations about Packwood,
or Gary Hart before him, suggests that the gossip was limited entirely
to people who would not just believe it but also need it. Similarly, many
posts on What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy? refer to under-
ground warnings of sexual harassers in departments, or bemoan failing to
warn a friend and fellow graduate student as an ethical lapse.5 Comparing
this with Janice Dowell’s observation that public accusations of academic
sexual harassment or assault get met with widespread denials of even the
possibility suggests an obvious pattern.6 Some gossip gets spread on a
need-to-know basis. But this doesn’t make it morally useless; rather, if its
goal is prevention of harm rather than response to harm, it is functioning
entirely as expected.
The fact that Radzik only considers personal gossip—as in, gossip about
a single person’s behavior—narrows her analysis, as it does Piazza and
Bering’s analysis. It’s certainly reasonable to imagine that much academic
or institutional gossip is done intentionally, and with the intention of rais-
ing awareness about collective bad behavior. Certainly, the Perestroika
memo, and the What It’s Like website stand as direct examples of institu-
tional gossip with the explicit purpose of shaming a discipline (and thus
motivating a response), not simply a person or two. Jacquet also has a
panoply of more weakly collective instances of shaming that function
effectively.
Jacquet’s analysis of shame is thorough and clear, and provides helpful
context for our understanding of how gossip works in shaming people.
She avers that shaming is always connected to a group identity and a group
norm; we shame someone when they fail to live up to a group (public)
norm and identity. Guilt, by contrast, is individual; someone feels guilt
when they fail to live up to their own standard (11). Because group iden-
tities and norms aren’t purely fixed, there is a softness and flexibility to
shame; for Jacquet, that primarily works to shame’s advantage as a tool of
social reinforcement of norms. Parallel to my analysis of gossip, she notes
that shame can function to identify a norm or transgression even before it’s
become firmly articulated as one. In particular, because shame works infor-
mally, it can be effective when norms are informal only; when there is no
or a weak formal sanction connected with a behavior (like say tax evasion,
which can pay off as a rational calculus for companies with money to spend
on fines), public shaming can result in swift action (as it did for California,
which began publicizing names of top 500 individual and business tax-
evaders, and which promptly began recouping lost funds [22–23]).
Obviously, this sense of shame is found in negative gossip only; we
shame when we criticize someone for failing to live up to “our” standards
(of being a politician, a good family man, or a “real” philosopher). But we
shame because reputation matters to all of us; if someone is in our group,
we want to make sure that members of the group behave accordingly. This
is why shame works (and why weaponized gossip can work); Jacquet notes
that “[e]ven if institutions cannot feel shame the way an individual can,
institutions do often change their behavior to avoid or compensate for the
threat of exposure or negative publicity” (86). Shame endures across cul-
tures and eras (though its prominence varies culturally, one suspects due
to how attached cultures are to group identity and reputation).
Jacquet’s defense is teleological in nature; she does not defend shaming
as an ethical practice, but merely defends its utility. Regardless, she is care-
ful to qualify her embrace of shaming as an effective tactic. She advocates
some limits on when shame should be utilized, consistent with her analy-
sis. Her central limitations are these: shame should be applied internally
(i.e. those who are members of the group in which the norm has been
violated have standing to shame, but not random strangers), the deviation
should be marked, and not trivial, shaming has some likelihood of having
real behavioral effect, and there isn’t a formal punishment (or if there is, it
is rarely or ineffectively applied, such as financial penalties for Wall Street
misbehavior; 100). Most of these limitations are defensible if one thinks
that shame itself has a reputation that it needs to maintain as a credible
tactic. Shame (gossip) applied too broadly, too indifferently, and in places
where it cannot be effective (because there are effective formal procedures
in place and being applied) strikes us as simply mean-spiritedness; one is
being negative for the sheer pleasure of it, and to no greater purpose.
200 K. ADKINS
But one of the implications in this list of restrictions is proportionality:

we should shame (gossip) about someone when a deviation from a norm is
noteworthy, and when there is a real benefit to be expected from shame (a
person or institution might change its behavior). While Jacquet acknowl-
edges the existence of disproportionate shaming (which she largely attri-
butes to gossip, and to Internet rumor mills, 123–127), she argues that the
benefits can be worth the cost. Properly focused shame, Jacquet argues,
can stigmatize bad practice, and propel development of more effective
rules and punishments (173–174). It’s worthwhile to note that her best
examples of collective public shaming are focused on norm deviations that
apply to many people (tax cheats, anti-smoking campaigns), not simply a
single bad actor. Her analysis lines up with Radzik’s, and mine, that sham-
ing gossip is most dangerous, and least socially useful, when it zeroes in
on a single person’s actions.
Still, Jacquet implicitly endorses the idea of shaming. One could argue
that the person who’s been through a disproportionate public shaming
solely focused on her would find the cost-benefit analysis of shaming’s
value less compelling. Jon Ronson, in his So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed
(2015), sharply disagrees with Jacquet on precisely this point. Ronson’s
analysis is less systematic than Jacquet’s, but he provides several evoca-
tive examples that suggest that disproportionate public shaming is less
anecdotal than Jacquet might believe. Ronson is refreshingly self-aware
when describing the tendency to take pleasure in bringing someone down.
He writes of his own pleasure in “evil billionaires”’ creation of Twitter
accounts; he and others could do exactly the sort of folk norm enforce-
ment outlined by Jacquet. But soon, he notes, “it wasn’t just transgressions
we were keenly watchful for. It was misspeakings” (88). Proportionality is
a major bone of contention between them; Jacquet suggests that shame
can effectively be used to correct public deviations from norms, whereas
Ronson argues that shaming is mostly used to needlessly humiliate peo-
ple for relatively minor transgressions. Ronson concludes his analysis by
retracting his enthusiasm for shaming; “I, personally, no longer take part
in the ecstatic public condemnation of people unless they’ve committed
a transgression that has an actual victim, and even then not as much as I
probably should” (275).
Proportionality, of course, isn’t simply about the magnitude of the
offense; it is also about the prominence, or lack thereof, of the victim.
Both Jacquet and Ronson defend the idea of “punching up” shaming as
opposed to “punching down,” where the directions refer to someone’s
prominence and publicity. The distinction is that Ronson sees most public
shaming as masking itself as punching up, while it in truth punches down.
The public shaming of Justine Sacco, publicist who makes a Twitter joke
widely derided as racist and insensitive, is a prime example for him. Sacco’s
Tweet, posted as she boards a plane to South Africa (“Going to Africa.
Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding! I’m white”) quickly went viral, and
resulted in her firing shortly after she landed in South Africa. Ronson,
along with other commentators, defends the joke as clumsy rather than
racist—a “reflexive comment on white privilege,” Ronson describes it (73).
His defense of her is more striking when balanced against his anger at her
critics, whom he sees as guilty of sanctimony and overkill, to deadly effect.
“A life had been ruined,” he says dramatically (78). Monica Lewinsky, in
her TED talk about cyberbullying, echoes this tone, when she describes
how painful it was to go from being a completely private person to a pub-
licly mocked person within a matter of hours. Mark O’Connell, writing in
the New Yorker, catastrophizes along a similar vein, describing this kind of
public shaming as a “new form of violence” in which the guilty stands “as
an effigy of the world’s general awfulness.”
One feature of public shaming (which certainly extends to weapon-
ized gossip) that is present in the Sacco shaming, as well as many of the
others Ronson catalogs, is the actual violent and threatening nature of
the rhetoric. Among the response tweets Sacco receives are multiple rape
threats. Adria Richards’ call-out of two programmers’ sexist jokes during a
conference presentation on diversity in Silicon Valley results in a torrent of
sexually violent or just violent electronic responses (120). Lindsey Stone’s
Facebook picture of her pretending to shout and raising her middle finger
by the Arlington military cemetery’s “Silence and Respect” photo results
in the same cascade of violence, and in particular sexually violent, threats
(208–209).
Ronson observes, but does not comment upon, the absence of violent
and sexually violent tweets to male offenders. In other words, concern
over “punching up” and “punching down” in status and publicity of the
target may hit only part of the story. As previous chapters have demon-
strated, gossip is often about power relations and disparities; marginalized
people talk about the vices and bad behavior of the privileged, because it’s
one of the ways in which they can criticize without (much) fear of retri-
bution. Roxane Gay alludes to this dynamic. Her account of the Justine
Sacco shaming is regretful about the scale and complacency evinced by
many of the shamers (shades of stones and glass houses), but empathetic
202 K. ADKINS
with the rage at unanswered injustice, which is “choking,” that results in a

desire for vengeance. The marginalized gain a momentary sense of power,
but she suggests at a high cost.
An implicit concern raised in Gay’s essay is that shame campaigns are
momentary, dissociated, and personalized; they rarely (if ever) lead to
meaningful social change. They are too often too personalized to address
structural issues, or concrete changes. One of the factors that affect this,
I suspect, is the power difference between who is on the receiving end of
these shame campaigns. When the Pew Research Center surveyed social
media behavior, their research confirmed what was anecdotally present
in Ronson’s book; the more severe types of harassment (stalking, sexual
harassment, physical threats) were directed to women at twice or three
times the rate they were to men (Duggan). Interestingly, men are slightly
more likely to report being purposefully embarrassed online, thus provid-
ing some empirical support to Margaret Atwood’s trenchant observation
that men are afraid women will embarrass them, whereas women are afraid
that men will kill them.
To bring this back to weaponized gossip, what’s telling here is that it
is women and people of color who are disproportionately likely to be vic-
tims of not just negative virtual talk but also hostile and harassing negative
talk. Observations of the dangers of online shaming that fail to take this
into account, as Ronson’s does, are dangerously incomplete if not openly
misleading. He has a great deal of empathy for “Hank,” the programmer
Ronson respectfully keeps anonymous, who lost his job over his Beavis
and Butthead-style humor. Adria Richards, who Tweeted about Hank’s
juvenile sexism (repeated and pointless puns on tech terms, such as “fork-
ing” a women speaker and the size of his “dongle”), not only lost her job
but received rape and death threats as well; Ronson merely comments that
her view that she feels personally endangered when hearing hostile sexist
jokes might be “overblown” (118). Indeed, Richard’s observation that his
dismissal is itself an act of privilege gets waved aside by Ronson as ad homi-
nem (ibid.). It’s apparently merely ad personam when one receives death
threats and Photoshopped images of one’s head on a porn star’s body.
In particular, when Ronson interviews Hank (who has successfully
found another programming job, whereas Richards has not), he asks
Hank what Hank has learned from this experience. Hank’s epiphany is
that now he will stay away from female developers at work. Ronson, on
a follow-up, learns that there are no female developers at Hank’s new
job whom he should avoid (130). This elicits no comment from Ronson.
Ronson’s implication throughout this passage, that Hank’s lesson actually

deters rather than advances women’s progress (casually sexist program-
mers will now simply avoid female coworkers, rather than risk shaming),
simply ignores underlying power disparities and social structures. It is
convenient, and pointlessly so, for Hank to claim he will ignore women
coworkers, if there are no women coworkers for him to ignore. Hank gets
to claim victimhood, Ronson implicitly chastises feminists for overreach,
while the underlying power differences are ignored (let alone Richards’
fate).
As with the philosophers’ example from Chap. 4, we can observe a
particularly regrettable conclusion to this sorry episode. Richards’ ini-
tial tweet and her subsequent blog post (Richards) weren’t simply about
poor conduct by two individuals. Particularly in her blog post, she high-
lighted the ways in which pervasive sexism in Silicon Valley condition and
perpetuate sexist juvenilia; Elizabeth Anderson’s “shared reality bias” is
enacted yet again, with programmers assuming nobody could be offended
by hilarious jokes about forking a representative because they were just
jokes, and there were no potential forkees in earshot. Indeed, the par-
allels to professional philosophy here are even more striking; Richards
notes that one of the PyCon attendees celebrates that the conference has
achieved some diversity, because attendance was 20 % women. In other
words, Richards’ point wasn’t simply about lame jokes, but a pervasively
sexist culture that perpetuates itself, thus discouraging women from con-
tinuing to participate in technology. This isn’t mere singular grousing;
remember that tech reporter Nitasha Tiku notes that tech women regu-
larly discuss the fact of sexually harassing behavior from coworkers and
bosses, but are so unnerved about consequences that they are unwilling
to name names publicly even on an ostensively safe anonymous app like
Secret (Tiku). But the ensuing scandal didn’t at all address those structural
circumstances, and Ronson’s book ignored them completely. Instead, the
focus was entirely on the individuals who participated; just as in the phi-
losophers’ example, the discussion was exclusively about personalities, and
ignored the power issues that were being raised (implicitly or explicitly)
by those personalities. And indeed, the hypersensitivity in the response in
both scandals (the makers of the Pluralist’s Guide were accused by Leiter
of damaging the prospects of women in top graduate programs, just as
Richards was accused of damaging the cause of diversity in tech) speaks
to the ways in which personalizing the response can work simply to elide
the root concerns.
204 K. ADKINS
The double standards in gossip are heightened when we look at who

enjoys anonymity, and who is obliged to endure publicity. Richards’ very
publicity as a woman of color in a predominantly white male profession
meant that she suffered the most extended negative consequence. By con-
trast, “Hank’s” very anonymity meant that he could live down his par-
ticipation, which aggravates those disparities. Richards chose to call out
the behavior publicly (as she noted in her blog post, in part because it
wasn’t even the first time that day she’d heard childishly sexist humor).
“Hank’s” behavior, while still public, was ultimately shrouded in anonym-
ity. Richards is already and inescapably visible in the tech industry as a
woman of color, and as someone who is outspoken about the ways in
which tech is insensitive to diversity. She does not have the luxury of ano-
nymity; indeed, she describes herself as being obliged to speak out publicly
so that programming doesn’t stay as homogeneous as it has in her lifetime.
“Hank”, on the other hand, enjoys anonymity simply for demographic
reasons; he is literally and figuratively one of a massive crowd. His literal
anonymity (carefully maintained by Ronson) means that he has no endur-
ing responsibility for his own participation in a sexist culture. Indeed, he
apparently can simply take the tack of avoidance (women are scary!).
It’s worth pausing to emphasize this point, because I think it speaks to
a bigger indicator of where gossip has the potential to do the most dam-
age, without any concomitant benefit. As I’ve suggested, the examples of
gossip that we’ve seen have impact as well as effect have always been oper-
ating on several levels—they’ve often been personalized (French peasants
spreading scandalous stories about the ignoble and irreligious behavior
of their ostensively divine monarchs, black Atlantans spreading rumors
about corrupt CDC officials kidnapping their children), but the stories
have simultaneously been about the institutions or the practices as much
as the people. Indeed, the grievances were often far more about the insti-
tutions than the individual person who at the moment was the target. The
most damaging gossip that we’ve seen in this chapter, whether fictional-
ized or truthful, has the same quality of focusing entirely and only on a
person’s conduct; its context gets left by the wayside. This is a misleading
way to talk about behavior and people, and allows us to zero in on osten-
sive and convenient villains (who may be at least partly conjured up in our
minds), rather than the environment that contributes to and legitimates
their behavior, and which may only be selectively observed and heeded
regardless. This is pure speculation, but it’s hard for me not to imagine
that John Stuart Mill’s profound distaste for gossip wasn’t simply because
he was the subject of it, but because the Victorian ideal of absolute marital
fidelity was so inconsistently honored. Indeed, it’s hard not to imagine
that some of the enthusiastic gossipers about Mill’s alleged dalliances with
Harriet Taylor were themselves guilty of the same behavior they so luridly
attributed to him. His criticisms in On Liberty of Christians as mostly
hypocrites who mouth empty moral platitudes while largely acting in their
own self-interest (52), and Christian morality as inferior to pagan morality
in its selfish rather than communal focus (63), provide textual hints that
the “proper” Victorians who condemned him were, in his opinion, far
from that.
In other words, gossip is most damaging, and least beneficial, when
it zeros in on a single person’s conduct in a decontextualized fashion.
The case for or against disproportionality is not just one of numbers and
context (do we notice and equally value all instances of disproportionate
shaming), but one of fairness. If we can judge shaming gossip to be dis-
proportionate to the act, even if the target would seem worthy of shaming,
the gossip is unfair. The trick here, of course, is that the concepts of fair-
ness and proportionate are not self-evident and ahistorical. Edwin Baker,
for instance, notes that gossip can be unfair when it “treat[s] as important
something about a person that should not, at least not now, be relevant for
the person’s public persona” (2004: 266). But as the Gary Hart debacle
so clearly demonstrates, concepts of relevance can shift depending on who
has any public authority or voice. For years, sexual harassment wasn’t rec-
ognized as a term, and held no legal status, and thus chronic sexual mis-
conduct of high officials was ignored or tolerated with a wink and a nod.
But the emergence of women politicians and journalists, as well as feminist
advocacy groups, meant that behaviors could be seen in a different light.
Perhaps a more useful way to think about proportionality is less in
terms of the value judgment and the act, but the scale: how widely
spread is the shaming gossip, and how prominent a reputation does the
subject of the shaming gossip have? Monica Lewinsky, who herself sur-
vived a rather harrowing period as the subject of persistent gossip, offers
moving testimony to the dangers of public shaming of previously private
individuals. Describing herself as “patient Zero” of online shaming, she
runs through some of the most damaging things that were said about
her (as well as the fact that her private phone calls were surreptitiously
recorded by an ostensive friend). The negative effect of this is clear and
dramatic; she describes a period of stark suicidality, where she did not
leave the house and where her mother would monitor her sleep and
206 K. ADKINS
showers to ensure her daughter’s safety. She aptly compares herself to

Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers freshman who became the subject of online
mockery. After his roommate surreptitiously posted video of Clementi,
who was not yet out, having sex with another man in their dorm room,
he committed suicide. Lewinsky targets commercial clickbait sites as
particular electronic villains in what she sees as an age of “virtual ston-
ing”; drawing clicks and acid comments about people we don’t know by
posting videos and photos leaves permanent damage to those exposed.
Relevant differences between Lewinsky’s and Clementi’s case stress, not
reduce, the dangers of shaming gossip. While Lewinsky experienced
national ridicule and mockery, Clementi’s more limited mockery would
have seemed no less total to him. While Clementi’s roommate used
Twitter to communicate and publicize his surveillance and mockery, his
Twitter friends would have mainly been fellow Rutgers students. A first-
year university student (particularly one who lives on campus) experi-
ences the world of the university as the world, and this sort of online
shaming would be particularly damaging.
It’s worth stressing a common and distinctive feature to both the
Lewinsky and Clementi case that has not been a typical feature of gossip;
both involve surreptitious recording of acts in which one has a reasonable
expectation of privacy. As Chap. 5’s discussion of privacy and gossip made
clear, it’s telling that condemnations of gossip routinely cite surreptitious
surveillance as a stand-in for condemnation of a much wider, and less
privacy-invasive, practice of talking about others’ behavior.7 What Linda
Tripp and Tyler Clementi’s roommate did was indefensible, but much of
the online gossip, even of the weaponized variety, starts with much less
invasive material. When we are in relatively public spaces (like a profes-
sional conference, as Hank was) or working in a public role (as Justine
Sacco, the PR rep, was when she issued her tweets), it seems unreasonable
not to expect that people will notice our behavior, and comment if some-
thing is egregious. Indeed, broad condemnations of shaming gossip, such
as those offered by both Lewinsky and Ronson, miss some of the differ-
ences about what we can and should expect from our peers.
Indeed, the effect, or lack thereof, of weaponized gossip is highly
variant, suggesting that those who wish to employ it do so at some peril.
Daniel Solove reminds us of the problem of shaming, if our goal is to
change behavior (Jacquet’s stated intention): “[s]hame is about hid-
ing; it is about exile; it is about withdrawal. Shame’s tendency to lead
to withdrawal and alienation is troubling. Without allowing a wrong-
doer to reenter community life, shame becomes quite destructive” (95).

While it’s worth pausing to qualify some of Solove’s modifiers—from
which communities are the shamed permanently exiled? In what fash-
ion?—he’s highlighting a key psychological feature of shame that makes
it so potentially damaging. Because, as Jacquet observes, shame works
by emphasizing the deviance of an actor (I depart radically from a com-
munity norm; I am an outlier), its text as well as subtext works to divide
and separate. The psychological effect (hide, exile, withdraw) is a natural
aftereffect.
6.5 Conclusion
We’ve seen, in this chapter, the way in which gossip can be destructive.
The fictional features of the gossip in Hellman’s play—a small, insulated
community in which power was both sharply divided and contested—get
real-life illustration in many instances of destructive gossip. While the
terms of destruction may not be quite as apocalyptic as some of the con-
demnatory language we saw in Chap. 2, the patterns are still evident.
Gossip, in its indirection and secrecy, has the power to wreak havoc on
individual lives. In general, the more decontextualized the gossip is, the
more dangerous it is. When we are in communities in which trust in
official information is wanting, or living or working in institutions where
there is little communication between those in and out of power, or in
such small communities that dissent is all but impossible, we are in petri
dishes of gossip fermentation. We ourselves can be agents of damag-
ing gossip when we zero in overmuch on a single person’s behavior as
noteworthy or appalling; if we ignore the way in which the behavior is
interesting to us because it reflects broader norms or standards, we risk
focusing too much on the personal, and ignoring how personal failings
emerge in part from social or political norms.
Finally, it’s relevant to pay special attention to the Internet as an
incubator of weaponized gossip. The most striking result in the Pew
study is the percentage of respondents who believe that online envi-
ronments facilitate negativity; 92 % of the respondents agree with that
statement. Many fewer respondents agree that the Internet facilitates
anonymity; interestingly, more than half also recognize that the Internet
facilitates supportive activity, which speaks to the ways in which online
environments are valuable for geographically dispersed marginalized
people. These findings, which on the surface appear to be contradictory,
208 K. ADKINS
actually demonstrate the way in which the Internet functions quite dif-
ferently for different communities. This Pew finding speaks to a surpris-
ing, if limited, virtue in some forms of Internet anonymity. It is common
to find excoriations against the anonymity of Internet commenting;
many people argue that it facilitates hostility, harassment, and threats
(and of course we’ve seen many examples of that). And yet, in some lim-
ited cases, we can see a kind of parity in mutual anonymity; for instance,
the online boards for people responding to harassment (like What Is It
Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy?). Women would not be submitting
those stories, or reading them, if it were unsafe. The blog’s being run
by a few senior women in philosophy, with reputations of their own to
protect, no doubt helps guarantee expectations of trust and mainte-
nance of confidentiality. By contrast, the women in tech were asked to
submit anonymous stories to a commercial website, where ownership
and operation were far less controlled. Indeed, the fact that women
philosophers regularly submit stories of harassment, and women in tech
explicitly do not, demonstrates that anonymity without some sort of
mutual if limited trust is useless.
And thus we return to one of the core themes of this book: the role
and importance of trust in gossip. Gossip’s origins are in trustworthiness
and intimacy; gossip’s damaging applications come where some aspect
of intimacy is being violated. One of the ways in which gossip can be
corrosive is in its undermining of public statements as ever reliable or
trustworthy. Both Patricia Turner’s work on rumor in African-American
communities, and Karen Brison’s ethnography of gossip among the
Kwanga, substantiate this concern. Indeed, Brison notes that the Kwanga
villages are infected with a “spirit of distrust,” in which public statements
are assumed always to be false, or concealing or distorting important
truths (31). This sort of environment foments not just a gossip but also
an assumption that gossip and public statements are forever in opposi-
tion. There are analogs to this in online gossip. Online gossip can work,
and indeed can be effective in propelling change, where there are ways to
maintain some version of trust and intimacy, as we can see in the What Is
It Like example. But it’s worth examining the special nature of Internet
gossip, and in particular, its context—how different is Internet gossip
from previous eras’ yellow papers or scandal sheets? The next chapter will
focus entirely on Internet gossip as a new subspecies of the gossip world,
so this analysis will be extended there.
Notes
1. Hellman famously observes that, despite the publicity the play drew
for its lesbian storyline, the play is not really about lesbianism.
Rather, she notes, she wrote it because she was interested in lying.
“The bigger the lie, the better, always,” she notes (4). While
Hellman has Martha admit that she has feelings for Karen in the
final scene, shortly before she kills herself—Martha describes the
gossip as “the lie with the ounce of truth” (67)—Mary’s gossip,
about a reciprocated and consummated relationship, is fundamen-
tally false.
2. It’s also indicative of Franklin’s care for his own reputation that this
incident is carefully stage-managed in Franklin’s Autobiography.
Keimer, who from the first is portrayed as an idle dullard with few
redeeming qualities, is described by Franklin as provoking his columns
because Keimer starts a paper out of sheer pique, to outdo Franklin
(Isaacson 455). Given Franklin’s regular allowances to his own ambi-
tion throughout the Autobiography, the fact that the Instructor had
been in existence for a full year, as well as other scholars’ research on
Keimer (Sidwell), Franklin’s version of events seems slightly self-serv-
ing. As Sidwell demonstrates (1966: 21–23), Keimer’s professional
commitments, including starting a school for African Americans in
1725 and printing an Almanac, demonstrate a commitment to the
public good that complicates Franklin’s cartoonish rendition.
3. Indeed, I would say that analyses like Westacott’s and Radzik’s of
the nuances of gossip are generally on-target in their analysis.
4. Thanks to Debbie Gaensbauer for this helpful caveat.
5. See “Available to Read Drafts—But Not For You,” October 12,
2010; “Dear APA, Thanks for the Memories,” November 1, 2010;
“Choosing Non-Creepiness,” April 29, 2011; “I Really Didn’t
Know Any Better,” May 24, 2012, all at https://beingawom-
aninphilosophy.wordpress.com.
6. For Dowell, see Clifford Sosis (2016). For, in addition, one anec-
dote suggests a significant gender-bifurcation in philosopher gossip.
One contributor to What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy
notes that she has overheard a lot of men gossiping about their
women colleagues’ and students’ romantic lives (and not those of
their male colleagues and students). See “Gossip About Women,”
November 14, 2010.
210 K. ADKINS
7. Recording someone’s words or acts without consent and then shar-

ing them is so transparently indefensible that Emrys Westacott, in
his otherwise very careful and nuanced examination of the ethics of
gossip (2012), doesn’t bother to discuss it meaningfully, merely
noting its moral repugnance as a violation of a reasonable expecta-
tion of privacy (59).
CHAPTER 7
Gossip in the Ether: How the Internet

Does, and Doesn’t, Change Gossip
Gossip’s roots, as we’ve seen, aren’t simply in intimacy but also in orality.
Walter Ong’s (1982) evocative description of the ephemerality of orality—
“sound exists only when it is going out of existence” (71)—reminds us
of the ways in which gossip as an oral phenomenon is always potentially
safer than printed gossip. It is transitory, impermanent, and can be forgot-
ten, even if it sometimes gets passed eagerly and destructively. Ong also
reminds us that the differences between how we think in primarily oral
cultures versus primarily literature cultures are substantive. Oral thinking is
more connective, grounded in memory-based tools (mnemonics like rep-
etition and rhyme), and functions associatively, empathically, situationally,
aggregatively, and concretely (37–57). It is literate culture that produces
formal logic, abstract reasoning, and other hallmarks of philosophy, as
Ong phrases it, or “the relentless dominance of textuality in the scholarly
mind” (10). Equally important, and often overlooked, is Ong’s emphasis
that this isn’t a simple either–or proposition of rationality and order over
connection and chaos. Humans didn’t simply switch over to abstraction;
rather, we live with and experience the residue of oral thinking and act-
ing in a print culture. Correlatively, the abstraction of print culture isn’t
automatically and utterly superior to association. Ong reminds us that
writing is an inherently solipsistic act that is yet meant for an audience; the
end and its means work against each other (101). Our thinking, for Ong,
reflects both oral and literate tendencies. In other words, spoken language
isn’t inherently sloppy, wasteful, or unproductive; rather, it is to say that

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47840-1_7
212 K. ADKINS
the techniques we learn and practice in our speech are not identical with
those of writing, but that each can influence the other, not just stylistically
but also substantively or imaginatively. It is not simply the case that rhetor-
ical flourishes can amplify a solid, logical argument, or find an otherwise
dry argument a connection with a wider audience, but that a vivid analogy
or memorable description can spark a connection or develop an idea that
might not happen in the best-articulated and -researched formula.
My arguments on gossip follow this template. As we saw with our his-
torical review, gossip has been with us as long as conversation has, and
despite our moves to a print, and now digital culture, the strengths and
weaknesses of gossip are with us as well. We can see, when we examine
the history of gossip, the way in which gossip’s origins in direct intimacy
quickly moved to a broader and often print audience. Medieval texts in
particular are full of warnings (if not outright panics) about gossip, though
as Susie Phillips (2007) skillfully demonstrates, these warnings often take
place alongside or in the form of gossip themselves, thus demonstrating
rhetorical ambivalence or hypocrisy toward gossip. By the eighteenth cen-
tury, broadsheets and newspapers in Europe and the United States were a
generous mixture of the sober and the scandalous. So our quick assump-
tions about gossip as ethereal—emerging in conversation, and dissipating
once memories of the scandal fade—don’t quite hew to fact. However,
our examples have typically been tucked into or on the margins of texts
whose subjects are far removed, at least ostensibly, from gossip. When the
printed references to gossip are ephemeral or casual, in papers or tabloids
that are designed for daily or weekly consumption at best, even printed
gossip has, for much of its history, been relatively ephemeral.
The question remains, then, to what extent and in what fashion gossip
changes when those repositories of gossip become digitized and perma-
nent, as they are in the age of digital media? Using Ong as a frame here is
helpful, because he identifies some conceptual markers that shift sharply
during the transition from primarily oral to primarily literate cultures.
First, the relationships between public and private transform in this switch.
Oral culture, with its emphasis on a strong and active speaker–auditor con-
nection, has a blurrier and more symbiotic relationship between the public
and the private than in print culture, where writing can be done privately,
is published after the fact, and responded to publicly. Second, the relation-
ship between the individual and the collective shifts; oral culture produces
texts that are passed down and composed, interpreted, or reinterpreted by
their many authors who work from memory. Homer is the most obvious
GOSSIP IN THE ETHER: HOW THE INTERNET DOES, AND DOESN’T, CHANGE... 213
case, but certainly major religious texts like the Old and New Testaments
support this as well, emerging from long and collective group authorship.
By contrast, literate culture produces the individual author who copyrights
work for credit if not profit, and texts are composed and revised privately;
personal diaries and confessional writing emerge as genres. Indeed, in lit-
erate culture anonymity or pseudonymity can be controversial (who is the
author behind this writing), whereas in oral culture it is either mundanely
obvious (I am telling you what I just saw) or collectively shared (we are
reciting shared myths and poems, there is no single author). Third, literate
culture brings with it the development of abstraction as opposed to con-
creteness. These poles of comparison—private/public, individual/collec-
tive, abstract/concrete—help us examine the ways in which gossip shifts
when it happens primarily electronically, as opposed to primarily orally.
I will examine digital gossip through these poles, and in order.
Before I review the organization of the chapter, let me pause to give
quick context of the apps I’ll discuss in this chapter. There are three apps
that have emerged in the last few years as ways for informal discussion of
folks in common communities (colleges and universities, Silicon Valley,
and Washington, DC, respectively). All three permit anonymous brief
postings and commentaries, which invites the kind of evaluative talk of
gossip. Yik Yak, created in 2013, functions as a backyard fence for the
inhabitants of the United States’ colleges and universities. Students (and
more recently faculty and administrators) use the Yik Yak app to spread
anonymous commentary on fellow students, classes, issues on campus, and
themselves. Secret was a short-lived app, existing for a mere 16 months
over 2014–2015, that functioned for Silicon Valley to gossip about itself
anonymously. While Secret was not designed to be internal to Silicon
Valley, it immediately became consumed by gossip internal to the Valley. As
Secret died in 2015, a Capitol Hill version debuted (Cloakroom), which
is still thriving after having passed Secret’s lifespan (Itkowicz). Cloakroom
has the same blend of vulgar and serious that Secret and Yik Yak do, but
it is telling that Cloakroom and Yik Yak have survived while Secret, after
being publicly successful, died an equally public death. The context may
make all the difference. Millennial college students, for better or worse,
are comfortable with public displays and discussions of their lives; Yik Yak
would not seem a differently intrusive technology than the other tech-
nologies (Instagram, Vine) they use to publicize or comment on their
worlds and their friends. For politicians, the keeping and trading of secrets
are an expected part of the job. By contrast, investors and owners in
214 K. ADKINS
Silicon Valley were perhaps used to working without much public or vis-
ible scrutiny; the sudden and egalitarian push to have their work and per-
formance revealed and critiqued would have been deeply uncomfortable
and new territory for them. In other words, the fact that Secret fails while
Yik Yak and Cloakroom continue reinforces my arguments from earlier
chapters of the danger of gossip when it reveals uncomfortable critical
positions about a homogeneous community.
I will elaborate on this claim later, but first, let me outline the argu-
ment of the chapter. In Sect. 7.1, I will examine the ways in which digital
gossip both does and doesn’t alter the public/private distinction. While
gossip has always straddled if not violated the private/public distinction,
in electronic gossip, as we will see, the private/public distinction is further
eroded. E-gossip’s expansion of the public, and the ability to post material
directly online means that the public realm, in terms of both participant
(who talks) and subjects (what is discussed) is expanded almost without
limits. In Sect. 7.2, I will examine e-gossip in virtue of the individual/col-
lective pole; the pseudonymity and anonymity that marks much electronic
gossip brings with it benefits as well as challenges. On the positive side,
people who have concerns or criticisms about power can raise them with
less risk, and find solidarity in others who have faced similar issues. But this
is clearly a double-edged sword; as we saw in Chap. 6, those who don’t
see the validity in criticisms have a ready response, and can personalize
criticism (and thus make minority voices all the more visible). In particu-
lar, the pseudonymity and anonymity of digital gossip (particularly when
combined with its relative permanence) makes it a far likelier vehicle for
conversational mischief or malice. While it is clear that digital gossip isn’t
uniquely anonymous or pseudonymous (the episodes of Kierkegaard and
Benjamin Franklin, just to name those discussed in this book, testify to
the health and vitality of pseudonymous gossip in the printed age), ano-
nymity and pseudonymity are far likelier to occur, and authorship is easier
to mask, in the digital world than that of print. In Sect. 7.3, one clear
difference between e-gossip and its oral and printed predecessors comes
in how concrete it is. While oral culture, according to Ong, was always
more concrete than abstract gossip, oral or printed gossip was indirect
in its concreteness. Classic gossip (whether oral or printed) was typically
discussion of something that happened offscreen (whether in a bedroom,
boardroom, or elsewhere). Cell phones with cameras, Google Glass, and
the plethora of social media apps that will publicize video with comments
means that much e-gossip now takes the form of viewing and discussion of
the act itself; the discussion is almost secondary to the viewing. To be sure,
there are some instances where this technology is clearly deeply valuable to
public discussions. Filming instances of police shootings or violent arrests
of people of color, for instance, gives visceral substance to community cri-
tiques of systematic racism, and in particular serves as a sharp visual rebuke
to those who deny the possibility of racism’s manifestation in some police
officers’ treatment of people of color. But the instantaneous nature of
digital promotion is dangerous, and is often used to publicize grievances
that have little public merit. While electronic gossip replicates some of
the positives we’ve seen in historical instances of gossip—it is an efficient
way for people who are blocked from knowledge or credibility to share
information and work in solidarity—its regular presentation as simulated
intimacy presents some distinct dangers. The final section of this chapter,
7.4, will explore some of the structural reasons for this decontextualiza-
tion. Part of the epistemic and social benefits to gossip, as I’ve argued in
this book, come from its ability to provide context. Gossip tells an alter-
native story to what gets more above ground attention because gossip
synthesizes, it connects public and private acts, or puts one person’s acts
in a different setting. Some of the architecture of the Internet works both
to facilitate this contextual work and to inhibit it. The architecture and
economics of the Internet in some ways render its conversational power
worrisomely vulnerable to manipulation. The fact that this manipulation
or direction would be invisible to its users, especially when some may be
psychologically or socially reliant on the reassuring or comforting ability
of an electronic community, is distinctly troublesome.
7.1 How Public Is My Digital Dirty Laundry?

In whatever form it occurs, gossip has always been about publicizing the
private. But the degree of publicity, in both subject and scope, has shifted
over the years. Oral gossip—neighbors talking to neighbors about commu-
nity members’ behaviors, colonizers’ oppression, or government officials’
hypocrisy—depended on shared background and community knowledge.
The emergence of printed gossip expanded both the range of who gos-
sips to whom, and who is the subject of gossip. French readers could
imagine themselves in the know with royal misbehavior and corruption;
devoted American readers of “blind items” columns from gossip mavens
like Walter Winchell, Louella Parsons, and Hedda Hopper could pride
themselves on discussing and correctly identifying who was being referred
216 K. ADKINS
to in columns alluding to Hollywood or government malfeasance. The

subjects of French scandal sheets and newspaper columns, though, already
were in the public eye; the public had at least some information (however
curated or controlled) about them. The shift to digital gossip, by contrast,
expands the domain of the public almost infinitely; those who have no
public profile can find themselves the subject of discussion on apps, and
the discussion can extend to anyone with Internet access.
The publicity of gossip matters, because if gossip is too widely or gener-
ically shared, interlocutors lack any sense of context with which to evaluate
what they’re hearing and discussing. As Solove phrases it, “the Internet
lacks the village’s corrective of familiarity. In the small village, people had
a long history together and knew the whole story about an individual”
(37). This is clearly just as true in printed celebrity gossip as it is in digital
gossip, it’s important to note. And it’s not also always false in Internet
gossip. For instance, it’s reasonable to note that some Internet electronic
communities can represent a small enough diaspora of people that there is
a substantive amount of shared background beliefs and experiences across
the group. Thinking back to our academic examples, for instance, the
community of people who participated in or completed graduate study
in philosophy in the United States is a small enough group to sustain a
variety of philosophy blogs.
However, printed gossip, whether of celebrity magazines or of the
scandal sheets from past centuries, is disposable and forgettable in ways
that electronic gossip is not.1 The paradox that electronic gossip is both
instantaneous and permanent makes its publicity particularly dangerous.
As Dunbar demonstrates with his anthropology of gossip, its origins are
dyadic, a nit-picker and a nit-pickee. While conversational gossip can
expand beyond the dyad, it doesn’t take too much expansion for gossip to
go beyond a conversation of trusted intimates to more generic rumor mill.
Intimate gossip—the private conversation of two or three people, which,
if particularly interesting or challenging, may get spread elsewhere—by its
embedding within conversation and friendship, carries with it some of the
virtues of conversation and friendship. It is sustained, it emerges in and
from trust, it is dialogic. That is to say, the structure of the gossip conver-
sation itself provides some checks on too-sharp charges, too-strong indict-
ments, or too-wild theories. By contrast, electronic gossip is often atomic
(single messages posted on a board). While some boards have a sense of
trust (their communities are relatively small and insular), many boards are
not. And while comment threads can be dialogical, their very openness
means that they are typically not dialogical in this, dare I say, more Socratic
sense that one finds in good gossip. Thus, there aren’t any of the ways to
check the credibility or plausibility of what is posted electronically. There
is no internal or external other face or voice to discourage someone from
electronically broadcasting the dirtiest of laundry. And the allure of having
something to say that people want to hear, which gets clicks, or upvotes,
or comments, can be powerful.
To give a concrete and personal example of this, I periodically check
my institution’s Yik Yak feed, as an informal way of checking small-scale
gossip in situ (gossip as it occurs, and gossip that does not make headlines
in the New York Times or the Chronicle of Higher Education). My college
(relatively small, traditional-aged student body, and Catholic) produces
Yik Yak posts that are a pretty healthy blend of both the worst and the best
of what people think about Yik Yak. Yes, there are plenty of comments
about and solicitations for sex, drugs, alcohol, and parties, but they are
also balanced by discussions of classes, assignments, financial stress, family
pressures, religious questions, and the myriad other tensions and troubles
of a college student’s life. Both most plaintively and sweetly, there are
regular entreaties from students experiencing loneliness, as well as regular
encouragements or cheering messages from random anonymous students.
In other words, for all its qualities of anonymity, brevity, and immedi-
acy, Yik Yak provides a rough facsimile of the kinds of subjects and atti-
tudes young people in their twenties discuss with their friends. In at least
this instance, Yik Yak as it is practiced is not the caricature that is often
described in critical press coverage.
But it is important to note that even though in general Yik Yak presents
a healthy blend of the sacred and the profane, the transcendent and the
quotidian, its anonymity and immediacy are not without danger. In six
months of following Yik Yak, the most (indeed only) breathtaking message
I saw was brief: a photo of a positive pregnancy test in a toilet stall trash
can, with a speculative sentence. This poster went so far as to name not
only the residence hall in which the test was found but the specific floor
and wing, thus clearly inviting followers to name names. Naming of names
did not, in fact, happen in the thread (which got many comments), but
this post, above all, struck me as damaging and irresponsible.2 Given that
my institution is Catholic in its orientation, some students, faculty, and
administrators are deeply uncomfortable with the realities of student sexu-
ality. While my campus’ student body is religiously diverse, the primacy
of Catholicism means that departures from Catholic teaching (whether in
218 K. ADKINS
a curricular or student activities context), particularly if it is on teachings

about sexuality, draws significant attention. Publicizing something that
somebody clearly wanted to keep private invites the sort of target-selection
and focus that can have obvious personal and social effects.
This particular moment well illustrates the dangers contained within
the publicity and permanence of digital gossip, in a greater extent than
its oral or print versions. When we gossip with our friends, there exists,
at least potentially, natural checks on our conversation that come from
real-life trusted interlocutors (whether the conversation is in person or
over the phone). In my own career as a gossip, many is the time I’ve heard
either myself or a friend walk back or retract a connection, speculation, or
indictment. Speaking for myself, something I may have thought to myself
changes when I say it to someone who knows and trusts me—the act of
speaking to and in front of other people acts as a reminder of my sense of
myself. C.A.J. Coady confirms my experience, when he writes that gos-
sipers are attentive to how their information is received and reacted to,
as a way of checking their assumptions. “Gossip may therefore assist in
what could be a useful form of self-criticism,” he contends (2006: 258).
Because we trust our gossiping intimates, and because the domain of gos-
sip is friendly, we can question each other in gossip—the stakes are low-
ered than they are in more public and formal discourse. This point isn’t
limited to gossip; Kwame Anthony Appiah’s writings on the moral effi-
cacy of honor (2010) are illustrative here. Appiah examines several social
practices that had widespread moral acceptance and defense for centuries
(duels, footbinding, slavery), and then rapidly underwent a moral trans-
valuation, becoming widely condemned. Appiah argues that honor—rec-
ognition respect—is the crucial difference; when people within a culture
saw themselves as disrespectful because of this treatment, they changed
their thinking. Thinking of ourselves as honorable means that we have
earned the respect of others. Crucially, that respect isn’t generic; Appiah
notes that we live in “honor worlds,” in which we hold or seek to hold the
respect of specific peers we think of as like-minded (20). Obviously, some-
thing like this is as work in friendship; friendships don’t sustain themselves
absent mutual respect, and violations of that respect (such as speaking
violently or wildly about others without check or containment) would be
challenging to many friendships.
These concerns about the dangers of immediacy have clear application
to the Yik Yak example. It’s easy to imagine our digital gossip (who we can
assume was alone in the toilet stall) reacting impulsively to an interesting
find. It is fun to tell shocking news, and the commentary can reinforce a
self-perception of cleverness or snarkiness. But the generic quality of this
publicity means there is no accountability or honor check on the clever-
ness or snark; the only value becomes in quick-wittedness, and there is
no meaningful check to encourage restraint. Even technological develop-
ments that seem promising—self-destructing text messages, via apps like
Snapchat, that appear to restore ephemerality to digital talk—are illusory.
The possibility of a screenshot means that talk via text always has the pos-
sibility of living in perpetuity, whereas in-person talk only does if it’s seri-
ously scandalous (as in our case studies).
I want to stress that the increased publicity of e-gossip over print is
a degree of difference, rather than kind. As we saw in the discussion of
political gossip, many commentators on sexual peccadilloes of candidates,
but especially Matt Bai, were remarkably ahistorical in their assessment,
acting as if the onset of cable news or online news blogs were the sig-
nal events that moved us irrevocably from decent people who discussed
morally upright topics to sewer-dwellers who trolled for scandals. This,
of course, is not what we’ve seen in the history of political gossip and
scandal. There is a parallel concern that privacy violations are distinc-
tively and crucially more significant and more public in the Internet age.
The recent lawsuit by celebrity wrestler Hulk Hogan (aka Terry Bollea)
against Gawker Media (whose namesake website carries the evocative
slogan “Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news”) and its discussion demon-
strates this concern. Hogan sued Gawker for publishing a film excerpt of
him having sex with a friend’s wife; the friend, allegedly, filmed Hogan
without his consent (though knew about and invited Hogan to have sex
with his wife). Hogan was awarded $140 million (more than his request)
by a jury who “dr[ew] the line” at what should be published (Rutenberg
2016).3 Defenders of this award pointed to it, noticeably, as a defense
against a culture of gossip. Jim Rutenberg, ombudsperson for the New
York Times, is typical in this tone when he rhetorically asks “Have we
finally found the bottom” of scandal-mongering, which he takes to have
been consistently increasing in the last few decades (Rutenberg 2016).
Rutenberg isn’t alone in his concerns about permanent publicity; Robert
Levine (2016) makes a comparable argument about the Hogan case as
a watershed moment in legal arguments of privacy. He notes that the
Hogan verdict suggests a popular desire for better and more nuanced
laws for the digital age, because “the Internet has allowed our private
information to be made public in ways we didn’t intend,” and quotes a
220 K. ADKINS
privacy expert who mourns an older and expired model of privacy where
one controlled information as it left one’s hands.
But we as saw in the chapter about politics, this claim of sudden pub-
licity is overstated. As long as we have had newspapers (and before that,
as long as people could talk to each other), people have had the ability to
snoop and publicize snooping. The differences Rutenberg and Levine may
be noting are the permanence of the publicity, though here as well, the
permanence existed before. Newspapers developed and became popular
concurrent with archives, in the Enlightenment and the nineteenth cen-
tury. While the effort to find a paper article on an archive far from one’s
house is obviously more substantial than the ability to Google a link at
any time in one’s pajamas, the permanence of the information is present
in both cases. Rather, I suspect that two different factors may have been
more relevant; one stated by several commenters, another implicit. Several
analysts noted the publicly available nature of online embarrassment may
have been relevant; no longer were embarrassing revelations about private
behavior limited to public figures. As Robert Levine drily phrased it, we
are all “just one airplane screaming match, ill-advised Facebook post or
recklessly shared photo from becoming an online story ourselves.” Privacy
invasions are nothing new; however, the democratic nature of online pri-
vacy invasions are.
In other words, publicity and privacy for whom becomes an open and
more charged question in the Internet era. Levine’s warning is clear: any
of us can conceivably find ourselves the subject of national and casual dis-
cussion and dismissal. Michel Foucault’s warning of a panopticon world
in which self-surveillance is more limiting than any external surveillance
applies; advice columns on navigating social media regularly remind users
to act as if all postings, email, and commentaries are public, to remem-
ber that Internet anonymity isn’t guaranteed, and encourage people to
behave in ways that are beyond reproach, in the event of electronic docu-
mentation. This is of course an unrealistic expectation. But the Gawker
trial contains a curious footnote on how much privacy anyone can expect.
Hogan’s lawyers made a sharp distinction between the public figure of
Hulk Hogan the cartoonish wrestler, and Terry Bollea. “Mr. Bollea argues
that Hulk Hogan, the character, made all those sexual boasts, not Mr.
Bollea himself. And that Mr. Hogan, the character, is given to exaggera-
tion and falsehood, which explains any contradictory statements he made
about the tape and his knowledge of it. Mr. Hogan, he agrees, does not
have much privacy left to violate. But Mr. Bollea does” (Somaiya 2016).
Hogan’s claim of privacy rests on a radical split between his public and
private identities, and ironically, a notion of his public self that is premised
upon repeated, public, and monetized violations of a(n apparently fanciful
and exaggerated if not outright fabricated) private self. While everyone
deserves a measure of privacy, public figures who regularly monetize their
private lives, while simultaneously claiming a carefully guarded private self,
seem more than a little inconsistent. Pertinently, Hogan spoke about his
sex life when making public appearances even before the sex tape was
released, so Hogan monetized not just his private life but also all parts of
his private life.4 Hogan, of course, is not unusual in this monetization of
privacy; the entire genre of reality television thrives on people’s willingness
to forego even the most minimal sense of privacy for their 15 minutes of
fame. Hogan’s claims to violations of privacy ring less sincere, for instance,
than do those by Tyler Clementi or Monica Lewinsky, who were private
citizens before being forced onto an endless electronic stage.
The combination of the immediacy and permanency of digital gossip is
sorely tempting when one has a secret. It is important to think about what
is at stake in these moments. The temptation is to throw out the gossip
baby with the bathwater. For instance, after the Hogan trial concluded, it
was revealed that a Silicon Valley billionaire (Peter Thiel) funded Hogan’s
lawsuit against Gawker (Streitfield and Benner). In an interview with the
New York Times, Thiel describes Gawker as a “singularly terrible bully”
and casts his financing of the lawsuit as a blow for personal privacy, cit-
ing not only the way in which Gawker attacked him (outing him as gay
in 2007) but also Gawker’s ruining of nameless people’s lives “for no
good reason” (Ross Sorkin). Media coverage of Gawker Silicon Valley
spinoff, Valleywag, focused on the most personal gossip (which execu-
tives were dating whom, whose wedding was grotesquely extravagant and
wasteful), and described Valleywag as “gossip with an agenda” (Streitfield
and Benner). But in largely accepting the gossip narrative as Thiel writes
it—Valleywag invades personal privacy for clicks and little news value—
reporters erased much of the substantive gossip reporting Valleywag con-
tributed. As we have seen in previous chapters, Valleywag was a prime
reporter of the homogeneity of the digital world, and the ways in which
women and people of color were both underrepresented if not outright
harassed in their careers.5 It routinely reported on incestuous funding and
promotional arrangements in the Valley (where tech news sites like Pando
Daily would report breathless raves on new developments and products
created by the same people who funded Pando Daily). In other words,
222 K. ADKINS
even its critiques of Silicon Valley actors’ personal behavior was gener-
ally framed in explicitly political or economic terms. While Streitfield and
Benner note the insularity of the tech world and the ways in which tech
executives like to control their media images in their opening paragraphs,
there is little meaningful grappling in the piece with the ways in which a
single person’s funding of a lawsuit against a gossip website could have
a chilling effect on this sort of substantive criticism of technology prac-
tices. Thiel’s interview with the Times (Ross Sorkin) contains no questions
about any of this, appearing to accept his rationale that his lawsuit has
nothing to do with revenge, and is merely concerned with privacy. Indeed,
the interview closes by printing without comment a line from Thiel that
again reduces Gawker to a smut site only, suggesting that people would
rally around Gawker because they want “more sex tapes to be posted with-
out consent” (Ross Sorkin). While Daniel Solove’s criticism of the specific
posting of the sex tape is sound—there is no news value in the sex tape as
it stands—reducing Gawker to a sex-tape site ignores that actual reporting
that it contains, and minimizes the clear personal agenda that the critic
holds. It is a way of using gossip as a club to minimize and occlude debates
about business practices that have meaningful public interest.
There are, to be clear, dangers within electronic gossip with respect to
privacy. But these dangers are less to do with gossip as a medium of critical
discourse, than with the particular temptations of instant electronic pub-
licity—it is too easy to post not just commentary about private acts but
also documents of the acts itself, and this publication is far more perma-
nent and widespread than even the scandal sheets of the bygone days. The
risks of gossip explored in the last chapter, particularly the sort of feigned
or faux intimacy that leads people to see relevance in every scrap of dirt,
are facilitated by these technologies.
7.2 Who Are the Digital Gossips?

The benefits and the dangers of electronic gossip are revealed when we
look at who participates in online communities. Gossip as good conversa-
tion between intimates is important here. Speaking and being heard are
two different things; we often study them as if they are one. But they are
not, and the connection between the two is weaker in the Internet than
anywhere else in public life. This connects to gossip. Research on gossip
often focuses on it as monological; a source tells a juicy story (Bergmann
is representative here). In fact, gossip, is dialogical; interlocutors not only
trade information but also work dialectically (stories in response to sto-

ries, stories that then get analyzed or connected to other ideas or people,
etc.). Genuine gossip (which again, arises from intimacy) is a subspecies
of genuine conversation, and requires both speaking and being heard.
Hindman’s persistent focus not simply on which blogs and political web-
sites exist but also on the amount and kind of viewership/readership they
receive, reminds us that good stories are only as good as their auditors
deem them to be.
Much of Internet gossip is, in truth, faux-intimate, and faux-
conversational. This argument extends my claims from the previous
chapter. There is an enormous amount of speaking, but very little get-
ting heard. Internet blogs and discussions are comparable to gossip col-
umns and celebrity magazines in their simulated intimacy. They typically
mimic the insider language as if the reader is friends with the columnist.6
Recall that Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s newspaper columns were killed
in part for being dully substantive, whereas Eleanor Roosevelt’s gossipy
tone of friends sharing secrets, entirely simulated, brought her a large and
loyal reading audience. Daniel Solove’s The Future of Reputation: Gossip,
Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (2008) articulates this concern nicely.
While his rhetoric around shaming and electronic gossip occasionally
verges into the overheated—describing the blogosphere as acting like a
“cyberposse” that “brands” ostensive norm violators with “digital markers
of shame” (6), he emphasizes some of the distinctive dangers of electronic
gossip. Most crucially for an understanding of who gossips, he emphasizes
the asymmetry and absence of trust of electronic gossip. When discussing
one mid-thirties man who was regularly digitally haunted by his public
misdeeds as a teenager, Solove notes that both the discussion was asym-
metric, and public beyond any enduring relevance. The man was briefly
imprisoned as a juvenile, and has both maintained a clean criminal record
since that experience, but wrote about prison life for journals at the time
(10). But his attempts to be a useful and productive citizen are haunted
by the possibility of anyone, at any time, finding out about his past in a
decontextualized fashion. As Solove describes it, this development of gos-
sip is a change “from forgettable whispers within small local groups to a
widespread and permanent chronicle of people’s lives” (11). No trust is
required to share these electronic whispers, and people never stop talking.
Solove’s reasonable concerns aren’t simply about the spread and pub-
licity of electronic gossip but our accountability in receiving it; scandal
can be released online and reacted to disproportionately to the original
224 K. ADKINS
offense. Scandal spreaders are not accountable for their spreading of sto-
ries. Solove describes tales of a student who blogs about his professors,
and two adjunct professors being fired for their online blogs about stu-
dents (54–58). The account of student blogging is relatively innocuous—
the student wrote an admiring blog about one of his law school professors,
which the professor happened to read and cited in class—but Solove warns
us that student blogs could easily become damaging to professors (which
is not hard to imagine). More oddly, however, his commentary about
the professors’ blogs about students are limited, and less cautionary. He
ignores the power asymmetry between professors and students. In par-
ticular, the fact that one of the two professors he describes actually writes
about how physically desirable he finds one of his students receives no
comment whatsoever from Solove. Indeed, the juxtaposition of this story,
given our previous survey of sexism in the academy, should read appall-
ingly familiarly. By contrast, Solove’s comparatively sympathetic treatment
of the other professor blogger (who took some pains to disguise descrip-
tions of students and faculty on campus), suggests that it is all too easy to
ignore the power disparities in online commentary. Accountability here
applies to the object of one’s gossip. Solove suggests that we should think
seriously about people we discuss online; reducing them to a source of
entertainment or commentary could subject them to embarrassment or
shame, and unnecessarily so. While this is true, it is also relevant to extend
this sense of accountability to those with whom we gossip. As I suggested
in Chap. 2, the reliability or lack thereof in gossip historically comes from
its emergence from intimacy. We gossip with those whom we know and
trust, even if the trust may be limited or confined to certain parts of our
lives. While some exercises of online trust are understandable as exercises
of solidarity, such as the women philosophers posting to What It Is Like,
more general acts of online trust are more like leaps of faith; one knows
little of one’s online interlocutors. In particular, Solove offers a caution for
those who would see Internet gossip as a glorious free-for-all, where rules
of accountability no longer apply. He reminds us that the traceability of IP
addresses means that even anonymous e-gossip can be tracked (147), and
of course there have been several both amusing and appalling occasions
where powerful public people have adopted pseudonyms to attack their
critics online.7
It is worth pausing to consider how anonymity and pseudonymity
work in online chatter. The sorts of invisible gossip we examined in previ-
ous chapters have clear electronic analogs. In his examination of political
scandal, Matthew Hindman (2009) reminds us that the pseudonymity or

anonymity in the Internet can be dangerous in terms of the openness of
dialogue. He notes that the leakers of two recent political scandals (the dis-
credited CBS documents on George W. Bush’s Vietnam service, and Mark
Foley’s sexual harassment of pages), while working pseudonymously on
blogs, turned out to be well-connected political figures. In wording that
echoes our discussion of Karl Rove, Hindman notes that “the Internet did
not empower ordinary citizens; rather, it allowed disgruntled elites to get
around institutional constraints” (138). Who seeks and uses anonymity
matters; when people who already have voice and access use anonymity, as
we saw earlier, their purposes are pretty narrow; they delegitimize a person
or idea’s credibility, so as to shift the conversation. While we have seen
several examples, in previous chapters, of the secrecy of gossip being used
to productive social effect (as a means of expressing concerns over power
disparities in institutions; as a way for people in marginalized communities
to articulate their anger at popular misrepresentations of their values and
activities; as a means of spreading political resistance), there are potential
dangers within the use and abuse of secrecy, particularly when it is con-
nected to political or social power. Sissela Bok phrases the concern acutely,
noting that the ability to exercise power secretly, “with no accountability
to those whom it affects… [invites abuse]” (106). There is dishonesty
in using a false position of anonymous ordinariness to smear a rival. It is
almost a perversion of Fricker’s account of testimonial credibility; falsely
adopting a position of ordinariness to gain populist credibility, while deny-
ing one’s very specific and expert knowledge, access and credibility that
comes from such a position.
The effect, good and ill, of pseudonymity or anonymity in electronic
gossip becomes more complicated when we expand our focus beyond
simply political gossip. Silicon Valley has attempted to monetize people’s
appetites for gossip by creating platforms to make interested and local
gossip more transmissible. Yik Yak, the now-defunct Secret, and now
Cloakroom operate as ways to facilitate gossip within small communities.
With the apps, anonymity provided cover for discussion of both serious
issues and the sort of lowest-common-denominator gossip we’ve seen
elsewhere. In the first place, both apps limited posts and commentary to
the length of tweets (140 characters), so the sort of detail, analysis, and
conversational reciprocity that we’ve seen in gossip’s history are missing
here. Yik Yak and Secret both prize, or prized, brevity, juiciness, and snark.
Interactivity is also limited in both apps; users can like or comment on
226 K. ADKINS
others’ postings, but the format discourages lengthiness. Since people are
usually working through their phones, as the apps are designed for instant
access and updating, lengthy comments are far less common and popular;
snarky one-liners are typically the most-liked posts. While both apps, in
particular Yik Yak, have come in for strident criticism (most bluntly from
Inside Higher Ed, which compared Yik Yak to a “drug-fueled rave filled
with miscreants” [Stoller]), it’s important not to ignore the substance
of the conversation. Not all of these conversations are mere debauchery.
Workers in the tech industry quickly started using Secret to call out the
industry on its own excesses; its sexism, nepotism, and developers’ habits
of overworking employees while celebrating a community culture were all
big barbs. These criticisms weren’t generic, either.
To be sure, a recent study of a similar anonymous message system
(Anonymous College Board) demonstrated that the anonymous system
did simply reproduce the worst sorts of retrograde sexist and sexualizing
rhetoric, largely aimed at women (Press and Tripodi 2015). There have
been many instances of racist and sexist rhetoric in both Yik Yak posts
(Mahler) and in its predecessor, Juicy Campus (Morgan). The danger here
is that the anonymity only cuts one way; the commenters on all these plat-
forms preserve their anonymity unless they choose to sacrifice it; however,
their most damaging comments are often aimed at specific, and named,
individuals, sometimes to damaging results. The connection between
speech and action is often assumed to be strongest when it is interper-
sonal. John Stuart Mill, for instance, made the argument in On Liberty
that a violent (even if false) opinion about a powerful person could be
harmless when printed in a newspaper, but more dangerous when uttered
before an angry mob at the person’s house. And yet, we have seen (and
will see) the ways in which anonymous poison on the Internet, because
it is free-floating, decontextualized, and pervasive, can be its own kind
of mob violence. To the recipient, being the target of online smears and
assaults can feel like a never-ending attack (particularly when one does not
know the origin of the attacks), and the snowball effect of online gossip
can be far more pervasive than its originators may have intended.
What this kind of free-floating vacillating talk sounds like is the sort
of cultural stew Robert Darnton identifies in pre-Revolutionary France.
He astutely notes that it’s not accidental that both pornography and radi-
cal philosophy were best sellers in Parisian back alleys; the emphasis on
censorship and constraints in thinking and talking encouraged people to
be more, not less, interested in liberatory ideas. And those ideas were not
limited to the above-the-belt variety. Darnton reminds us that we can’t

pick and choose our critical and revolutionary rhetoric, the way some the-
orists of liberalism might prefer. The epistemic wheat comes right along
with the chaff.
The specific appeal of anonymity in online venues, of course, is that
one can say what one really thinks about something or somebody, absent
fear of consequences. And while that can clearly be abused, with serious
results, there are still some benefits to online anonymity. Institutions have
become all too aware of the value of marketing, and have rushed to create
or recreate brands for themselves. Whether or not this process involves
the hiring of costly consultants and brainstorming sessions around a col-
orless conference table, the importance of an identifiable and attractive
brand, that is pursued consistently across media platforms, is indisputable.
The juxtaposition of the development and vitality of online fora like Yik
Yak, Secret, and Whisper at the exact moment that branding has become
persistent and pervasive suggests a connection. Indeed, one parent user
of Yik Yak is explicit about this; Lori Rozsa notes in the New York Times
that she checks the Yik Yak feed on her daughter’s campus in part because
she gets a more accurate sense of what’s really going on at the campus,
and what really concerns students. “[I]t is definitely not the view you get
at Parents and Family Weekend,” she notes. In closing Secret after 16
months, its founders bemoaned what it had become; David Byttow’s self-
proclaimed goal to “create a world flowing with authenticity” was revealed
to be far from the fact. Before closing Secret, the app instantiated new
rules designed to weed out openly abusive posts; Byttow’s goal of getting
authenticity was clearly a curated sense of authenticity (Isaac 2014). These
bifurcated experiences with anonymous platforms serve as a reminder that
giving people wide publicity for online commentary will invite juvenile
and abusive impulses to manifest themselves. But that very same anonym-
ity will also give people a way to express angst and ask for help.
One target of Internet ire sought to defend himself. Silicon Valley ven-
ture capitalist Marc Andreessen, whose behavior and work practices were
mocked on Secret, wrote a series of tweets in which he asked people to
make a choice about whether or not their actions were lifting people up
or putting others down (Wortham). But of course, what’s ironic about
precisely this noble observation is that the New York Times article expos-
ing some investors’ discomfort with widely and anonymously spread
secrets depended on, of course, anonymous sources (Isaac 2015). Indeed,
the app was extremely popular at first, attracting $35 million in outside
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investments; one of those investors recognized that Secret was a way for
people to speak honestly about dynamics in their workplaces without dam-
aging their careers (Isaac 2015). The fact that Secret’s popularity never
approached Yik Yak’s, which raised $73 million in several rounds of out-
side investments, and has withstood early challenges (Isaac 2014) may
speak to the ways in which Yik Yak’s secrets are seen as less financially
explosive than those at Silicon Valley. Potentially exposing a boss as a serial
sexual harasser, for instance, can have permanent damaging effect to a
company. The personal damage done by Yik Yak doesn’t get the same
amount of formal challenge or resistance. It should, of course, because it is
often not trivial. Many professors and students have described the experi-
ence of being singled out for criticism and mockery, one psychiatrist (Elias
Aboujaoude) describes this anonymous abuse as distinctively eerie because
it is both local and diffuse (Mahler), and most appallingly, a student leader
of a feminist group on one campus (University of Mary Washington) was
murdered in her apartment in 2015 after being singled out on Yik Yak for
threats of rape and murder for her criticisms of grossly sexist language and
actions from the campus rugby team (Cohan). A member of the school’s
rugby team has been charged with her murder. The contrast between the
immediate and sharp effect taken with Secret and the persistence, not just
of Yik Yak but also of the worst of rhetoric and actions, is a depressing
reminder of the ways in which financial threats to those with social, politi-
cal, and economic power are safer to counter than physical threats to those
lacking those advantages.
Secrecy is intrinsically uncomfortable. When we tell someone a secret,
we concretely demonstrate trust in them that can be violated. When we
learn a secret about somebody else, it is a reminder of just how fragile
trust in other people, and our senses of privacy, can be. Obviously, this
gets abused in these online platforms, and as many commentators (Solove,
Ronson) demonstrate, the consequences (even for what may seem at the
outset to be simply harmless teasing) can be serious and long-lasting.
Indeed, Sissela Bok’s emphasis that long-term secrecy, such as that prac-
ticed by anonymous or pseudonymous commentators, is more likely to
exaggerate possibilities of abuse, rather than minimize them (110) alone
should stand as a caution for online commentariat cheerleaders. But what
gets missed in analysis of online secrecy, going back to Bok, is the ways
in which online anonymity can act as a way to even power stakes. The
specific secrets of Secret weren’t explosive because they were secret; they
were explosive because they were criticisms of people and practices that
were at the heart of Silicon Valley power. Venture capitalists were put in
the awkward position of being forced to see what their employees really
thought of them when they could speak freely. Indeed, the response to
Yik Yak heightens an alternative response that is less heavy-handed, and
more promising. While some schools have set up electronic “geo-fences”
or blocks to Yik Yak from school servers (Koenig), which is necessarily
inefficient (students use the app from their phones), there have been sev-
eral rounds of professors and administrators themselves taking to Yik Yak
to communicate with the students, and to set a more collegial counterex-
ample of communication (Mahler). I will return to this theme in the con-
clusion, but the fact that antisociality gets met with aggressive sociality is
promising. Absence of accountability can be directly challenged by specific
and generous accountability.
It’s crucial to emphasize the unusual commonality we can see in some
of these online communities, particularly those that focus on giving a
voice to people in communities where they might not otherwise have one.
Paradoxically, commentators could feel more trust toward fellow commen-
tators, who are generally anonymous or pseudonymous, and who might
in fact not be who they claim to be (might not be inhabiting the intellec-
tual, professional, or demographic space they espouse) than they do in the
pronouncements of those with whom they share physical or professional
space. As I’ve previously argued, it’s difficult to understate the importance
of credibility in argumentation, and that our personal stance and position
often adds or detracts from our credibility on issues. As Michael Kinsley
noted about political sex scandals, outraged claims of violations of privacy
are particularly rich coming from politicians who are only too eager to
trot their family members, willing or not, in photo ops to demonstration
their commitment to safe and non-toxic family values. Given that, the fact
that people totally unknown to us might have more credibility with us
(depending on the claim at stake) than those with whom we have regular
and direct engagement is troubling. Accusations of trolling and doxxing,
for instance, are really debates around credibility.
There is another way in which the faux intimacy of digital gossip alters
the makeup of the gossipers—the emergence of a few dominant voices
in conversations. While commenters on blogs can shape and redirect
conversations, initial posts frame the debate, and it isn’t hard to see the
ways in which prominent bloggers can take an outsized role in debates.
Returning to the academic examples from Chap. 4, for instance, one
difference between the two case studies is in their timing. The Perestroika
230 K. ADKINS
controversy in political science occurred in the early 2000s, still the rela-
tive youth of the Internet as a public discussion platform. While there
were some political science blogs and listservs, they were relatively few,
and didn’t bear the personal or institutional markers of authority that con-
temporary political science blogs have (with named contributors from R-1
institutions). Thus, the discussion and resolution of the conflict happened
over email, on the phone, in conversations, and ultimately, in disciplinary
discussion in more formal settings like conference panels and meetings.
By contrast, the Pluralist’s Guide controversy in philosophy occurred a
decade later, during which a few philosophy blogs had become prominent
and visible. It seems reasonable to conclude that part of the reason the
conversation narrowed in philosophy onto personalities, in ways it did not
in political science, is because the conversation was in large part framed
and driven by blog posts. While gossip occurs in dyads or small groups,
in its traveling—particularly when gossip is about issues of real social or
public controversy—it thrives and supports multiple voices or layers of
meaning, even or especially in polyphony. The limitation that occurs in
digital gossip is a flattening out of conversation; only one melody is aired,
repetitively.
7.3 How Concrete Is Digital Gossip?

Walter Ong recognizes that one of the consequences of the print world is
the development and spread of abstract thinking. By contrast, oral think-
ing works through concreteness; comparing or conjoining concrete sit-
uations, moments, or people. Gossip, I suggest, plays a specific role in
this oral thinking, in part by doing the work of context—its playful and
intimate setting means that unexpected but fruitful connections can be
made. But there is good reason to worry about the ways in which elec-
tronic conversation actually decontextualizes events as much as contextu-
alizing them. The first and most obvious way in which electronic gossip
can work to decontextualize gossip is connected to the previous discus-
sion. Filmed and publicized interactions take on a particular documentary
weight for observers. In some cases, the documentary weight is illuminat-
ing, as with the revelations of police violence. But our tendency to assign
excessive weight to visual evidence is dangerous. Susan Sontag reminds
us of the dangers in her discussion of photography (2001 [1977]), when
she describes photographs as “packaging the world.” They “get reduced,
blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out” (4). Sontag’s pur-
pose isn’t Luddism; she does not ask that we dismiss photography as an
aesthetic form or as cultural document. She merely reminds us that behind
the camera and in the darkroom is a photographer who is shaping and
guiding the image consistent with her ideas. We have, I suspect, a simi-
larly excessive and overblown faith in cell phone videos of bad behavior;
so exciting is it to see people at their worst that we don’t pause to con-
sider who it is doing the filming, why they are filming, and what occurred
before or after the cell phone camera was activated.
In addition, I also detect an implicit concern in the hand-wringing over
the Gawker trial. This concern is less about the mere fact of its publicity
and its permanence, than about the visuality and degree of its display. While
Oliver Wendall Holmes was reasonably unhappy with the idea of servants
selling family secrets to newspaper reporters who were willing to pay, there
is a crucial difference between the reporting of an intimate secret, and the
visual display of the secret in all its most unappetizing detail. Gossip, as I’ve
suggested, is discussion of acts and decisions that have occurred elsewhere
or at other places in time; the Gawker trial is less about the commentary,
then the fact that the act up for discussion was filmed and then posted
online. A similar moment of public revulsion from the Clinton-Lewinsky
scandal supports the focus on detail and recitation. When Kenneth Starr
completed his report on the scandal, it was published in full in newspapers
across the nation. Any hopes Starr may have had for political heroism
would have been quickly dashed, when backlash to the report’s publica-
tion quickly spread. What commentators routinely cited, in their disgusted
letters to editors, was the unnecessary detail Starr included in the report.
People may have differed widely on their opinions of Clinton’s culpabil-
ity and dishonesty with the Lewinsky scandal, but there was widespread
public agreement that they didn’t need an encyclopedic recounting of the
president’s private parts and sexual activities. The oft-asserted claim that
the Lewinsky scandal was really about perjury was undermined by the
tediously detailed recounting of the minutiae of Clinton’s encounters with
Lewinsky; if the scandal was supposed to be about lying under oath and
obstruction of justice, the actual report was so heavily focused on sexual
minutiae as to obscure any possible legal issues.8 The backlash wasn’t lim-
ited to Starr himself, but extended to the Republican party. Bill Clinton
survived his impeachment, and Democrats unexpectedly made gains in
the next midterm elections, which was unusual for second-term majority
parties. The impeachment met with failure in part because it revealed too
much for no compelling reason. Similarly, Daniel Solove briskly dismisses
232 K. ADKINS
the worthiness of Gawker’s position in the Hogan trial by arguing that the
video doesn’t contain ideas, contribute to political discourse, and thus is
not newsworthy (Solove 2016).
It’s important to emphasize that this concern represents merely a seg-
ment of Internet conversation, and that in other forms, online chatter can
do precisely the work of context and connection we see in interpersonal
gossip. For instance, the What Is it Like blog posts, in aggregate, make
a good case for the connection between some of the demographic and
gender harassment issues in philosophy, and their expression or manifesta-
tion in disciplinary or pedagogical biases (e.g. that all and only women are
interested in feminist philosophy, that feminist philosophy is a lesser form
of philosophical thinking). Indeed, the moderators of the blog make this
connection explicit in their FAQ section, noting that the small problems
they often document “can cumulatively have large effects.” So sharing of
stories in some contexts can help people make connections between small
and large injustices, behavior in and out of the classroom. But there’s
a difference between the carefully designed What Is It Like blog, which
insists on anonymity and no identifying detail in stories, and refuses to
permit comments, and blogs that operate for clicks and comments. These
blogs (such as Gawker) invite the posting of salacious documents or films
for their own sake. In other words, the concern about the Gawker trial is
less about the fact that we gossip on the Internet, but the manner in which
this gossip takes place. As with the example of the pregnancy test posted
on a YikYak forum, immediate posting of private documents is danger-
ously tempting. Part of the danger, I am stressing, is that it inhibits rather
than facilitates meaningful conversation and connection of serious issues
that are often implied by the dirt.
7.4 The Architecture of Virtual Talk

Electronic chat does not emerge from a blank slate (or processor), but
according to rules and designs that limit the talk. We have already seen
some small examples of these and how they work—apps’ following the
Twitter character limit means that lengthy discussions are effectively ruled
out—but it is worth examining this more fully, to examine the ways in
which the structures of electronic conversation function to narrow rather
than widen the scope and content of our talk. Elizabeth Eisenstein makes
a convincing case that how we think, and what we think about, changes
with the development of the printing press and increased literacy. I think
there are some corollary arguments to be suggested here with the shifting
of gossip from oral to digital. The initial development of the Internet was
met with general rhapsodizing about its democratic possibilities; anyone
with access to a modem could talk to anyone across the globe. Some of
this cultural democracy has indeed come to fruition; in particular, online
resources such as Wikipedia and Google Books, and the digitization of
archives’ materials, have made it possible for middle- and working-class
people to immerse themselves into other cultures and authors to which
they previously would have had no access. But there is good reason to be
cautious about the extent to which the promised openness of the Internet
actually comes to fruition. In this section, I want to focus on the ways
in which specific electronic practices, such as the algorithms of Google
searches, narrow our electronic talk. I am explicitly focusing on political
conversation in this section, as it has the advantage of being both national
in scope (people have reason to talk to each other across the nation), and
substantive.9
Recall that one of the specific epistemic functions for gossip is selec-
tion; it works to help us filter our ideas. We consult trusted friends and
colleagues to compare notes on what they know about somebody, or
something. This filtering is direct and visible; we know those whom we
consult, and have some sense as to their biases and prejudices. As Matthew
Hindman’s insightful book The Myth of Digital Democracy (2009) dem-
onstrates, the sort of filtering that happens when we search on the web
for ideas is done by a simpler and lowest-common-denominator calcu-
lus. He points out that winner-take-all analytics determine which sites get
linked, which results pop up first in Google searches. “Winning” websites,
according to search algorithms, are those which contain the most in- and
out-links (i.e. they refer to other pages, and are themselves referred to by
other web pages). His tracking of web pages on several high-conflict social
issues found a very small group of sites that had both the most viewers,
and the most links (42). Concerns about Internet conversation as a virtual
Tower of Babel where anyone can find any piece of evidence to support
ideas are undermined by Hindman’s research; to the contrary, he suggests
drily, putting up a political website is like “hosting a talk show on public
access television at 3:30 in the morning” (56). In other words, it’s not
conversation if one is merely shouting into an electronic canyon and hear-
ing the echo of one’s voice. The combination of tracking search and visi-
bility numbers present an image of a much more straitened virtual political
discourse than we might imagine. Hindman’s term for the ways in which
234 K. ADKINS
search engines condition our political discourse, “Googlearchy” (55),

speaks to the ways in which the architecture and economics of the Internet
work to condition and sort our talk for us. Just as there are precursors to
this in the transition to print, there are electronic precursors, as seen by
Neil Postman’s prescient analysis in Amusing Ourselves to Death (2005
[1985]). Postman argues that the dangers of television are epistemologi-
cal as much as cultural and political; the brevity, absence of context, and
discontinuity of television programming, even and most disconcertingly in
instances where television attempts to be “educational,” condition us to
passivity and disengagement. What he describes as news “from nowhere,
addressed to no one in particular” (67) produces too much disconnected,
trivial information, about which we are disinclined to remember particu-
lars, think analytically, or act in any particular way. While Postman engages
in some false dichotomizing—I think he nostalgically overstates the seri-
ousness of the printed page—his argument can clearly be extended and
amplified to how we receive and respond to information virtually.
Part of our reception and response to information comes from cred-
ibility, in what manner and to what extent we find virtual interlocutors
reliable conversation partners. Who gets and holds credibility is also more
narrowly assigned than one might expect, given the mythologizing of
electronic openness. Hindman notes that there is a difference between
speaking and getting heard (13). That isn’t simply true online, but offline
as well; part of my arguments about gossip has been the ways in which it
is surreptitiously used to further diminish credibility to already marginal-
ized voices. There is a corollary ratcheting of credibility in online politi-
cal discussions. Hindman profiles the top ten political bloggers in 2004,
spanning both conservative and liberal blogs (114–116). When nine of
the top ten political blogs are owned and operated by people who have
either journalism degrees, PhDs, or law degrees, when seven of the ten
attended Ivy or other comparably elite universities, and when six of the
ten worked as reporters or editors either professionally or at well-regarded
universities, it’s safe to conclude, as Hindman does, that the openness of
Internet political dialogue is not nearly as widespread as we might imag-
ine it to be. It’s particularly striking that of this group, several of them
claim to be speaking up on behalf of the voiceless; they have embraced
the language of populism (117). This elite result is extended when the
second tier of blogs is examined; Hindman discovers similar unrepresenta-
tive patterns of elite education, serious journalism experience, and a high
degree of professional or business success when he surveys producers of
75 of the 83 political blogs that receive an average of 2000 visitors daily

(120–122). Indeed, when Hindman compares bloggers to professional
journalists, he finds that in several respects—education level, race, and
gender demographics—bloggers are less diverse of a group than journalists
as a whole (121, 124–125). Even shrinking the comparison group from
all professional journalists to op-ed columnists, which is fairer (most blogs
do not produce independent reporting, but primarily opinion) largely rep-
licates the disparities (126–127). Credibility, for Hindman, is not being
expanded because of the Internet; it is simply being replicated and con-
centrated; the same faces get still more views (19).
Credibility can also be challenged merely by an electronic presence,
even when it is unjustified. While Hindman notes that blogs routinely get
celebrated as a revival and democratization of political debate, bringing
much-needed direct deliberation back to American democracy (108–109),
they are equally reviled as poorly sourced and poorly reasoned hives of
hyperpartisan reactionaries. Returning briefly to the Plame scandal, New
York Times reporter Judith Miller regularly sounds this note in her mem-
oir, attributing her takedown in the press to ill-informed bloggers pay-
ing attention to the stories, and magnifying non-issues (188, 206). And
indeed, the move to attack blogs by attacking their authors’ credibility and
reputations is one Miller herself applies directly. She attacks one unnamed
blogger for describing her as a “useful idiot,” referring to him only as
an “assistant professor” (206). It is only by consulting her endnotes that
one discovers the blog post is not in fact a personal blog post, but a story
for Salon, and that the story was written not by an assistant professor
(so much for journalistic fact-checking) but by a Middle East specialist,
working as a full professor at the University of Michigan (Juan Cole),
and author of multiple well-reviewed books and articles about the Middle
East. The ordinariness of blogging can be claimed, or decried, when it
suits political agendas.
Debates about credibility and the Internet are most charged when talk
is of political scandals, as in Miller’s discredited reporting of weapons of
mass destruction. Hindman rightly points out that where the Internet is
most politically effective is with respect to scandals; it operates as a “bur-
glar alarm” to magnify concerns over individual behavior that violates
norms or what the politician claims to espouse (136). Hindman suggests
(with scant evidence) that Internet scandal-mongering or fueling does
little to advance deliberative democracy, simply because it reveals behavior
with which everyone already disagreed (137). This is a disputable claim.
236 K. ADKINS
But as I’ve shown in Chap. 5, political gossip isn’t always solely about
individual behavior; it often has its roots in substantive disagreements
that are ongoing. The trajectory of public responses to Gary Hart and
then Bill Clinton’s infidelity alone demonstrates the way in which norms
of private-to-public behavior were and are under contestation. Extending
this argument, one of Hindman’s own examples, Trent Lott’s comments
at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party that the nation would have been
better off if Thurmond had been elected president in 1948 when he ran
as a segregationist, speaks to this. While Hindman notes that “both sides
loudly repudiated the segregationist ideals that underpinned Thurmond’s
1948 campaign” (137), this gives too much credit to the text instead of
the subtext (or better put, the edited text in contrast to the full text, and
the repeated text). This was not the first time Trent Lott had uttered such
a sentiment; he’d repeated the same claim, in virtually identical terms, fol-
lowing a Thurmond speech in 1980 in which Thurmond praised states’
rights (widely known as code speech for racism in the South; Edsall and
Faler). This also ignores that Thurmond’s campaign was focused entirely
on states’ rights, not incidentally. As a candidate from the States’ Rights
third party, he was supporting their platform, and fully three of eight
substantive agenda items explicitly endorsing segregation (American
Presidency Project). The other items were either implicitly segregationist
(containing extensions or implications of those agenda items) or stan-
dard political rhetoric (supporting the US Constitution). There simply
wasn’t another substantive issue on which Thurmond’s campaign was
based, so there was no meaningful disagreement about a debate actu-
ally being about small versus large government. And finally, as copious
research has shown, racism hasn’t been eliminated from American politi-
cal life; instead, it has simply moved underground. Republican presiden-
tial candidate Donald Trump’s revival of Richard Nixon’s phrase “the
silent majority” (a phrase that was explicitly about the anti-civil right
“Southern Strategy,” as former Nixon aide Kevin Phillips documented) is
just the most recent example of racism functioning on a subtextual level.
So the rush to denounce segregation after his remarks is hardly evidence
of progress; it is rather, a recognition that Lott should have spoken more
allusively and less explicitly.
What the Lott example in particular demonstrates is the way in which
political scandals aren’t simply about individual behavior that everyone
already finds abhorrent (if they do, they would have pretty short shelf
lives, as interest in discussing what everyone already agrees about would
presumably fade quickly). Political scandals (as the Hart, Clinton, and
Plame scandals also indicate) resonate because they aren’t simply about
behavior we already repudiate. They often open questions about norms
that are under debate or shifting. Indeed, our long look at political gossip
throughout American history demonstrates this as well. We cannot sim-
ply dismiss political scandals as a whole as a vulgar debasement of politi-
cal discourse, though we certainly can challenge the means by which we
discuss the scandals. To be clear, all discussions of scandalous figures are
not equally substantive. Some don’t have much, if any, substantive text or
subtext. But there are simply too many scandals where the lurid overtones
have clear substantive undertones to justify pearl-clutching nervousness
about debasing scandals lowering the common public good denominator
as a universal position.
I will conclude this section by looking at how electronic conversa-
tion affects us when it isn’t simply political, but increasingly the way in
which we converse. In other words, the “architectural” concern here is
not the structure of apps or web searches, but the fact that electronic
media become the way in which we communicate and connect with oth-
ers, even those with whom we’re closest. There is some evidence that the
thinness of these virtual conversations and social connections that should
give us serious pause. Sherry Turkle’s interviews of young people (middle
school through college) over the last five years in Reclaiming Conversation
(2015) demonstrates some worrying trends in terms of the perception
and value of conversation. Her informants describe real-time, in-person
conversation as burdensome, and making them unnecessarily vulnerable;
they prefer simulated conversations like those of Snapchat, Instagram, and
Sidekick, because they can select and edit their words with care before
they’re expressed, and because they determine when and how much they
talk (143). Turkle’s praise of family conversations in which “children learn
that what can matter most is not the information shared but the relation-
ships sustained” speaks to the extension over time and memory within sus-
tained conversations and connections (107). Letter-writing, and sustained
correspondences (not simply the magnificent ones from history, like James
Boswell and Samuel Johnson or Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, but
the more mundane ones many families have had until recently) becomes a
record of mattering and importance. Apps that are designed for transitory
and ephemeral conversations, by their very existence, suggest that connec-
tions are not to be sustained. Oral conversation is contingent; it can turn,
evolve, move dialectically between topics, themes, tensions. Having this
238 K. ADKINS
kind of conversation requires sustained attention, common experiences

and memories, and trust. The architecture of apps like Snapchat explicitly
works against all these features.
In addition, orality has specific and unique social and psychic benefits;
Turkle cites research demonstrating the value of eye contact and com-
munication, even in infancy, in terms of building trust and the ability to
empathize, and that the absence of sustained eye contact and interper-
sonal communication can lead to loneliness, lack of empathy, and depres-
sion (108, 170, 325). Written correspondence, because it often served as
an adjunct or supplement to in-person communication, didn’t eliminate
those benefits; it served as a next-best-thing to them. But digital conversa-
tion, as it moves to replace in-person communication, presents some real
dangers to our emotional development.
To conclude, concern over the architecture of digital gossip is well
placed, and comparable to the phenomenon I describe as invisible gossip.
That is, both are manifestations of a stacked communicative deck, wherein
those who are already flush with social and testimonial credibility get to
take advantage of invisible means to delegitimize their opponents. While
there is good evidence that there are some capacities in which electronic
gossip can facilitate solidarity of minority views, and connect dots that
are otherwise publicly ignored, some of the features of social media work
against the best features of gossip: its intimacy, our knowledge and trust in
our conversation partners, and its extension over time.
Notes
1. Of course, now that much printed gossip of yore can and has been
digitized and electronically archived, this is no longer the case.
2. I’m ignoring the personal-revulsion factor of someone using their
cell phone while on the toilet.
3. The judgment ended Gawker’s independence under founder Nick
Denton; it was sold in August 2016 to Univision.
4. See, for instance, his appearance on the Howard Stern show in October
of 2011, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6k0AUwTFrc
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ-_gJKgnQQ. Several
specifics are worth noting. At one point, when asked about whether or
not he’s gay, he comments that he wouldn’t hide that information
because “at the end of the day, everyone knows everything about me,
anyway.” At another point, he refers to the place in which he’s lived for
56 years (Tampa, Florida) as a “small town,” and says that “everyone
knows me as Hulk Hogan, not as Terry Bollea.” Several times during

the interview, when sex comes up, Hogan strikes a dentist’s-office
tone of resignation, saying things like, “I knew you were going to go
there.” But the clear quid pro quo nature of publicity is revealed in the
windup, where Stern (in the final three minutes of an interview that
has lasted over 20 minutes), by acknowledging that this is why Hogan
is here. Hogan has willingly signed up for sexual scrutiny as the appar-
ently necessary price to capture Stern’s audience for some profit,
which undermines his professed embarrassment at revelations about
his sex life.
5. Indeed, Owen Thomas’ 2007 Valleywag item outing Thiel explicitly
frames the outing as a blow against homogeneity, noting that having
a gay Silicon Valley executive is a good thing for the world of digital
disrupters. This rationale is also a least a little disingenuous as a draw
for readers—it’s doubtful that many readers would click on the arti-
cle for an examination of sexual homogeneity in Silicon Valley, par-
ticularly with its headline of “Peter Thiel is Totally Gay,
People”—however, it does not make his point that homogeneity
existed and plausibly interfered with creativity and consideration of
new ideas invalid.
6. US Weekly’s regular photographic feature, “Stars: They’re Just Like
Us!” which features celebrities engaged in such mundanities as
pumping their own gas or drinking Starbucks, is a direct visual dem-
onstration of this condescending simulated intimacy.
7. Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams and Whole Foods CEO John
Mackey are just the first two to come to mind. Mackey’s online chi-
canery is actually particularly dangerous, as he was criticizing a com-
mercial rival shortly before a successful takeover bid, in what many
viewed as an attempt to lower the stock value. For Adams, see
Haden (2011); for Mackey, see Martin (2007).
8. In a sad but telling epilogue to this scandal, Kenneth Starr faced
widespread criticism and was ultimately removed from his post as
President of Baylor University for his mishandling of a whole host of
student allegations of sexual assault by other students (many of
whom were football players). Starr, who so enthusiastically assumed
the role of Inspector Javert in the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, and
for whom no detail of a consensual (if tawdry) sexual affair was too
minute to escape publication, was widely reviled for his apparent
utter disinterest in responding to or pursuing student allegations of
sexual violation.
240 K. ADKINS
9. The appeal of electronic political talk is apparently much less vivid

than one would hope. See Hindman (2009) 61, figure 4.1, for a
depressing illustration of just how little traffic political websites get
contrasted to, for instance, adult websites. Cheerleaders of the
Internet as fuel for a golden age of deliberative democracy can only
be chastened by this document.
CHAPTER 8
Conclusion: Schools for Scandal
In some ways, digesting so much scholarly and popular gossip invites a

response of cynicism. We have spent a lot of time covering events that get
regularly, and sniffily, dismissed as unworthy of the time of serious people.
Indeed, scandals are not only deemed morally or socially unworthy of
discussion, as we’ve seen over and over again, but also often given extraor-
dinary negative powers—merely by mentioning the unmentionable, we do
damage to imagined social or moral ideals. In discussing the Bakker affair,
religious historian Martin Marty warns that “[e]vents like this contribute
to a climate of cynicism, to a feeling that there seem to be no refuges, no
islands, no pure places to turn to” (Martz and Carroll 241). We see ana-
logs to this attitude throughout discussions of gossip. Neil Postman issues
dire warnings that instant news turns us into trivia-obsessed barbarians at
the gates; Matt Bai fears that both our discourse and our politicians suffer
because we are more interested in their peccadilloes than their policy. The
warning is clear; when we grant attention to trivia and scandal, we falsely
elevate trivia and scandal. We lose interest in other, more substantive con-
cerns; our own ability to be serious or contemplative, or to recognize
substance in others, atrophies. One study of workplace gossip revealed the
paradox that the most active gossipers were both more influential at work
and viewed less positively as workers by their supervisors (Grosser et al.
2010: 201). And yet, I hope I’ve given plenty of evidence and argumenta-
tion that suggests that, at minimum, this is a great exaggeration of the true

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47840-1_8
242 K. ADKINS
state of gossip. The history of gossip itself is long enough and complicated
enough to undermine this simple view. As Chap. 2 demonstrated, gossip
is a historical constant, practiced across cultures for millennia and across
media today. Yet it now generally holds a degraded status; it is the recep-
tacle of our cultural anxieties in a print and now digital world. It is often
poorly described, and stripped of social and political context, reduced to
individual psychological or character analysis only. By contrast, as I con-
tended in Chap. 3, gossip is a path to knowledge, particularly in com-
munities suffering from credibility deficit. When we gossip, we can cut
through a haze of competing and colliding information and reports to
figure out what deserves our attention or focus (indeed, natural scientists
utilize reputation gossip for exactly these sorts of purposes). We also syn-
thesize in gossip, making ostensibly disconnected pieces of information
connected, assembling bits of information into interpretive arcs. This is
so because gossip isn’t merely personal, negative talk; we talk about what
interests us, which is often what we do, for example, while we’re at work.
These functions of gossip get additional traction because of differences in
viewpoints; credibility differences in who speaks to whom, and what infor-
mation gets taken seriously, are magnified. Gossip becomes an informal
way of figuring something out against the grain of conventional wisdom.
While the patterns of gossip may be similar across communities, the
reception of gossip is not. Chapter 4 looked closely at academic gossip.
Its two case studies of disciplines in which demographic and method-
ological disputes coexisted (the Perestroika scandal in political science;
the Pluralist Guide scandal in philosophy) were both the subject of long-
standing gossip within the disciplines before surfacing in mainstream press
and the blogosphere. The crucial difference between the two scandals was
the presence and influence of invisible gossip; in philosophy, high-status
individuals regularly inveighed against the reputations and credibility of
those challenging the status quo of academic philosophy. Indeed, the
criticisms of philosophy as a field and a profession were themselves dis-
missed as mere gossip, often within the rhetoric of gossip itself. It seems
not coincidental that the institutional responses to very similar questions
and criticisms moved much faster in political science than in philosophy.
Part of the rhetoric in these disciplines was about rigor and objectivity;
those defending the status quo in both political science and philosophy
appealed to standards of rigor and objectivity. Implicitly in political science
and explicitly in philosophy, the criticisms were reduced to the emotional
vents of the resentful. But to make these appeals successfully, an enormous
CONCLUSION: SCHOOLS FOR SCANDAL 243
amount of context and history must be ignored. This kind of stripping

away of context isn’t merely the work of academics; Chap. 5’s examination
of gossip in politics finds the same sort of rhetorical double standard. In
three case studies (Gary Hart’s failed presidential bid of 1988, the Bill
Clinton impeachment, and the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name
during the second Iraq War), we see journalists and politicians lamenting
the recent tabloidization of the press, while themselves chasing feverishly
after anonymous sources or rumors which they distribute with varying
degrees of care. By contrast, the actual history of gossip in politics is no
different than its history elsewhere; it is constant, used in diverse ways, and
regularly influential even as it is disavowed.
This is not to say that gossip is simply a force for good. Chapter 6’s
exploration of weaponized gossip tracks the social features that promote
disproportionate critical gossip that is often aimed at individual reputa-
tion destruction. Transactional relationships, insular communities, and
distributions of power that are stark or undergoing change can all foment
destructive gossip. And while gossip is a constant, just as it changed with
the development of print (and then newspapers and celebrity columnists),
it has changed again in the digital age. Chapter 7 examines the ways in
which gossip has stayed the same, and has changed. While some features
of e-gossip are comparable to print gossip, like simulated intimacy and
permanence, the almost unlimited degree of publicity and permanence
in digital gossip represents a distinct danger, in my view. The likelihood
in most apps for people to comment pseudonymously if not fully anony-
mously means that some of the checks of accountability on oral gossip go
missing in digital fora. The ability to film and post clips of people behaving
badly, while having clear public value in some instances, also promotes a
kind of disproportionate negative analysis (seeing a single decontextual-
ized clip of a previously private or unknown person speaking rudely that
stands for the person’s entire character or career, for instance). Finally,
some of the structures of the Internet, such as search algorithms based
on in- and out-links, work to narrow the pipeline of who speaks to how
broad an audience.
One of the running themes in this book has been that our hypocrisy
around gossip—not simply our selective use of the term, but the way in
which uncomfortable ideas get tarred as gossip by people who themselves
use gossip as a tool—perpetuates a bad situation. This hypocrisy serves
to occlude relevant issues of power and social status that affect what we
hear, and the credibility we do or don’t attribute to speakers and ideas.
244 K. ADKINS
The hypocrisy isn’t simply about the act itself—labeling it sloppy, care-
less, malicious, even as it’s relied upon—but also the actors. There is a
long-standing hypocrisy directed toward who gossips; we judge and con-
demn outsiders for gossip, while permitting and sanctioning invisible gos-
sip. Benjamin Franklin is a perfect illustration of this hypocrisy. There is
ample evidence of him being an enthusiastic and astute gossiper through-
out his long, highly productive business and government career.1 But
equally, he’s careful not just to keep his gossip off-the-record where pos-
sible but also to issue broadsides against gossip.2 He relies upon the intel-
ligence and observation that gossip provides, but can’t be publicly seen as
so relying on it. He is far from alone in this. As we saw in Chap. 4, the dif-
ference between conflicts in philosophy and political science boiled down
to the presence and persistence of gossip about a philosopher who was
challenging received views of good departments. In politics, prominent
journalists like Judith Miller and Michael Isikoff scorn gossipy news items
and tabloids from one side of their mouth, while avidly pursuing gos-
sipy leads on the other. John Hunt notes that during early modern papal
conclaves, the tight constraints on confidentiality were routinely violated
for powerful nobles and foreign ambassadors with no penalty (365–366).
In each of these cases, power disparities are perpetuated via invisible gos-
sip. But even in situations where power disparities are far less potent, the
double standard exists. While gossip was considered an indictable offense
in the Kwanga court system and routinely and publicly excoriated, Karen
Brison notes that sometimes gossip was accepted as evidence (79). Erica
Ball (2014) notes that the antebellum black press in the northern United
States regularly published excoriations on both the moral and political
dangers of gossip alongside gossip itself; gossip was recognized for having
legitimate news value, and thus a shaky distinction between “legitimate”
and “illegitimate” gossip was drawn (113–118). In public, we wave off
gossip as trivial, negative, or distracting even as in private we seek it out
and make use of it.
My project in this book has been to expose this hypocrisy, in part by
demonstrating the epistemic and social value that gossip often has for us.
Gossip is a cognitive and social quisling. In crossing borders, it reminds
us of how porous and artificial those borders were to begin with. Gossip
fills in pieces, connects, culls through competing theories. Gossip gives us
context: It is true that the speech and authority are not ahistorical in their
status—for many of these periods I’ve described, much of the populace
was illiterate and had no explicit voice in government. Thus, the tools of
rumor and gossip were the only meaningful ones available to them. But
the persistence of gossip and rumor in current days speaks to the ways in
which formal voice and literacy are not adequate. For people in margin-
alized positions, simply having formal voice does not equate to having
authority or recognition. Speaking, or writing, does not assure an audi-
ence. Chris Wickham reminds us of this phenomenon when he cautions us
not to exaggerate the value of gossip in medieval times versus the modern
age; the academy, he notes, is not just fully literate but also a remark-
ably text-based culture, and yet it is rife with gossip. “Oral culture has
always dominated all societies; written transcripts are a surface ripple,” he
concludes (17–18). And indeed, the implicit corollary to this position is
worth making explicit. If gossip and rumor and constant subtexts running
through authoritative texts and conversations, the traditional texts and
authorities we put such stock into are destabilized.3
If gossip both generates meaning and has potential for causing damage,
it is worth spending at least some time talking about how to gossip better.
My recommendations on gossip are both individual and social, because
gossip is both an individual practice (words come out of my mouth to
another’s ears, or vice versa), and it is conditioned by social, political, and
economic structures. My conclusions here follow from a basic conten-
tion that gossip is in some ways a symptom of the relative health of our
social lives. Gossip thrives on intimacy, informality, and trust; as Chaps.
6 and 7 demonstrate, in situations where trust and intimacy are lacking,
toxic gossip proliferates. One of the running themes of this exploration
of gossip has been the value of its informality; that in its playful space, it
allows people to explore ideas in often fruitful fashions. The informality
comes because gossip is a social action, and the value of the social realm as
a mediator between the individual and the formal realms is considerable.
This informality doesn’t automatically generate itself, and its norms and
values vary from community. But I think we cannot take the informality
(or even the existence) of the social realm for granted. Marilyn Yalom’s
recent history of female friendship (2015), summarizing the history and
influence of women’s friendships throughout written history, reminds us
that proximity is often the facilitator of friendship (88). Women become
friends with one another, and share secrets, because they encounter each
other regularly. Virtual proximity does not meet the same needs that
physical proximity can, and some of the social and economic structures
of our modern life can undermine the possibility of sustained friendship.
My exploration of gossip has reminded me of both the value of the social
246 K. ADKINS
realm as an informal communal check on our behavior and the ease with
which it can be undermined. Transactional or monetized relationships,
and easy (if fleeting) electronic notoriety, can tempt us to publicize our
own or others’ secrets.
To be clear, romanticizing the past is a dangerous move. The promi-
nence of public shaming of gossips in medieval Europe should alone remind
us that intimacy presents as many dangers as benefits. The intimacy of a
medieval European town, or the villages of the Zincantan province, can
be stifling; everyone knows everyone else, and secrets and shames can be
rapidly spread and remembered. But at least in those settings, friendships
can work to counteract the pain of public shaming and embarrassment.
My concern here is that we have a far more expansive and permanent
possibility of public shaming, without an equally vigorous possibility of
friendships that can counteract and balance the public, if virtual, shaming.
In short, good gossip requires both individual and social commitments.
8.1 How to Gossip

First, I want to consider some conclusions we can draw from the span of
this book that address individual norms around gossip; how we ought to
talk and listen. Linda Radzik offers up practices of gossip that are useful
to ponder. She suggests that good gossipers listen skeptically, use discre-
tion when talking and sharing, and neither gossip with an ulterior motive
nor listen to those who themselves seem so inclined (2016: 201). These
are good norms, in that they remind us to gossip carefully. Given the
damage that we have seen gossip do, it is worth being mindful to avoid
damage. However, Radzik’s recommendations run the risk of sanitizing
gossip a bit too much. Radzik’s caution that gossip can damage people’s
reputations without merit is valid, but ignores the way in which gossip
can fulfill a social good. The gossip we’ve seen in past chapters, where
women compare notes on sexual harassers or chauvinists, and people of
color trade stories of harassment and discrimination, points to the ways in
which gossip, even critical or damaging gossip, can work to alert people to
bad actors or bad situations. But it is also important to think about when,
and to whom, to share this damaging gossip. Radzik is certainly right to
caution us to be sensitive to the reputation-damaging potential of gossip,
particularly gossip which seems quite unlikely. But websites like Being a
Woman in Philosophy remind us that talking to others about our shared
communities, particularly the destructive aspects of the communities, can
be a crucial tool for figuring out connections, and even fomenting resis-
tance. While Radzik is right to caution us about being careful about gossip
with another’s personal reputation, I would modestly suggest that some
lack of caution about institutional gossip is also justified. The problems
and injustices that political or institutional gossip highlights are gener-
ally not limited to single individuals, and the gossip functions to reveal or
highlight context. Refraining from this gossip out of a fear of reputation
damage limits a crucial tool, particularly for those who are marginalized.4
Radzik’s cautions about reputation damage deserve extra emphasis when
we contemplate the venue of our gossiping. It is worth stressing the differ-
ence between electronic gossip; our concern for sharing gossip should be
amplified when it comes to posting. Emrys Westacott rightly observes that
the moral status of gossip doesn’t change when it is posted electronically
(70), but its spread and potential permanence does.
As I’ve stressed throughout this book, gossip isn’t merely about juicy
stories being told to eager, passive recipients. Rather, it is often a dia-
logic process in which beliefs and interpretations are constructed through
information-sharing. As such, norms around gossip aren’t just about talk-
ing, but about listening. The most basic conclusion I’d draw in this sec-
tion is for the need for people to listen to gossip. To be clear, given that
gossip is often providing information or interpretations of events that have
value and are getting marginalized, ceasing to be hypocritical about our
condemnations of gossip seems long overdue.5 As I’ve emphasized sev-
eral times in this book, gossip gets segmented and treated variantly, often
depending on the power positions held by its spreaders. Those with cred-
ibility excess and well-developed public reputations can gossip invisibly,
and often can ignore or minimize what is said about them from below.
By contrast, those with credibility deficit and occupying marginal social
positions can find themselves in an extremely vulnerable position if their
gossip about the empowered becomes publicized. Examples abound in
this book involving selective, not to say random, usage of the “gossip”
as a shortcut for debate and dissent. To summarize the ways in which the
term is dishonestly used, we find that something is gossip if: it’s unflatter-
ing to us, it threatens our personal or political stability, it might be true
but we really don’t want to contemplate that possibility, or somebody is
about to tell or publish this elsewhere. But when those in positions of
relative privilege decide to say something about somebody else in a public
forum, it suddenly transmogrifies from gossip to a “juicy story” (Judith
Miller), a potential scoop (Michael Isikoff), or “news about the profes-
248 K. ADKINS
sion” (Brian Leiter), among other slippery transvaluations. While some

journalists defend themselves for their noble attention to substance over
shallowness (Matthew Bai, Hendrik Hertzberg), Michael Kinsley rightly
calls this attitude out for what it is: arrogance for readers and servility
toward politicians. He is writing strictly about political gossip, but we
can extend his language more generally—selective and self-serving usage
of the term “gossip” assumes our interlocutors can’t hear what we mean,
and implies that we’re only too happy to listen to and spread scandal when
it serves our interests. Kinsley accurately notes that the very politicians
and journalists wanting to draw tight and arbitrary cordons of privacy
around the sanctity of family life are simultaneously parading their fam-
ilies in front of cameras for flattering articles, and using an ostensively
successfully maintained family life as supporting material for a candidacy
(14). It’s arrogant, he argues, for journalists to assume that readers don’t
have the sophistication to be able to read and analyze this information for
themselves, and assess how relevant it is or isn’t to their judgment of the
candidate (15).
The particular hypocrisy about what I call invisible gossip is worthy of
challenge and response. People with epistemic and social privilege have
more freedom to speak and write loosely, irresponsibly, and damagingly,
without it being recognized or challenged; it gets admired as “political
incorrectness” or “speaking truth to power.” By contrast, we’ve seen
many examples of people from minority positions getting their positions
damaged as gossip, in and by rhetoric that is itself gossipy. The inconsis-
tency with which gossip is recognized and challenged as such leads to the
perpetuation of this sad state of affairs. Relatedly, the practice of wide-
spread and unnecessary use of anonymous sourcing (against stylebook
teachings, where sources have little real risk of speaking out) perpetuates
invisible gossip being presented in newspapers, unchecked and unchal-
lengeable. The New York Times, despite its public editor’s admirable com-
mitment to challenging this practice, remains a prime offender. Twice in
three days during the 2016 presidential campaign cycle, we saw stories
featuring reports of gossip from New York dinner parties presented as
crucial political information (Chozick, Burns, and Haberman). Excessive
and unjustified anonymous sourcing perpetuates a situation where the
politically privileged get far more than their fair share of media oxygen and
credibility, and squeezes out alternative positions and perspectives. Many
newspapers have eliminated their gossip columns for a variety of reasons
(not least the cost of society reporters’ salaries); challenging newspapers
either to label the Manhattan dinner party circuit gossip as gossip in the
news stories, print the information with names attached, or not print it at
all, might be one way finally to rein in the practice of overeager anony-
mous sourcing that merely perpetuates invisible gossip. Kinsley’s point
can be not only extended to non-political gossip but also, more relevantly,
turned on its head; when people who have shared reality bias gossip invis-
ibly about coworkers, job candidates, newcomers to the neighborhood,
but defend themselves as simply spreading news, they are demonstrating a
corollary arrogance; they and they alone decide when something is or isn’t
reliable information. In other words, the concern around gossip should
cut both ways; as readers and interlocutors, we should be mindful both of
when someone uses the term gossip about some nugget of information,
and when someone is defending what they’re doing as not gossip- or
rumor-mongering. Those who dissemble most acutely about gossip may
simply be diverting our epistemic attention and priorities elsewhere. To
illustrate this, note that neither of the two Times dinner party stories from
the last chapter actually used the word “gossip”; they merely reported sec-
ondhand reports about private conversations as news. By contrast, one of
the Times reporters producing stories about dinner party political gossip,
Maggie Haberman, used the term explicitly in a recent article about gos-
sip, but there it was in a minimizing and trivializing fashion. She described
Donald Trump’s penchant for repeating far-fetched and widely debunked
conspiracy theories as “part hair-salon gossip,” and quotes one Republican
source who describes him as a “walking, talking Enquirer magazine”
(Haberman). Gossip is named when we want to delegitimize ideas, and
we most regularly want to delegitimize ideas that are challenging to our
assumptions; the spreading of gossip that reinforces ideas becomes anony-
mously sourced news.
This is not to say that listening to gossip is always easy, or that we should
do so uncritically. The same kind of epistemic and moral humility that well
serves good gossips in their storytelling mode also serves us when we
receive and respond to gossip. C.A.J. Coady’s arguments about “patholo-
gies of testimony” are a helpful guide here. Despite his title, Coady notes
that gossip is actually not a deviant form of testimony, merely another form
of it (255). He suggests that gossip is more reliable than rumor, because
it is typically told sincerely (253). He clarifies his meaning in a way that’s
fruitful; he notes that gossip’s “natural home” is in small groups; in other
words, that it is intimate conversation (255). The connection between
sincerity and intimacy is transparent here; we can more reliably assess the
250 K. ADKINS
sincerity of gossip than rumor, because we have more of a sense of the

person conveying the gossip than we probably do the person spreading
the rumor (there is no trust basis for rumor-spreading, no reputation on
the line). Even so, Coady suggests, following literature we have seen, that
rumor may have an indirect epistemic value; it may be getting at a truth
in a distorted fashion (269). Coady points at, for instance, the kinds of
rumors Patricia Turner so capably analyzes. Even if the CDC didn’t liter-
ally kidnap African-American children from the streets of Atlanta in the
early 1980s, the fact that the rumor spread so quickly and so furiously
indicates how perilous and unsafe people felt in their community, in part
due to governmental medical negligence (such as the Tuskegee experi-
ments). In other words, the epistemic reliability of gossip and rumor is
directly connected to its source. This doesn’t mean that epistemic guid-
ance for gossip is straightforward, however. Mark Webb’s analysis of the
epistemic value of urban legends (2004) is instructive; he walks through
some basic possible principles for when information is or isn’t trustworthy,
including some that are directly applicable to gossip, such as “never trust
the friend of a friend” (54), and points out ways in which the rules are self-
defeating (they are too broad, it is too easy to think of counterexamples).
His conclusion is that epistemic agency is more like moral judgment; start-
ing with simple principles too often narrows the situation and occludes
relevant context. “Principles come later, as an aid to judgment, but they
are not the final story” (57), he argues. I would contend that something
similar operates with gossip.
But the fact that we should listen to gossip, and that we should listen
with some care, also reminds us of another obligation: to call out invis-
ible gossip when it occurs. The persistent appearance of invisible gossip
by the empowered, and the way in which it persists, unrecognized and
unchallenged, perpetuates epistemic and social disparities. As it turns out,
it’s not difficult to identify invisible gossip, particularly of the front-page
variety; anonymously sourced articles in which the anonymous sourcing
focuses more on personal or political feuds as opposed to previously undis-
closed issues of national importance is paradigmatic of invisible gossip.
Given that these sources often have what Miranda Fricker would describe
as credibility excess, it is worth being skeptical when people with privilege
and credibility turn to anonymity (and a very public anonymity) to speak,
and it is worth examining their words with some skepticism. By contrast,
gossip that is initially upsetting to me or troublesome, particularly when
it comes from people who don’t have credibility excess, is often worth
a second or a generous listen. Recall Kate Manne and Jason Stanley’s

arguments in the Chronicle about the ways in which student protestors
got selectively demonized and undermined. They suggested that student
anger over institutional and interpersonal anger had been simmering for
a long time, and generally not expressed publicly. Simply focusing on the
few cell phone videos of students shouting down house masters (an admit-
tedly uncivil experience) missed the fact that students had been talking
about issues for a long time, with no meaningful response or reaction from
administrators. They encourage those with credibility to spare to pause to
listen to the students’ anger and to engage it. There is a corollary here for
us when we think about gossip. It can be easy, and satisfying, to poke holes
in the rhetoric and logic of gossip; often exaggerated, phrased for humor-
ous or sarcastic effect, it does not hew sharply to standards of epistemic
precision. But to focus on the epistemic trees misses the epistemic forest;
the truth of gossip is often present, just indirectly. The street talk about
the police kidnapping children in 1850s Paris was literally incorrect; the
police were detaining, and then the courts deporting, vagrants (Farge).
These actions were done according to the law, but the effective difference
between the rumor of kidnapping and the fact of deporting, and who was
doing the action, would be minimal, particularly to the family members
who never saw their kin again. In particular, this kind of rumor is a portent
of change to come; when it’s plausible for people to spread the news that
the state is illegally imprisoning people and demanding ransoms, that is a
pretty clear sign of a failure of popular confidence in the justness of the
government. Even when rumors and gossip are more markedly wrong, as
in some of the rumors about racism that Patricia Turner documents alone
and in her work with Gary Alan Fine, there is a similarly relevant truth
being expressed. To dismiss these warnings because they don’t adhere to
propositional standards of justified true belief diminishes the reach and
grasp of our knowledge.
To extend this argument about hypocrisy and listening to other realms,
my analysis of institutional and political gossip suggests to me that indi-
vidual leaders should not be afraid of gossip in principle (and that busi-
ness magazines should probably stop writing popular articles about how
to eliminate gossip in the workplace). As Kathryn Waddington’s research
demonstrates, gossip functions as an early warning system (2012: 133).
She recommends good managers should ask themselves questions when
they hear gossip. “How much gossip has come to our attention recently?
What are the underlying issues, gaps, and themes? What is the mix of
252 K. ADKINS
good, bad, and toxic gossip? Do we need to take any action” (135). These
are good, pragmatic questions to consider, but they are also individual
questions, directed at individual leaders. However, as I’ve demonstrated
in this book, even being able to ask these questions presumes that those
with administrative and decision-making authority are hearing the gos-
sip. One of the dangers of perspectival obstacles is that information and
critique never even make their way to hearing rooms, that is, too many
Perestroikan emails never get sent, or only get sent to equally marginalized
recipients, and stay at the level of angry underground whispering. This is
because of the social factors conditioning and producing not just the gos-
sip but also our communication in general. It is worth spending a little
time thinking about those factors.
8.2 The Social Context of Gossip

Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone (2000), reminds us that social capital
(social ties, civic organizations) is a key informal piece of a well-functioning
community. He names gossip as one of the manifestations of social capital
(93). The enemies of social capital, for Putnam, are segregation, segmen-
tation, and fragmentation in communities; the less time we spend in sus-
tained, informal engagements with others, and the more time we spend
in private hobbies or virtual communication, the weaker our connections
are to our social circle, and communities are less able to withstand stresses
and strains. We can see both the positive effects of gossip or schmoozing
when we think about the examples we’ve explored in the last few chapters,
as well as identify some of the structural strains Putnam analyzes as stresses
on social connection. Because gossip is often an adjunct activity—it hap-
pens alongside work or other activities—its reputation as idle talk is unfair.
We often, as we have seen, gossip while we are busy with others. Think of
Melanie Tebbutt’s British housewives gossiping while engaged in laundry
or shopping, or Kathryn Waddington’s nurses enthusiastically dissecting
the life, work, and politics of the hospital while at work. It is social talk; it
is an activity that glues us to each other, and reveals the fissures or weak-
nesses in those connections.
But the dangers of segmentation and fragmentation are visible when we
think about contemporary work settings, and how they facilitate or dis-
courage social connection. One of the effects of the contemporary work
world is to make work less meaningfully social, while more ostensibly
social. Silicon Valley start-ups get rapturous press for including Ping-Pong
tables and conversation nooks in open-plan offices as ways of decreas-

ing workplace formality and fomenting creativity, but the underside of
this development is also clear. Workers are rarely in private or confidential
settings, so the kinds of exploratory or confiding conversation that gos-
sip produces are architecturally discouraged.6 More bluntly, the casual-
ization of the workforce found in many previously stable sectors of the
economy (engineering, the academy, the legal profession) sharply limits
the subversive and disruptive potential of gossip. When over half of the
faculty at a university are at-will adjuncts who have no dedicated office
space, no benefits, and don’t know that they will be at the institution after
the semester concludes, they have no incentive to attend to or respond
to the institution’s political and structural decisions, and certainly no
incentive to confide in fellow faculty about the unsatisfactory conditions
in higher education. Patricia White extends this argument and makes it
more systematic, pointing out that a whole host of budgetary choices in
higher education—eliminating common space, increasing telecommuting,
conference calls in lieu of face-to-face meetings—can work against the
democratizing force of gossip (2013: 10). This is a particularly unwelcome
development for the academy, which has historically been unique among
the professions for its shared governance, in which a faculty—presumably
full-time—has a substantial role to play in making curricular and structural
decisions. While there have been occasional and impressive rebellions from
segments of the economy being casualized—Disney engineers are cur-
rently suing the family-friendly company for their family-unfriendly mas-
sive layoffs of engineers for low-cost H1-B visa holders; adjuncts across
the United States organized a day of protests and teach-ins—these have
been occasional rather than sustained.7 The increasingly common practice
of requiring departing employees to sign nondisparagement clauses as a
part of a severance package is a further (and very concrete) disincentive
to talk.8 The problem with these economic structures is that they further
tilt the scales of influence and communication in favor of management;
decision-making influence is increasingly concentrated in the hands of
executives, which increases the risk for employees to venture unpopular
or critical ideas.
Just as some social and economic stressors can make the practice of gos-
sip less likely, other social and economic stressors can make the gossip that
exists worrisomely dangerous. The very same casualization of the economy
brings with it dangers for gossip. Recall the business research that demon-
strated that workers who perceived that a company’s breaking of a promise
254 K. ADKINS
to them justified spreading a damaging rumor about the company (Bordia

et al. 2014). Not all casualization scenarios are equal; for instance, some
newer industries or companies (such as Task Rabbit, Uber, or Lyft) were
conceived and defended as contractual in nature. However, industries or
companies that seek to turn long-standing employees into contract work-
ers or eliminate positions for H1-B workers (such as Disney), or indus-
tries where previously long-standing workers are being replaced by casual
workers (such as higher education) are playing a risky game with employee
loyalty. Employees who perceive that an expectation of loyalty is broken
with insufficient cause are less restrained in their words and actions.
Absence of trust did not suddenly emerge with the gig economy; it
can occur whenever and wherever institutions are too closed off to the
people they serve. The historical Vatican provides an immediate exam-
ple of this. Attempting to quell widespread rumors about an ailing Pope
in 1602, Clement VIII made an appearance at his balcony as a proof of
life and health. Rather than quelling the talk, however, it backfired, and
rumors about a highly stage-managed appearance were added to the stew
of public discussion of his health (Hunt 2014: 148). This instance speaks
to the way in which trust in official pronouncements, once damaged, is
extremely hard to repair. If there is a sharp division in perspectives, and
particularly if there is mistrust of official reports (because they are seen
as whitewashing, or surface only, or simply replicating the views of the
empowered), getting more official information won’t change anyone’s
perspective. Rather, it will simply sharpen the divisions; those on the mar-
gins would have yet more evidence of their ideas or perspectives being
ignored; those issuing the information could reasonably be more irritated
that ideas and proposals are met with resistance (“we are bending over
backward to be transparent!”).
The sorts of segmentation that we see economically also extends to
information, with worrisome results. Recall Patricia Turner and Gary
Alan Fine’s research on “Topsy/Eva” race rumors (2004), where a similar
rumor would take neatly opposed formulations, depending on whether or
not it was being spread in predominantly white or predominantly African-
American communities. Rumors that spread about Rodney King’s beating
by white Los Angeles police officers in 1992, for instance, emphasized
equally the crazy behavior of Rodney King, if the rumors were spread in
white communities, or the crazy behavior of the police officers, if African
Americans were spreading the rumors (30–41). The same information
takes on opposed emphasis based on who is talking to whom, and the seg-
mentation and segregation of communities allows both rumors to spread

with few chances for comparison. This kind of dynamic exists in gossip,
and in some cases, we have seen that people trust what they hear via the
grapevine more than they trust official proclamations or memos (Smeltzer
and Zener). While this sort of skepticism is understandable (recall that
the company grapevine was often more accurate than the official informa-
tion), it is not, I believe, a healthy state of epistemic affairs when people
put so much trust in gossip at the expense of what they hear and read in
conventional sources. As David Coady describes it when writing about
popular interest in rumor over official news sources (2012), the concern is
not that people believe rumors, but that they are distrustful of official or
corporate news sources (106). In particular, when we consider the divided
state of news media today (where there are news and opinion sources
for many niche groups), gossip that functions in an exclusionary fashion
can be worrisome. This argument is analogous to one of José Medina’s
claims; he argues for a kind of “guerrilla pluralism” where multiple and
heterogeneous knowledge communities can coexist (266–289). The goal,
for Medina, is not total agreement or consensus, but rather that epistemic
and social differences can be discusses productively; epistemic friction is
acknowledged and generates fruitful discussion. Guerrilla pluralism isn’t
a permanent or steady state, but for Medina, it’s a necessary state in a
heterogeneous society with strongly differentiated communities. This sort
of segregation or segmentation speaks to the need and value of social
inclusion in decision-making. Gossip, as I have demonstrated throughout
this book, is often both a marker and a channel for these differences. It
functions as a kind of counter-discourse for marginalized people—they
use it to make sense of an unjust world and oppressive actors, and often
to articulate or foment paths of resistance. But too much gossip—or bet-
ter put, too much gossip that stays in homogeneous communities—has
its own dangers. As I said earlier, while individual leaders should listen to
gossip, they will not have the opportunity to do so if their leadership teams
and work or learning practices are homogeneous.
The sorts of dangers that information or community segmentation and
fragmentation represent are, I believe, only magnified when we consider
digital gossip. There also seem to be two specific dangers to digital gossip
specific to fragmentation. While digital gossip, in some cases, can func-
tion to provide support and solidarity (as in small boards or chat rooms
for communities that are marginalized), in other cases (here I am pri-
marily thinking of the kinds of news aggregators that rely on lively com-
256 K. ADKINS
menters to add spice to news stories, such as Buzzfeed or Gawker, and

of course micro-blogs like Twitter) they are a kind of feigned intimacy
that promotes quick judgment, which I think limits our thinking in two
different ways. First is in the synthetic way; they discourage connections
across stories or information. This is most obviously true with Twitter,
with its 140-character limit on posts, and apps that are modeled upon
or rely on Twitter in their construction. The more novelistic Twitterers
may issue series of tweets on a sole issue, but in general Twitter serves to
encourage quick snark and put-down, and discourages the kind of con-
nection or context that can be useful. And second, these forums discour-
age connection across time. While some discussion boards and blogs have
long-standing contributors with continuous identities, many boards and
blogs are totally or mostly unmoderated. Further, the ease of adopting or
changing pseudonyms means that relatively few discussants on electronic
boards will persist over months or years. The conversation is less like sus-
tained gossip sessions, and more like a very large and very noisy party. This
means that there are few checks to accountability for those who do most
of their gossiping online, which makes it easy to say scabrous things, or
post poisonous images or video.
8.3 Facilitating Good Gossip

We’ve seen that gossip at its best is many things: a social glue, a means
of articulating shared disagreements with community norms, a means of
fomenting resistance. There are some instances we can point to where
communities that permit or even encourage gossip benefit by it. Gossip’s
informality allows it to be a relatively quiet mediator of differences. In one
community, ranchers effectively used gossip as a way of resolving disputes
over usage of land for grazing, rather than appealing to time- and money-
consuming formal channels like lawsuits or governmental bodies (Kniffin
and Wilson 2010: 160). Indeed, the ranchers observed that gossip was a
more effective dispute-resolution tool than court precisely because of its
informality; those who sued, whether or not they succeeded, immediately
became the subject of widespread and harsh gossip (ibid.). Polly Wiessner’s
(2005) ethnography of the Ju/‘hoansi in Botswana, an egalitarian forag-
ing community, recounts the ways in which norm enforcement took place
primarily through conversation, both to and about the offender. What
she describes as “rallying … group opinion against the offender” (132)
seems pretty to line up pretty clearly with the work of gossip. This kind
of indirect criticism accounts for a full third of the norm enforcement,

Wiessner observes (130), and is defended along lines of efficiency and
conflict-easing that are comparable to the study of the ranchers (135).9
The informality of gossip gives it not just social but also intellectual
power. Surprisingly, given the Catholic Church’s historical obsession with
privacy and control of information, at least one of its religious orders
seems to have structured time for gossip into its leadership-selection pro-
cess. Several contemporary commentators have observed that a period
called the murmuratio or murmuration exists before the election of the
Superior General, world leader of the Jesuit order (Schultenover, Palmo,
Primrose).10 This period, several days in length, exists so that electors can
speak privately and informally about the candidates. It is deliberately indi-
rect in nature—one Jesuit remarks that one of the rules of engagement
specifically forbids outright electioneering or campaigning (Schultenover).
Given that explicit and direct electioneering is ruled out during this period
suggests that the goal is more informal and evaluative, the work of gossip.
The fact that the Jesuits, with their long history of political engagement
and activism, are the religious order to institutionalize informal conversa-
tion as a valued precursor to political decision-making is telling.11 At mini-
mum, it suggests an awareness that a ban on this kind of talk is pointless.
At maximum, it indicates that there is a particular and distinctive value in
creating and legitimating informal conversational space. Quiet, intimate,
evaluative talk about candidates can be something that amplifies rather
than degrades decision-making.
These examples stand in contrast to more standard analyses of gossip
that recommend its abolition or banning. In European history, we’ve seen
how the development of the coffeehouse and salons encouraged intimate
conversation. By contrast, highly surveillant social mechanisms can dis-
courage, though never eliminate, the secretive conversation of intimates.
Robert Darnton points out that gossip flourished during periods of formal
censorship like in pre-Revolutionary France (“Gossiping About Gossip,”
1986: 42). Medieval German shaming punishments of gossips demon-
strate the ways in which speech was violently and publicly curtailed, to
no effect. In early modern Rome, the contrast between the Vatican’s dra-
matic, public theater of privacy for papal conclaves stands in stark contrast
to the pervasive gossip and rumor about its actions. Staff serving cardinals
were sharply limited, doors and entries to the Sistine Chapel were theatri-
cally sealed, four different sets of armed guards protected hallways, and
access to the conclave was limited to a few wooden wheels to bring food
258 K. ADKINS
into the chamber (Hunt 362). Violators of conclave secrecy, or writers

of gossipy avvisi on the proceedings, were prosecuted and in some cases
executed (Hunt 358). And yet, in each of these cases, what we see is that
this dramatic public spectacle of silence and shame is persistently under-
mined by human curiosity and rebellion; gossip flourished in Germany
and at the Vatican. The need for information, particularly when one’s life
is being constricted and damaged by those in authority, will find an out
against repression. I do not want to minimize the dangers of toxic gos-
sip; we have seen how people have suffered from egregious damages to
their reputations in some of our examples. Part of what remains troubling
about public gossip or weaponized gossip, as was highlighted by both
Jacquet and Ronson in their discussions of shaming, is the way in which
it can be used endlessly, disproportionately, and on people or on offenses
that are glancing, not penetrating.
But what is worrisome about contemporary calls for individual elec-
tronic reputation management (Fertik and Thompson 2015), attempts to
construct “geo-fences” around schools so that students can’t access Yik
Yak on servers, or even Sherry Turkle’s well-intentioned suggestion that
technology-free spaces be created in workplaces and schools to facilitate
in-person intimate conversation (321), is their focus on digital conversa-
tion as the danger.12 Hiring a(n expensive!) firm to cleanse one’s online
presence of unseemly factors or videos, or repressing a venue for casual
student talk won’t eliminate destructive habits; instead, they will simply
be driven more underground, to places that are harder to track or respond
to. Conversely, I fear, people will say what they really think only in more-
screened situations, which means that conversations will become more
publicly empty, and more privately monologic, not dialogic. At least one
legal scholar contends that we overvalue privacy to the possible limitation
of public discussion. “To be the author of their own lives,” Edwin Baker
argues, “people want to evade the intrusive eyes of those who can exercise
power over them” (2004: 255). Baker warns that too strong an attempt
to limit damaging speech can result in a kind of public quietism, where
people withdraw from the civil or political sphere as opposed to engage in
difficult or even damaging conversations. Polite public silence combined
with increasingly behind-the-scenes viciousness is toxic. Given what we
know about how power and authority are still distributed along race, class,
and gender lines, it is still not hard to imagine conversations continuing to
take place that can have meaningful effect on our working and other parts
of lives (during hiring committee lunches, say, or during happy hours after
executive planning or strategy sessions) that would be completely private,

completely off-the-record, and completely problematic in result. In other
words, the in-between nature of gossip is valuable precisely because it can
negotiate these awkward moments or clashes; more, not less, sociality is
required for it to function better.
What the prohibitors miss with gossip is the fact that instead of discour-
aging gossip, we ought to be mindful of how we gossip. The examples of
gossip we’ve seen that have been effective—calling attention to injustices
that have been ignored or actively erased—work in part because they are
contextual. Condemnations of gossip, whether electronic or in person,
are really, I would contend, condemnations of gossip that’s self-serving or
cherry-picking. To take a recent example, a senior philosopher who was
raped in graduate school by a fellow philosopher wrote a testimonial about
her experience, and how it informs her response to current debates about
sexual assault and harassment in philosophy (Feminist Philosophers).13
Her advice was equally split between other philosophers who themselves
are survivors of assault or harassment (to encourage them both to persist
and to utilize resources for help), and those who gossip about the harass-
ment. Strikingly, the advice (do not gossip) was based on basic assump-
tions about gossip that experience has demonstrated to be incomplete.
“Gossip can be fun,” she wrote, and something that most people enjoy
“regardless of its consequences.” But the effect of any gossip about sexual
harassment and abuse in philosophy, she essentially suggests, is a kind of
skeptical dismissal of the problem. And yet, part of what brought these
problems to a more public face was in fact persistent gossip about their
existence. To be sure, this was a different kind of gossip than what the
writer describes in her piece. It was the gossip of philosophers who expe-
rienced it, to each other, and who connected the dots between the persis-
tent problems of abuse and harassment, and the lopsided nature of both
the demographics and the subjects in focus in philosophy. Linda Alcoff, in
“A Call for Climate Change,” explicitly connects the need for women to
speak up, and their growing willingness to talk to one another to produce
blogs like What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy with the possibility
of change. In other words, not all gossip is done for entertainment value,
out of idleness, and ignores context.
More crucially, strictures simply to avoid gossip for its irresponsibility
ignore what has been previously established; gossip by the empowered
has already happened, is happening, and has the double advantage of
happening silently, or without visible acknowledgment. Both Alcoff, in
260 K. ADKINS
“A Call for Climate Change,” and Martha Nussbaum, in her account

of her career in philosophy (“Don’t Smile So Much”), acknowledge
the widespread and persistent whispers about women who manage suc-
cess in philosophy. Nussbaum, in describing a serial and pathetic sexual
harasser in her graduate department, notes that the women who were
most damaged by this predator were not the women who complained
and refused him, but those who consented; they became the object of
gossip and criticism in the department (99). This problem isn’t indi-
vidual, Nussbaum notes; the widespread assumption of women as sexual
beings first and foremost means that they are often gossiped about, and
their professional performance undermined, with assumptions that they
are successful more for their sexual connections than their intellectual
contributions (100–103). These long-standing patterns have contin-
ued effects on the profession; Alcoff, in “A Call for Climate Change,”
writes acerbically about women who “chose” not to pursue or con-
tinue study in philosophy after enduring harassment. These conversa-
tions stayed for so long in the domain of gossip because there were too
many risks to having one’s name publicly attached to such criticisms;
funding opportunities, professional positions, and good recommenda-
tions hinge impossible-to-quantify factors such as one’s reputation for
“collegiality.”14
Not only would discouraging gossip in this case discourage discus-
sion of sexist practices, the gossip Dowell describes actually reveals sex-
ist assumptions that are worth exposure. The speculation Janice Dowell
reports overhearing provides very selective context (Sosis). People (more
likely than not men, given philosophy’s demographics) personally know
and like the philosopher, therefore he can’t have done such a thing. He’s
well educated, and thus would not do something so foolish. He’s profes-
sionally accomplished; he doesn’t need to force sex on anyone. In these
cases as well, the philosopher survivor notes, the victim’s motives are
impugned: her sexual past is scrutinized and criticized; she is assumed
to be a vengeful ex-girlfriend or someone with an agenda. Sadly, these
comments are all too believable. What they reveal is a limited, extremely
dated, and sexist set of assumptions about sexual assault and harass-
ment. These kind of explanations, defenses, and rationalizations for
sexual assault and harassment were common in the years before Susan
Brownmiller published Against Our Will (1975) and challenged under-
standings of sexual assault as a crime of lust; she effectively argued that it
is instead a crime of power. While her arguments have been responded to
and complicated in the intervening decades of scholarship and research,

the basic shift of allegations of sexual assault requiring serious and non-
judgmental examination has persisted. By contrast, what these overheard
conversations demonstrate is that too many philosophers speculate about
allegations of serious crime without even the merest familiarity with it.
Indeed, there is more than a passing resemblance between the content
and tenor of these remarks, and what José Medina recounts as occurring
at Vanderbilt after the fraternity member left the pig’s head on the steps
of the Jewish student union. “One cannot hide oneself completely in the
collective ignorance in which one partakes,” Medina writes about the
vandalism at Vanderbilt (140); a similar collective ignorance is revealed
by the gossip the philosopher recounts. A very elemental familiarity with
basic social and political conventions is being excused and perpetuated
here; the gossip is merely the venue by which the ignorance is revealed
and perpetuated. In other words, the problem is not the fact of gossip and
speculation, it is the fact that some of the gossip and speculation—what
the senior philosopher describes, to me, sounds like paradigmatic invis-
ible gossip—is epistemically and ethically irresponsible. The response,
then, should be one that facilitates condemnation of bad (antisocial) gos-
sip, and improves our sociality.
Better gossip, I would argue, requires more social accountability. Gossip
originates in small, trusting communities. Because we talk to the same
people over months and years, the underlying trust and intimacy serves as
an informal check on what we say and how we say it. A coffee klatscher
who speaks abusively to me is not someone with whom I’ll keep having
coffee. This kind of trust doesn’t just exist in personal friendships. Indeed,
this is why some Internet gossip not only survives but also flourishes—
boards and blogs like What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy thrive
because of the value of solidarity that springs from shared background
experiences. Women philosophers—who as we’ve seen, are typically vastly
outnumbered in their departments by men—take value in shared experi-
ences, even in anonymity. But the shared experience provides grounds
for intimacy and trust; in more generic web communities, there’s less of
a basis for shared trust or intimacy. Thus, moderators of web communi-
ties would be well served to create and enforce rules for commenting that
mimic a sense of accountability, or at minimum, make it transparent when
someone behaves destructively. Indeed, Justin Weinberg explicitly appeals
to a need for accountability in his revision of commenting practices at the
philosophy blog Daily Nous (2015). Expecting commenters to create and
262 K. ADKINS
maintain a consistent identity and nom de plume across threads is a basic

way of making an Internet conversation more truly conversational.
In other words, if gossip is often a cry for recognition and respect, than
facilitating ways of informal discussions of differences tamps down some of
the social pressure that are explosive. As my arguments about weaponized
gossip suggest, negative gossip proliferates exactly when people perceive
themselves as systematically devoiced, disregarded, disempowered. Gossip
as counter-discourse erupts and flourishes, because it becomes the most
trustworthy means of communication, when conventional means of com-
munication are seen as irrelevant or demeaning of one’s experience and
perspective. Karen Brison’s ethnography of the Kwanga substantiates this
idea; she notes that the extended, lengthy public discussions of gossip and
rumor were able to check some of its destructive potential. When people
were aware that both serious objections to actions would get some kind
of public hearing, and that there may be accountability for words used too
carelessly, the gossip was less pervasive and less destructive (116–117).
Both of these results are equally important, as they stem from the same
impulse. In many of the case studies we’ve examined the gossip spreads
and proliferates precisely because the underlying issues go publicly unex-
amined or unrecognized.
As I’ve shown throughout this book, our conversation throughout
history, and in various professional and personal realms, has never been
simple or redundant—we’ve always meandered between the sober and
the scabrous, the linear and the dialectical, the monologic and the dia-
logic. Gossip has always already been part of our talking, our think-
ing, and our acting. Indeed, at crucial moments gossip acts as a kind
of counter- discourse, challenging conventional wisdom about what
events matter, how they connect, and what we think of each other and
ourselves. We must be able, not simply to recognize these facts but also
to find a way of reckoning with them. Lively gossip is many things, but
at minimum it is a marker for the life and health of the social realm.
If our gossip lives, our friendship lives, are undernourished, then we
know less about the worlds we inhabit.15 Gossip has been effective and
powerful because it is also running alongside and interacting, effecting,
more formal and public conversation. It is, if you will, in conversation
with conversation. My argument, ultimately, is that we need to take
steps to ensure that our informal conversational life is as rich as our
formal life.
Notes
1. Most of this evidence has been reviewed in previous chapters, but
I will add one more tidbit. The discussion club Franklin started in
Philadelphia, the Junto, was clearly designed to be a business group
as much as a social group, and one for self-improvement. Thus, the
fact that the list of questions used to prime group discussions
include many with a distinctly gossipy cast (numbers 2, 3, 4, 6, 7,
8, 16, and 18, which ask about interesting stories, others’ failings,
whether business or personal, and attacks upon reputation of
members) stand as convincing testimony to Franklin’s judgment
that gossip has business and personal value. Ever the pragmatist,
Franklin would not include so many gossipy questions if he didn’t
think they were worth discussing. Franklin’s own description of
the Junto in his Autobiography, naturally, is more flattering and
elevating; it “was the best school of philosophy, morality, and poli-
tics that then existed in our province” (Isaacson 454). Interestingly,
he points to the questions that opened Junto meetings as a key
factor in the liveliness and efficacy of the discussion.
2. Most shamelessly, he celebrates his disinterest in publishing libel
and personal attacks in his newspapers in his Autobiography, and
detracts rivals who so indulge at being more interested in selling
papers than in elevating civic discussion (Isaacson 481).
3. Susan Phillips (2007) makes this point brilliantly in her discussion
of gossip in medieval English literary texts (113, 206).
4. James Scott (1985) reminds us that the asymmetry of power means
that gossip is a valuable tool of resistance, even if sometimes only
symbolic, for the poor against the rich (282).
5. The most basic hypocrisy, sadly, seems the most unavoidable. One
wishes fruitlessly for self-appointed moral scolds to stop loudly and
publicly condemning behavior those same scolds commit in
private.
6. Some of the more elaborate setups for the care and feeding of
Silicon Valley employees, so entertainingly sent up in David Eggers’
The Circle (2015), are no different from high-powered law or
investment firms’ practices of having high-end restaurant meals
delivered to firms when employees pull all-nighters, and providing
transportation home. Taking over an employee’s waking hours and
most basic self-care is a backhanded “benefit.”
264 K. ADKINS
7. For Disney, see Julia Preston, “Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to

Replace U.S. Workers With Immigrants.” The New York Times
January 25, 2016a. The adjuncts’ protest (National Adjunct
Walkout Day) was covered, among other places, in Inside Higher
Ed (https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/10/06/
national-adjunct-walkout-day-planned).
8. See Julia Preston, “Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on
Way Out, Grow Bolder.” The New York Times June 11, 2016b.
9. Ironically, she doesn’t use the word gossip to describe tribe mem-
bers discussing each other’s bad behavior with each other; by con-
trast, she separates “malicious gossip” out as a “sin of the tribe”
and a violation of community norms to be punished (123, 139). It
is unclear where Wiessner draws the line between useful and mali-
cious indirect criticism of others.
10. The term and practice have long roots; Elizabeth Horodowich
(2008: 157) refers to “mormoration” in chronicles of Venetian
gossip in the early modern era. The late Edward T. Oakes, SJ, first
called my attention to this historical detail.
11. Interestingly, the term’s medieval origins are far more mixed; it is
used in medieval texts complaining about subversive speech, and
was explicitly banned by the Benedictines (Dumolyn and Haemers
56–57). Given this, the Jesuits’ reclamation of the word and prac-
tice further stresses the constructive potential of small talk.
12. Fertik and Thompson’s book exemplifies the market economy

approach to privacy. Reputation sites free professionals from the
oppressive middlemen of firm managers—everyone can manage
their own reputation, and hence their careers. The only indispens-
able middlemen, it turns out, are those who create and manage the
for-profit reputation sites like Reputation.com, created and run by
Fertik and Thompson. They treat digital reputations entirely as
under the purview of individuals, and as market economy assets to
be managed (regularly comparing them to credit scores). The priv-
ilege assumed by this idea is troubling (in other words, the idea
that some of the most dangerous damage to reputation happens
precisely to those least capable of rectification, because they don’t
own a computer on which to set up Google alerts for their names,
or have the leisure time and income to upload positive images and
ideas of themselves). Fertik and Thompson’s view isn’t peculiar in
Silicon Valley. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, voiced a similar view
in 2014, advocating that “the way to deal with [passive electronic

surveillance] is just to be good” (Turkle 316), which seems dan-
gerously simplistic. But more basically, the assumption that we
have personal brands that need to be managed—Fertik and
Thompson walk right up to the idea that we ought jettison friends
who have declared bankruptcy or suffered similarly “brand-
degrading” experiences—suggests troubling things about how
economics should drive the decisions we make.
13. The philosopher later self-identified as Janice Dowell, associate
professor at Syracuse. See her April 7, 2016 interview at What Is It
Like to Be a Philosopher? http://www.whatisitliketobeaphiloso-
pher.com/#/janice-dowell/.
14. To be clear, the problem of sexist treatment and sexual harassment
in the academy is not, sadly, limited to philosophy. Several recent
surveys (Clancy et al. 2014, Richey et al. 2015) demonstrate that
sexual harassment is a widespread problem in several disciplines
of the natural sciences, particularly for early-career women.
Astronomer Geoffrey Marcy (California-Berkeley) was revealed to
be a serial sexual harasser of his graduate students, and resigned his
position. It is probably unnecessary to point out that his behavior
was discussed through gossip and rumor, rather than officially, for
almost a decade before an investigation began. See Overbye
(2015). Mere months after the surveys and Marcy’s behavior were
publicized, both the NSF and NASA issued statements announc-
ing lack of funding for sexual harassers suggests that the
consciousness-raising value of gossip can have practical effect (NSF
Press Statement, Bolden).
15. It’s hard to ignore the fact that it is male philosophers who so con-
sistently dismiss and undermine gossip as piffle and women’s talk,
even when there’s evidence that some of them had lively gossip
lives outside the university halls. By contrast, the friendship of
Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, so fully documented in their
correspondence (Brightman), stands as a firm demonstration of
the intellectual value of gossip—Arendt and McCarthy easily navi-
gate discussions of lectures, books and journals with the talk of
their lives, and the interplay between the personal and the profes-
sional or professorial is often impossible to disentangle.
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Index
A 84, 91, 96, 100, 108, 130, 140,

accountability 191, 230, 244, 245, 252, 258
of subjects of gossip, 20, 109, 121, Ayim, Maryann, 8, 70, 72, 105n2
146–7, 154, 223, 224
of those who participate in gossip,
243, 256, 261, 262 B
Alcoff, Linda Martin, 92, 95, 159, Bai, Matt, 14, 109, 110, 112–15,
259, 260 118–20, 122, 123, 126, 129,
Allen, Anita, 122, 126, 127, 146, 160, 131–3, 136, 219, 241, 248
171, 172 Baker, Edwin, 43, 50n21, 75n2, 78,
Anderson, Elizabeth, 165 136, 174n10, 205, 258
anonymity Bergmann, Jörg, 31, 35, 36, 40, 41,
in electronic gossip, 214–16, 48n10, 74, 179, 222
222, 223, 225, 230, Bok, Sissela, 77, 149, 182, 190, 191,
238, 247 225, 228
as privilege, 250 Brison, Karen, 7, 27, 28, 43, 188,
as problematic, 164, 165 196, 208, 244, 262
as protection for damaging gossip, Butler, Judith, 159, 161, 183
118, 189, 204, 207, 246
anonymous sourcing, 4, 5, 110,
164–70, 248–50 C
Auden, W.H., 9, 108, 148, 153 Clinton, Bill, 13, 29, 109, 126, 127,
authority, 4–7, 10, 17n8, 20, 23–7, 137–53, 167, 174n13, 231, 236,
29, 33, 37, 53–5, 60, 64, 65, 79, 237, 239n8, 243
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to foot notes.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47840-1
292 INDEX
Cloakroom (app), 14, 213, 214, 225 G

Coady, C.A.J., 11, 63, 73, 218, Gawker (website), 10, 219
249, 250 Gluckman, Max, 2, 4, 29, 43, 48n10,
Coady, David, 63, 255 79, 93
Coates, Jennifer, 8, 68, 69, 179 gossip
Code, Lorraine, 3, 15, 29, 30, 53, 57 accountability for, 127, 256, 262
coffeehouses, 41 as channel for testimonial injustice,
as locations for gossip, 26, 27, 257 53, 156
Collins, Gail, 32, 116, 157 as contestation of accepted meaning
context of interpretation, 59, 236
absence of in electronic gossip, 216 definition of, 7–11, 16n4, 23, 31,
in gossip, 5, 8–9, 13, 16n2, 110 44, 90
in knowledge claims, 53, 71 double standard within, 46, 65,
in shaming, 7, 13, 110, 183, 196–8, 204, 243
204, 216, 232, 244, 252 epistemic reliability of, 250
credibility. See also epistemic privilege as gendered, 39
excess, 124, 162, 247, 250 historical degradation of, 25, 26, 28
testimonial in gossip, 225, 238 history of, 13, 19, 42, 119, 121,
140, 212, 219, 242, 243
as invisible, 238
D as malicious, 37, 39, 42
Darnton, Robert, 65, 66, 71, 77, 193, in marginalized communities, 4, 32,
226, 227, 257 65, 225
Dowell, Janice, 198, 209n6, 260, by men, 42, 46
265n13 as personalizing institutional
Drudge Report, 139, 140 problems, 247
Dunbar, Robin, 7, 19–22, 46, 216 as perspectival, 55, 60, 252
as private or intimate, 10, 16n4,
65, 78, 107, 122, 216,
E 218, 222
Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 23–5, 47n7, 232 publicizing of, 118, 215
Elias, Norbert, 35, 44, 188 as reputation establishment,
epistemic privilege, 58. See also 136, 179
credibility, excess as response to credibility
constraints, 63
as response to time constraints, 86
F responsible social norms of, 165
Franklin, Benjamin, 124, 127, 173n7, as selection, 52, 60–4
180, 209n2, 214, 244, 263n1 as a signifier of shifting political or
Fraser, Nancy, 26, 149 moral standards, 119
Fricker, Miranda, 5, 15, 53, 54, 57, in small communities,
58, 89, 96, 121, 124, 128, 156, 187, 207, 225
158, 159, 162, 163, 225, 250 as synthesis, 64–9
INDEX 293
as tool for political or economic I

resistance, 11, 120 intimacy. See also trust
as tool of American politicians, as a marker of gossip, 22, 59
27, 109, 112, 116, 123 simulated in electronic gossip, 215,
as tool of journalists, 27, 39, 109, 222, 223, 238
110, 112–15, 119, 121, 122, invisible gossip, 5, 15, 82, 87–105,
127, 128, 130–2, 139, 142, 109, 224, 238, 242, 244,
143, 151, 153, 163, 164, 168, 248–50, 261
185, 186, 198, 205, 235, 243, Isikoff, Michael, 140, 150, 151, 168,
244, 248 184, 244, 247
as transactional, 158, 184, 185,
243, 246
as trivial, 42, 105 J
as used in law, 38, 44, 50n21, 90, Jacquet, Jennifer, 183, 196, 198–200,
118, 139, 157 206, 207, 258
as violation of privacy, 141, 221, 229 Jefferson, Thomas, 110, 116–18
weaponized, definition of, 6, 11, Jones, Karen, 184
14, 31, 90, 177–210, 243,
258, 262
at work, 9, 30 K
Guha, Ranajit, 23, 77, 191 Kamensky, Jane, 27, 36, 38,
47n4, 118
Kant, Immanuel, 37, 38, 184–6
H Kierkegaard, Søren, 33–5, 48n12,
Haberman, Maggie, 248, 249 49n13, 49n15–17, 214
Habermas, Jürgen, 25, 26 Kierner, Cynthia, 189, 190
Hart, Gary, 13, 14, 109, 111–16,
119–22, 126–33, 135–9, 198,
205, 236, 237, 243 L
Heidegger, Martin, 31–3, 48n11 Leiter, Brian, 82, 84–6, 88–92, 94–6,
Hindman, Matthew, 223, 225, 233–6, 98–100, 103, 104, 106n9, 195,
240n9 203, 248
Hogan, Hulk, 219–21, 232, 239n4 Lessard, Suzannah, 129–31,
Hunt, John, 43, 47n4, 244, 254, 258 198
hypocrisy Lewinsky, Monica, 13, 109, 126,
in journalistic treatment of gossip, 138–40, 143, 147, 150–3, 167,
122, 132 168, 174–5n18, 201, 205, 206,
in naming of gossip, 109 221, 231, 239n8
in political treatment of gossip, literacy, 20, 25, 47n7, 47n8, 52,
37, 131 232, 245
in reception of gossip, 242 Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, 51, 117,
as tool for politics, 123, 125 118, 172n3, 223
294 INDEX
M print culture
Medina, José, 3, 5, 15, 54–8, 69, consequences of, 20, 24
72–5, 77, 97, 107, 108, 129, effects on status of gossip, 24, 27
147, 164, 165, 171, 172, 190, features of, 20, 28
192, 255, 261 privacy
meta-blindness, 54, 57, 73, 129, as dependent upon social or
131, 192 economic capital, 149
Miller, Judith, 158, 167, 168, 184, eroded with electronic gossip, 222
235, 244, 247 gossip as premised upon, 171
Mill, John Stuart, 15, 55, 56, 100, gossip’s transgression of, 37
102, 106n7, 141, 162, 226 legal justification of, 142
murmuratio, 257
R
O Radzik, Linda, 10, 183, 197, 198,
Ong, Walter, 20, 23, 24, 47n7, 68, 200, 246, 247
211, 212, 214, 230 reputation
orality and oral culture as a check on damaging gossip, 118,
features of, 68 189, 246
relationship to gossip, 40 gossip as marker of, 179–81
outing Ronson, Jon, 183, 196, 200–3,
justified by hypocrisy, 123 206, 258
as originating in gossip, 39 Rosen, Jeffrey, 109, 110, 144, 145,
as political strategy, 125 147, 148
Rove, Karl, 155–63, 175n19, 181,
184, 225
P rumor
Perestroika, 48n9, 80–3, 87, 88, 93–9, definition of, 8, 11, 90
104, 105, 198, 229, 242, 252 differentiated from gossip,
Phillips, Susan, 22, 26, 36, 44, 45, 70, 91, 255
47n4, 212, 263n3
Philosophical Gourmet Report, 80
Plame, Valerie, 13, 110, 154–64, 167, S
169, 175n19, 178, 181, 192, secrecy, 10, 11, 22, 30, 43, 78, 108,
193, 235, 237, 243 146, 182, 190, 191, 207, 225,
Pluralist’s Guide to Philosophy, 80 228, 258
power secret (app), 14, 203, 213, 214,
gossip as critiquing disparities of, 225, 227
192, 194 sexism
gossip as reflecting disparities gossip about, 40, 81, 91
of, 225 in labeling and valuing gossip,
gossip as surveilling, 23 38, 58
INDEX 295
sexual harassment, 54, 58, 85, 94, Toobin, Jeffrey, 109, 110, 137, 140,
119, 121, 128, 129, 131, 137, 151–3
138, 158, 197, 198, 202, 205, trust. See also intimacy
225, 265n14 definition of, 7, 8, 11, 70
gossip about, 259 in gossip, 208, 255
shaming simulated in electronic gossip, 223
proportionality of within gossip, structural factors that inhibit, 81
36, 246 withdrawal of as motivating
as punishment for gossip, 36, 257 negative gossip, 178, 181,
shared reality bias, 108, 109, 112, 186, 187
113, 127, 154, 158, 165, 169, Turkle, Sherry, 15, 237, 238, 258,
170, 190, 203, 249 265n12
Shibutani, Tamotsu, 12, 38, 180, 193 Turner, Patricia, 30, 59, 60, 66, 72,
Shklar, Judith, 122–7, 173n7 77, 93, 168, 191, 193, 208, 250,
Signorile, Michelangelo, 39, 135, 251, 254
143, 144
Solove, Daniel, 6, 14, 42, 206, 207,
216, 222–4, 228, 231, 232 W
Spacks, Patricia, 7, 23, 28–30, 36, 41 Waddington, Kathryn, 8, 46, 78,
Starr, Kenneth, 152, 231, 239n8 251, 252
and Starr report, 138, 139, Watson, James, 60–2, 185, 186
147, 150 Westacott, Emrys, 16n2, 30, 77, 185,
Sunstein, Cass, 70, 192 209n3, 210n7, 247
surveillance What Is It Like to be a Woman in
in electronic gossip, 148 Philosophy (blog), 85, 259, 261
presented as synonymous with Wife of Bath, 45
gossip, 4, 68, 116, 141, 145, Wilson, Joe, 155, 156, 158, 159, 163,
148, 149, 174n17, 188, 206 164, 175n19
witchcraft, 46, 47n2, 187
accusations and gossip, 21, 194
T
Tebbutt, Melanie, 43, 44,
174n17, 252 Y
Thiel, Peter, 221, 222, 239n5 YikYak (app), 14, 213–14, 217, 218,
Tiku, Nitasha, 38, 203 225–9, 232, 258

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G O S S I P,

ISBN 978-3-319-47839-5 ISBN 978-3-319-47840-1 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963733

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover image © Schandmaske mit Narrenkraut (Abbildung), provided by Kriminalmuseum

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction: Some Loose Talk About Gossip 1

2 Gossip’s Bad Reputation 19

3 The Word On the Street: Gossip’s Contributions to

4 Failure to Communicate: Gossip as Institutional Conflict 77

4.3 Institutional Responses and Invisible Gossip 87

5 Rumors Help the Enemy! Gossip in Politics 107

7 Gossip in the Ether: How the Internet Does, and Doesn’t,

8 Conclusion: Schools for Scandal 241

masks are worth examining in person; the museum generously shared a

Brian Moore, is a marvel; he combines brilliance, patience, and discretion.

Introduction: Some Loose Talk About

I gossip a lot. Indeed, I have only half-jokingly remarked to friends that

© The Author(s) 2017 1

I begin this project so ostensively flippantly for two distinct reasons.

not always straightforward; being able to “read” a culture’s gossip is a sign

be a best-case scenario; often times, an idea won’t be literally or publicly

In other words, it is important to be able to read gossip literally and

1.1 What We Talk About When We Talk

place in the pages of glossy magazines about and directed to strangers, to

miss the interdependence and symmetry of friendship (and utterly ignore

To ignore these kinds of episodes as irrelevant draws a circle around gossip

fit which celebrities, do appear to have at least some shared information or

1.2 A Gossip Agenda

are some clear ethical implications to my argument, particularly since I

In short, history’s whisperings in our collective ears aren’t merely dis-

8. An alternative take on this distinction, offered by Bertoletti and

Gossip’s Bad Reputation

Gossip is a recursive concept. Because it is itself talk, it can be the subject

© The Author(s) 2017 19

done chiefly by women. While I am no historian, I want to venture an

2.1 Gossip’s Pre-History, or Grooming

“Gossip,” as a term, has a relatively short linguistic history. The Oxford

more than the practice, is personalized. Gossip’s origins are as a noun;

2.2 The Fall of Gossip

(47). This book economy doesn’t merely propel quantities of learning

gossip specialist Pietro Aretino, described by Eisenstein as “one of the

as a result of the press. Habermas, drawing from diverse historical and

in part because coffeehouses are widely recognized as places for political

consider gossip to be a danger comparable to sorcery—it isn’t to be dis-

2.3 Small Talk

truths—albeit often corrigible, renegotiable truths—about people” (147,

harmless outlet” for people to gripe about social differences as opposed to

something only in the sense of factual triviality” (99–100). Kierkegaard’s

and detailed questioning of another Corsair editor, Meïr Goldschmidt,

2.4 Slam Books or Malicious Gossip

and demonstrates the way in which it is actually formalized (2016). Sherry

2.5 Mean Girls: The Gendering of Gossip

in the Old Testament, provides both association and contrasting testimony,

feehouses, which “function primarily as places of business … centers of

2.6 What Is Left Unsaid

of false gossip being spread. In 1635, ambitious members of the British

1 Introduction: Some Loose Talk About Gossip 1

2 Gossip’s Bad Reputation 19

3 The Word On the Street: Gossip’s Contributions to

4 Failure to Communicate: Gossip as Institutional Conflict 77

4.3 Institutional Responses and Invisible Gossip 87

5 Rumors Help the Enemy! Gossip in Politics 107

7 Gossip in the Ether: How the Internet Does, and Doesn’t,

8 Conclusion: Schools for Scandal 241

also a persistent theme of relevance, a suggestion that a discipline that is

ltimately, they opened up the elections of officers to APSA, doing away

isconnected pieces together—is apparent in the Gary Hart story. The