English Version | Knowledge is power

Or, as Cersei Lannister corrects, in Game of Thrones, “power is power”. No matter how much we want to kneel at the feet of fiction's most ruthless queen, we can’t agree with her in this case. Knowledge is, indeed, power, especially when it travels from mouth to mouth with a touch of doubt. 

October 30th 1938, New York. Clocks marked 8pm and the city was starting to light up and welcome nighttime. Somewhere in one of the dots of light in one of the many skyscrapers up in the cosmopolitan skyline, the CBS radio station was getting ready for another nightly broadcast. As was usual, millions of families across the United States sat down together to listen to the daily news. But, instead of updates about the economic crisis that was devastating the country or Europe’s political state, the North American population was surprised with the announcement of an alien attack. The Martians had landed in New Jersey and, despite the efforts of the police force, the aliens were gaining territory, not in a peaceful way. The listeners witnessed (via audio) the battles between opponents (aliens and humans) and the destruction caused by the attack, thanks to the supposed correspondents on the scene, who, through impressive sound effects, made people believe the conflict was, in fact, happening. It didn’t take more than 30 minutes for chaos to settle in: amongst thousands of phone calls, the station received one from a mayor of a town in the Midwest who demanded an explanation. The broadcast had led crowds to the street in despair, looking for salvation. That was when the updates stopped and an announcement was made: “You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in an original dramatization of The War of The Worlds by H.G. Wells”. The message could not have come at a worse time. After having “heard” whole cities being destroyed by laser beams and giant monsters, the 12 million listeners weren’t even paying attention anymore. You didn’t even need to turn on the radio to know what was going on - all that was needed was to go outside and hear the news from the mouths of any desperate person running with no destination. What came next was a night of chaos: television, radio stations and newspapers were flooded with calls, either looking for answers or for comfort. It was only on the next day that the media confirmed that, in reality, there was no alien invasion - the incident was a product of rumours spread by those who did not pay attention to the announcement made in the beginning and middle of the broadcast, and didn’t waste time sharing the panic.

The radio drama narrated by the future director of Citizen Kane (1941) and The Lady of Shanghai (1947) ended up not causing too much damage and yet it is the perfect example of what a good tale can do. Even though this was just gossip on test-drive, it was a clear predecessor of the destructive power of gossip. There was a whole historical period to which we can look today through this ironic lens that makes us see the Cold War as the result of very well orchestrated rumors. After World War II - the practical consequences of which only ended in 1991 with the demise of the Soviet Union - the two opposing nations (USSR and the United States of America) proved to be extraordinarily skilled in the art of creating a good rumor. The fact is that the constant tension between the two countries over more than four decades had very real impacts, such as the escalation of war conflicts, for example in Vietnam or in the present-day Czech Republic. However, there was something very unconventional about this "war" - which was not a war at all, at least not in the sense we usually imagine it. There was no battlefield, no thousands of men fighting each other. What there was was a series of threats, of carefully planned moves to make the opponent withdraw and kneel before the supremacy of the other. In this struggle for popularity, gossip was a key tool - it was no accident that the United States did everything in its power to land on the moon in July 1969. After the USSR sent the first human into space, it was rumored that the Russians were focused on space missions rather than interplanetary ones, leaving the door open for the Americans to claim that victory. It was on this record of espionage, this game of spoiled telephone, that the two nations coexisted for years on end, with catastrophic consequences for their inhabitants. And for the dynamics of the rest of the world…

The famous "I've heard" can make anyone jump to conclusions - in school days, I was automatically annoyed when I realized that I had not been invited to another classmate's birthday party, even if I had gotten the information through muffled whispers in the playground. In this case, much thanks to the constraints of the age of innocence, the worst possible scenario was something like a silly argument that was easily cleared up. However, when what is at stake is the political relationship between two of the most powerful countries on the planet, it's a different matter. In 1962 John F. Kennedy was notified of the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuban territory - close enough to reach the United States in a matter of minutes. This is how the infamous Cuban missile crisis began, in which, for about a month, the possibility of an armed conflict between the US and the USSR became more real than ever, thanks to the power of a (good) rumor, which guaranteed that the Soviets were about to attack. Today we can look back to that time and see more clearly that these subliminal messages were unlikely to turn into facts, since, however much the political leaders might suffer from SDE (small dick energy, or small penis syndrome), the potential of mass destruction was clear. For both sides, everywhere.

A good rumor has the potential to do a lot of damage. If the incident of the dramatization of The War of the Worlds and many of the situations experienced during the Cold War are examples of how gossip can gain monumental proportions, the same is true on a more individual scale. Nor are we going to get into the trend of fabricating lies and using them to bully children, because this is a phenomenon that has more serious consequences than mere rumors. Of course, when it comes to individual contexts, malice always has a role to play. In a world where celebrities are first and foremost public figures whose lives can be scrutinized mercilessly, any uncertainty is enough to become gossip, and quality gossip has the ability to do a lot of damage. Khlóe Kardashian is a good example when it comes to being a tabloid star: the younger sister of Kim and Kourtney may not even be Robert Kardashian's daughter. According to some keen observers, Khlóe lacks physical similarities to her sisters, which can only mean that they do not share the same parentage. The rumor circulating the Internet suggests that she is the fruit of an extramarital affair by Kris Jenner. And with whom? With O.J. Simpson, curiously one of Robert Kardashian's best friends (supposed "physical resemblances" between one of the former athlete's daughters and Khlóe are the main foundation of this theory). Although denied by both parties, the rumor continues to circulate and there are still many who believe it, despite the lack of empirical evidence. Since we have entered the celebrity world, we cannot fail to mention the unbelievable rumor about Lea Michele. Rumor has it that the Glee actress suffers from a peculiar disability these days: she can neither read nor write. Skimming the confines of cyberspace, one realizes that this idea comes from an episode of a podcast broadcast in 2017, in which the hosts note that despite being critiqued in Naya Rivera's autobiography, Michele never got around to revealing her side of the story. The only possible explanation is that the actress never even got to look through the book, because she can't read - even though she graduated from high school and was accepted into college. This rumor has spread so widely that there are hundreds of articles analyzing the theory, which Michele herself has already commented on, and denied. In the same way that lives are ruined, a rumor also has the power to create them. Take the case of Anna Delvey (originally Anna Sorokin), who used the potential of gossip to her advantage to reinvent herself as a socialite, influencer, and German heiress. Thanks to a series of (more or less) well-thought-out lies, Anna reached the highest tiers of the New York social pyramid. That is, of course, until it was discovered that the rumors about Delvey were just that, rumors, causing the beginning of the end of her career as a public figure.

Donald Trump's controversial lawyer Rudy Giuliani often says that "truth is relative", and in fact it is easy to convince thousands of people that a rumor is more than a rumor. After all, what is the worst that can happen?

Translated from the original on The Gossip Issue of Vogue Portugal.Full credits and stories on the print issue.