Confidential (magazine) - Journalistic Techniques

Journalistic Techniques

Robert Harrison is said to have come up with the idea for Confidential while watching the senate hearings on organized crime conducted by Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver in the early 1950s. The popular hearings had higher ratings than many television shows because they exposed the underworld of the USA, with mafia bosses who had colourful nicknames, lavish lifestyles and private lives full of scandalous details. Harrison knew he couldn’t target the mob without personal protection, and instead turned to the world of movies. Hollywood was a similar environment that seemed to live by its own laws, and was known for the same glamorous lifestyles filled with promiscuity and temptations.

To gather material for his new magazine, Harrison established an organization called Hollywood Research Inc. in Los Angeles, operated by his niece Marjorie Meade, which has been described as "a spy network of hack journalists, private investigators, waiters, call girls, and 75-dollars-a-week starlets who were on the rosters of the major studios and were going nowhere except to bed with anyone who might boost their careers." These characters tended to know what the movie stars did in their spare time and thus got a chance of making some money by informing Confidential.

Since his earlier time in the newspaper business in New York, Harrison had contact with the famous gossip columnist Walter Winchell. In the first Confidential issue Winchell was honoured with a submissive article. Winchell then went on to secretly collaborate with Confidential, passing on rumours that were unprintable in the serious press and giving publicity to the new magazine in his nation-wide, syndicated column.

New techniques also contributed to the development of gossip magazines. Surveillance equipment had become smaller so that cameras and listening devices could be installed without an immediate risk of discovery.

Confidential's technique for the writing of an article was also innovative. In 1955 Time described the journalistic approach: "By sprinkling grains of fact into a cheesecake of innuendo, detraction and plain smut, Confidential creates the illusion of reporting the 'lowdown' on celebrities. Its standard method: dig up one sensational ‘fact’ and embroider it for 1,500 to 2,000 words. If the subject thinks of suing, he may quickly realize that the fact is true, even if the embroidery is not. The magazine specializes in finding one black mark in a subject's distant past, and hammering him with it..."