PEEPERS, PUNDITS, AND PEGLER
Meyer, Ernest L.
Peepers, Pundits, And Pegler By ERNEST L. MEYER SPEAKING broadly, mankind is a race of peepers and leaners. The peepers have an inordinate interest in the personal didos, the love life, and the...
...Howell, Soskin, $2.50...
...Fisher wields his surgical knife with happy abandon, let the gore splash where it may...
...And they find what they need in the score of wise men who daily, via radio and press, ladle out the soup of comfort to the perplexed...
...Search of the names of those attending Knox's funeral fails to reveal that of Pegler...
...Broun was taken on by the New York Post...
...He has really done splendid work in fighting anti-Semitism and other current excrescences...
...Fisher selects Dorothy Thompson, who, because some 8,000,000 readers lean on her daily, reaps an annual income of around $100,000...
...The leaners are average men and women who stand confounded amid the welter of the world's complexities...
...Fisher sets down precisely the fabulous incomes and vast reader following of such pundits and peepers as Dorothy Thompson, Walter Lippmann, Walter Winchell, Westbrook Pegler, Drew Pearson, Leonard Lyons, Sam Grafton, and Ernie Pyle...
...Pegler had the effrontery to attend the funeral services...
...Bates of the crossroads store was safely delivered of twins...
...It is because of the unnumbered millions of peepers and leaners among us that radio commentating and newspaper columning has become such a tremendously lucrative Big Business...
...Her energetic explorations have made her the most celebrated oracle of her sex in the columnar big leagues...
...She is, moreover, Mr...
...The editorial ended: "Good-by, Mr...
...The second item goes back only a short time ago...
...Miss Thompson, he reports, "has directed her monitorial attention to the whole world, which she evidently regards as an obtuse and disorderly place which suffers largely because it won't listen to Dorothy Thompson...
...Pegler wove this fantastic charge into another column...
...He sometimes copes with world problems, while his mental baggage equals that of a backwoods drummer of canned vitriol...
...Winchell rose to fame by his cocksure assumption that "I am keyholier than thou...
...Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, publisher of the Daily News of Chicago, was ill...
...In her prophecies she has been as often wrong as right...
...He has good and glowing things to say about Raymond Clapper and Ernie Pyle and some of the others...
...The peepers among us are matched in number by the leaners...
...At that time Heywood Broun, ablest and bravest columnist of them all, had been fired by the Scripps-Howard syndicate...
...But his following and reputation rest on his pioneering ability as a peeper...
...His circulation has risen with his blood pressure...
...The very next day Secretary Knox died...
...Knox's Daily News building...
...On his sickbed—he was dying of pneumonia...
...Fisher estimates, makes upward of $400,000 annually by his writing and broadcasting...
...They feel lost and weak in the hurricane of great events, the thunder of clashing isms...
...Fisher's volume, one of them because it occurred too recently...
...Of late years, Winchell has crashed into the cerebellar and crusading field...
...Peeping On The Peepers Tremendous national and international problems bother them...
...So Knox's sole motive in suppressing Pegler's columns denouncing Marshall Field was because Knox didn't want to lose a good tenant...
...The simple rural recipe is precisely the recipe employed by the writers of the widely syndicated gossip columns, save that they report on the capering of men and women nationally known, and thus put bigger eggs into their daily basket of banalities...
...When the feud was carried, ad nauseum, into Pegler's column in the Daily News, the News quit printing it, for the very sane reason that it did not wish to become involved in a local newspaper brawl...
...It also printed an editorial revealing the facts of the case, announcing that Pegler's column would no longer appear in the News...
...It is called, of course, "On the Record...
...The leaners are only a latter-day accretion to the flock of the faithful...
...He is neither peeper nor pundit, though he professes the erudition of the latter...
...Even today the "personal" items of country weeklies hold the widest reader interest, for it fascinates Mrs...
...One of Pegler's many feuds is with Marshall Field, publisher of the Chicago Sun...
...And while Broun was nearing death Westbrook Pegler, colleague .for years on the World-Telegram, published two columns of lies and viciousness about Heywood Broun...
...Farmer Slocum to learn that Mrs...
...He wrote only one column for the Post...
...Fisher dissects is Walter Winchell, who, Mr...
...Mr...
...The peepers swarmed to him...
...it goes back to the back-fence gossip of small and early settlements, and its sales value won recognition in the chit-chat departments of some of our very first newspapers...
...But Pegler's venom saw a different motivation...
...Fisher remarks aptly, "cherish his cholers...
...The Daily News printed it...
...Unhappily the force of this statement is lessened by the fact that on the very same page Mr...
...Can it be that an arrow of decency has at last penetrated Pegler's hide...
...His readers," Mr...
...Pegler Loses A Client There are a couple of items about Pegler which are not included in Mr...
...The peepers have an inordinate interest in the personal didos, the love life, and the income of their neighbors...
...Broun died...
...Just how financially rewarding the profession of peeping and punditing has become you will begin to grasp if you read a book just published: The Columnists, A Surgical Survey, by Charles Fisher...
...Fisher says that Miss Thompson's column is called "Off the Record...
...He has, however, very few bouquets for West-brook Pegler, that spluttering master of invective who was weaned on a bottle of bile...
...This keyhole urge is primitive...
...She is the Bloomer Girl of the trade...
...Fisher declares, "inaccurate in names...
...The first item goes back five years...
...Knox's paper had been printing Pegler's column...
...Shrewdest and most financially successful of all the columnists Mr...
...Fisher's useful volume is by no means all malice...
...Pegler belongs in a separate category...
...The Chicago Sun had leased quarters in Mr...
...He interlards his gossip about the great and near-great with valorous essays on the skulduggery of spies and sneaks in our midst and is currently embroiled with reactionary cotton-state Congressmen...
...As a type of super-pundit, Mr...
...They feel the need of leaning on something or someone for moral and mental stability...
Vol. 8 • May 1944 • No. 20
