Five Minutes With: Richard Leiby

By Elana Berkowitz, Campus Progress

Before chronicling cocktail parties and the foibles of the powerful and wealthy, Richard Leiby’s distinguished 25-year career as a journalist included reporting from war zones and winning an award from the National Association of Black Journalists for a profile on a Washington, D.C. youth who was sentenced to 19.6 years in prison for his first drug offense. After finding out about the available position as the Washington Post’s “Reliable Source” gossip columnist while reporting from Kuwait, Leiby decided to take the plunge and become ‘Gossip Man.’ Not exactly a party animal, some considered him an odd choice for the job – Leiby himself included – but he gamely chronicled the D.C. social scene with humor. After announcing that he will be leaving the gossip column to return to his roots as a longer-form journalist, Leiby talked with Campus Progress about his journalistic career path, canoodling, D.C. sex scandals, and the pitfalls of being a Washington intern.

CP: I am used to the gossip on Page Six of the New York Post. “The Reliable Source” definitely has a different feel. Even the name itself sort of sounds like the antithesis of Paris Hilton. How does D.C. gossip compare to New York or other big cities?

RL: I always point out that we appear on page 3 of the Washington Post Style section, which is half of page 6. So you’re only getting half of the actual gossip content that you would in a New York tabloid. Political content is a current that runs through everything in Washington. So our gossip tends not to be overwhelmingly sexy.

CP: So how do you go about making Washington, D.C. sexy?

RL: Well, there was a junior level sex scandal back in the summer involving a blogger named Washingtonienne who worked in a Senate office and wrote about her sexual encounters with some six separate men. I had the distinct happiness of interviewing Jessica Cutler, the blog’s author, for the first time on the record with her real name being used. But I think that on the Monica Lewinsky scale of scandal, where Monica and Clinton is a ten, this was probably about a two. And it didn’t even get close to some of the previous congressional scandals involving mistresses or famous strippers. So it was a pretty dry run overall for me.

CP: Were there stories you didn’t want to touch or that were out-of-bounds for you?

RL: I didn’t deal with any outing or any outing stories. We are forbidden by policy to do blind items that would, for example, suggest that a married Congressman was seen canoodling with a young blonde at a local nightclub. That’s against policy. We adhere strictly to a two source rule or direct observation or documentation. This tends to narrow the field on what constitutes gossip. It has always been a high wire act at the Post. I got to the point of telling readers that the Washington Post does not have a gossip column. We want to transubstantiate and fumigate gossip until it meets Post standards for consumption.

CP: I never hear people speak the word canoodling but yet it always shows up in gossip columns. It doesn’t really seem to mean much. Do you use it?

RL: I’d have to do a Nexis search to see if I’ve even used it. What word would you use?

CP: ‘Making out’ comes to mind though I don’t think it’s quite the same.

RL: I’m not sure canoodling suggests making out, which would suggest tonsil hockey. I think it’s more of a spooning, and I don’t mean spooning in the bed sense. I’ll have to look that up. But I guarantee you, I won’t use that word in my next incarnation as a writer.

(Typing.) Wait, I looked it up. If two people canoodle, they kiss and hold each other in a sexual way. I stand corrected. I’m looking on the Internet, my favorite resource. If it’s on Google, it’s good enough for me. Kidding.

CP: How did you go from covering war in Iraq to cocktail parties in D.C.? Seems like quite a change of pace.

RL: Two years ago, I was in Kuwait when I found out from David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist who covers foreign events, that Lloyd Grove, the previous occupant of the gossip column, was leaving. David suggested to me that I would be good for the job. I looked at him like he was crazy because I had never thought about it. He said, well, you ought to think about it because at some point everyone should be a columnist. I got back from Iraq and started editing the Style section while the search was on and I decided, well, maybe this would be an interesting way to light a fire and continue some of the momentum I had while being in the war zone. Little did I realize that it would be harder to work in the D.C. social circuit than in Baghdad. It is a constant scramble for material here, which required about four nights out a week and ten hours a day on the phone. I report five stories a day, and in a war zone, you could focus on one at a time and write maybe three a week.

CP: What is the media food chain like in Washington? What is the role of a gossip column here?

RL: Gossip is extremely well read; it is even more high profile than I thought it would be. But it’s also a difficult position; people want you to write about them and their events but don’t want you to say anything negative. I think gossip is certainly low on the reading list of administration people or serious types, bureaucratic types, but it was very exciting for me to know people were reading my columns, which amounted to just ephemera, and religious following my Internet chats, which bordered on the absurd. I mean for God sakes, they have me in a cape. Last week I actually appeared on the Washington Post website in a cape as ‘Gossip Man.’

CP: Most of our readers don’t live in Washington, though many may be coming here as interns for the first time. How would you describe the D.C. lifestyle for them?

RL: The first thing I suggest is that you can actually never pay for a meal in Washington if you learn the ins and outs of attending receptions and cocktail parties. There are interns that actually eat that way the entire summer. There is always some sort of event, whether it’s National Pork Day on the Hill – and I mean pork, the other white meat, not pork the larding of an appropriation bill – or Orange County Orange Juice Day or whatever. There are events all the time so you can eat. I was never a Hill rat so I don’t know all the ins and outs. On a cautionary note, in most Senate and House offices there are some lecherous types eagerly awaiting the new crew of fresh faced and possibly naïve young women who will descend upon the Hill hoping to make connections. Please do not end up like Jessica Cutler. She is a cautionary tale even though she did end up with a six-figure book deal for her sexploits. So you have to balance that against being considered, as she put it, just another slut on the Hill.

CP: How did you come to be a journalist in the first place?

RL: I pretty much decided I wanted to be a journalist when I was 17 and got my first $15 check from writing freelance at that age. So I knew if someone would pay me to write that was probably a good thing. And I went to Temple University for journalism and edited the school newspaper there and got internships at the Pittsburgh Press. Got hired by that paper. Got fired by that paper. Went to Florida and ended up finding work there pretty quickly and stayed there for a number of years and moved in the ‘80s to Minnesota and I was hired by the Post in 1991. I never had an internship here and I wasn’t Ivy League, I was just sort of determined to put enough time in the salt mines until I was at a place where I thought the journalism was top notch. After college it took 13 years to get here. Sometimes finding the right job can be a journey.

CP: What other kinds of stories are you looking forward to covering after you leave the gossip column?

RL: I never want to write about another Washington social event again. I would like to write profiles of significant people on the national scene that are connected with foreign policy or administration policy and how they position America in the bigger world. I also like to write about average people, whose lives intersect with government usually for the worse. I wouldn’t mind going back to some form of investigative reporting.

CP: So you are not looking to leave Washington?

RL: It is the capitol of the free world. If I am covering terrorism or national security, which I will probably do more of, it’s the growth industry for the foreseeable future and this is the place to be. You can’t go wrong covering war in terms of always having something to cover.