Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip Makes Timely Debut on PBS
Judith Trojan

Writer/producer/director Ben Loeterman masterfully incorporates a fascinating collection of vintage archival footage, audio and photos (the Lindbergh, American Nazi party and Josephine Baker segments are especially gripping). Sharply focused anecdotes from period historians (most especially Winchell biographer Neal Gabler); spot-on Winchell reenactments voiced by actor Stanley Tucci; and unobtrusive voice over narration by Whoopi Goldberg round out this outstanding 90-minute documentary that will grab you from its 1952 “What’s My Line” opener and never let you go. Walter Winchell: the Power of Gossip is one of the best films in THIRTEEN’s American Masters’ series for WNET to come along in recent memory. Read full review

Walter Winchell: He Snooped to Conquer
Nicholas Gilmore, The Saturday Evening Post

If he is remembered, the journalist and radio man Walter Winchell evokes a few different types of memories. Baby boomers might recall the narrator of the 1959 series The Untouchables. Their children might have caught the HBO biopic Winchell that starred Stanley Tucci as the fedora-donning gossip columnist. Younger people likely won’t recognize the name Walter Winchell at all. But consider this: every time you guiltily click on a link promising a juicy scoop on a washed-up actor, Winchell is somewhere, smiling. Read full review

Walter Winchell’s Ghost Still Haunts a Media Biz That Divides America
Lloyd Grove, Daily Beast

Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip, an hourlong documentary airing at 9 p.m. Tuesday (Oct. 20) on PBS stations, explores how he pioneered an unholy fusion of journalism, entertainment and political posturing—call it ideological infotainment—that has become the essential feature and business model of today’s media industry. Thus, the film argues, we can credit Winchell with the template by which Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow, John Oliver and Alex Jones, among many others, have managed to insinuate themselves into various lobes of our disconnected national consciousness. Read full review

Doc Talk: Gossip monger, peace protectors, women on the march, unshod walker
Peter Keough, Boston Globe

The age of entertainment-driven politics in which an actor or a reality-TV show host can be president had its origins with a popular newspaper columnist in the 1930s. Such is the premise of Ben Loeterman’s PBS “American Masters” documentary, “Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip.” He makes a strong argument, showing the foreboding similarities between Winchell’s success and our current politics. Read full review

How Walter Winchell created this mess we’re in
PJ Grisar, Forward

“He should be an important thing to all people, which is the one thing he didn’t end up being — important or remembered,” said Ben Loeterman, director of “The Power of Gossip.” Yet while that was true on a personal level — Winchell became obscure and outmoded in his final days — we can’t shake the atmosphere he left behind.

Loeterman believes that the now-porous boundaries between news and entertainment and political power and journalism all trace back to Winchell’s penchant for salaciousness. We now see his habit for celebrity scandal in the grocery store checkout tabloids, hear his quick-tempo cadence on talk radio and receive his broadsides and distortions on cable news and even from the White House. Read full interview

‘Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip’ Review: Tuned Into Power
Dorothy Rabinowitz, The Wall Street Journal

Walter Winchell (1897-1972), who grew up in poverty in East Harlem, began his working life as a boy hoofer in Vaudeville. Then, having learned to merchandise gossip, he got a regular spot in a newspaper—the New York Evening Graphic, where he began working in 1924. This “American Masters” film provides impressive period detail—some of the most fascinating of which concerns the newspapers of the times. Read full review

‘American Masters’ recalls the power of columnist Walter Winchell
Jay Bobbin, Gracenote

“Walter Winchell was the highest-paid, most-read, most-listened-to person, and he died alone and in obscurity,” Loeterman reflects. “I don’t think ‘American Masters’ has ever done a master S.O.B. before, but he was one.” Read full review

Before TMZ and Page Six, America Turned to Walter Winchell for Gossip
Glenn Garvin, Reason

The broadcaster-columnist Winchell is little-remembered these days, but he was very much a man of our time. Gossip as news, news as entertainment, fake news, tabloid news—as PBS’ American Masters episode Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip recounts, Winchell was present at the creation of it all. He had a radar fix on the lurid and the tawdry and an awesome disregard for anything that smacked of professionalism or integrity—“as if this or that newspaper gives a continental about ethics, as they are so amusingly called.” Read full review

The Legacy of ‘Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip’
David Hinckley, TV Worth Watching

Like many of today's media personalities, Winchell made himself famous by chronicling and often editorializing on the fame of others. While it doesn't sound like he had a terribly satisfying life beyond that, it also sounds like maybe he understood the tradeoff and accepted it.

He didn't influence history quite as much as Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But we see some of his legacies every day. Read full review

PBS Documentary on Walter Winchell Shows What Messed Up the Media
Reuben Baron, JewishBoston

Where did the era of hyper-partisan news, clickbait journalism and punditry-as-entertainment begin? “Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip,” an informative new PBS American Masters documentary premiering Oct. 20, traces the origins of our current media landscape to one particular volatile tabloid columnist and radio personality. You might not have heard of Walter Winchell, but from his heyday in the 1930s up through his dramatic fall from grace in the ‘50s, he commanded an audience of millions and could destroy careers with his words. Read full review

New PBS Documentary on New York Gossip Columnist Walter Winchell
Justin Wu, Untapped New York

A new American Masters documentary Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip traces the life and career of Walter Winchell, an American journalist, columnist, radio news commentator and television host who invented the fast-paced, gossip driven, politically charged media culture with massive audience and influence in the U.S. from 1930s to 1950s. He was said to be America’s most feared and admired man at the time and had the power to make or break careers. Directed by Ben Loeterman and presented by PBS, the documentary tapped Stanley Tucci as the voice of Winchell and Whoopi Goldberg as the narrator and utilizes recordings and digitized collection of Winchell’s work to reconstruct the life of a pioneer in the field of journalism. Read full review

Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip
Sheldon Kirshner, The Times of Israel

“Winchell is the architect of modern American media,” says his biographer, Neal Gabler. “He turned journalism into a form of entertainment.” Ben Loeterman’s absorbing biopic, American Masters — Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip, will be broadcast by the PBS network on Tuesday, October 20 at 9 p.m. (check local listings). It is narrated by Whoopi Goldberg. Winchell’s breathless newspaper columns and broadcast scripts are read by Stanley Tucci.
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