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most media students today, but it was a pivotal event that shaped the direction of journalism for decades to come. It was the trial of
Confidential.

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the war against
confidential
    Spectators spilled into the corridor of Los Angeles’s Hall of Justice those muggy days in the summer of 1957. Some wore their fanciest evening clothes, some wore short shorts or tight toreador pants, some even brought ballet or tap shoes and danced; they all hoped to catch the eye of the guard who had the power to grant them one of the few seats that had been set aside for the public. Court clerks had searched for hours trying to find a room big enough to accommodate the stars, defendants and witnesses, reporters and photographers, and hundreds of curious onlookers who crowded into the eighth floor of the Hall of Justice, craning their necks, hoping to catch a glimpse of the unfolding drama of America’s favorite spectator sport: celebrity scandals. In its relatively short history, Hollywood had survived scores of sensational cases, but inside the packed green-and-gold filigreed courtroom that summer, scandal itself was on trial.
Confidential
—the magazine that had shocked and riveted America with tales of celebrity excesses and debauchery—had been indicted by the California Attorney General’s office on charges of “conspiracy to publish criminally libelous, obscene and otherwise objectionable material.”
    “We will convict the filth peddlers that smear the names of Hollywood,” vowed California Attorney General Edmund “Pat” Brown. The movie industry had been good to Brown and to California; it had endowed the state with millions of dollars in business and international fame. The film world is built on images and appearances, on fantasy and facades;
Confidential
made its money destroying those images, said Brown, “dragging people’s names through the dirt and mire of gossip.” Brown was a rising political star, a popular prosecutor who was planning to run for governor of California. He had already threatened to prosecute newsstand dealers who sold
Confidential,
effectively banning the magazine in California. Now Brown was going to finish the job, promising to “end
Confidential’s
reign of terror.”
    Celebrities had long endured—even embraced—gossip. The cleverly placed tidbit about a star’s lavish lifestyle could actually help his career—or help keep a wayward actor in line. For years, celebrities and studio publicity departments worked with columnists like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons—planting items that were often concocted—about romances and marriages, and feuds and fights over film roles. The studios and stars controlled that sort of press; they used the gossip columnists as high-powered publicity machines. Despite their reputation for nastiness, the old-line gossip columnists were usually most vicious when it came to fighting with each other. Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky was so certain that rival Louella Parsons got him fired from the
Los Angeles Examiner
because she didn’t want the competition in her most valued outlet, that one day he retaliated by sinking his teeth into her arm. The gossip business had gotten very competitive.
    The formula pioneered by Walter Winchell in the 1920s was so successful that by the 1940s gossip columnists were among the best read and most influential journalists in the country. Most newspapers carried several gossip columns; by the 1950s, there were more than four hundred full-time reporters covering Hollywood. Show business columns with announcements of romances and casting news like Hedda’s and Louella’s were becoming old hat. So were the New York columns like Walter Winchell’s that chronicled Cafe Society and the Broadway scene. America washungry for juicier scandals. In 1952 a flamboyant publisher named Robert Harrison gave it to them.
    Harrison was intrigued by how America was spellbound in the early 1950s by the Kefauver hearings—the