Wendy Williams is a loud sister, let her people tell it. When she was a girl, her parents had verbal codes for her: “TM” meant “too much,” “TF” was “too fast,” and “TL” was “too loud.” They’d interject during conversations she was having, sometimes with strangers, nudging her to tone it down. “I still talk too loud today,” she wrote in her 2003 autobiography. A bevy of health issues have lessened her public appearances, but back in the day, you could hear, and see, her coming. She stands 5’10”, brandishes a broad smile rimmed by glossy pinks and matte reds, and has a figure she doesn’t mind sharing the origins of. Then there was that unmistakable Jersey accent. Her voice is radio gold, cutting through the more gruff or grating tones other hosts had. Through her various shows, she provided juicy, sometimes salacious scoops on Black celebrity life, earning her a reputation for being another kind of loud. She owned it.
“I know that the show is messy, because I’m messy,” she said to CNN during her television show’s onset in 2009. The Wendy Williams Show eventually climbed to a viewership of 2 million. Ms. Williams was a hit.
Gossiping isn’t a Black thing. Nor is it just an American compulsion. Sharing people’s personal updates with anyone who’ll lend an ear are human obsessions—ones that go way, way back. We know it’s dead wrong to be all up in folks’ Kool-Aid, but the especially bold grab a wooden spoon anyway. “I thought she was outrageous and just kind of that gossipy loud mouth, but there’s something really fascinating about just the way she delivered rumors,” says journalist and author Clover Hope. She was a teenager in New York when Williams was runnin’ Hot 97. “It was like you were talking to your sister or something like that, or just a group of girlfriends. It’s like, Oh, did you hear about so-and-so? There was a familiarity to her.”
There’s always been that stoop sitter who had the hot goss about Miss Lady down the block, or that old head with the debatable stories about the dice-shootin’ high rollers he used to run with. Mmm-hmm. Lemme tell ya sum. Ooo chile. But Williams wasn’t Lady Whistledown or Benita Bertrell. She didn’t hide behind an alias or shift blame. She wanted you to know that she said what she said.
She wasn’t the first to report on celebrities’ shortcomings and goings. “When I was a kid, we used to read fan magazines like Right On or 16 Magazine,” says essayist and former music journalist Michael Gonzales (He profiled Williams for XXL Magazine in 2001.) “Then I kind of graduated from reading that to reading the person who was a big celebrity gossip slash news person; this woman named Rona Barrett. She was on TV, she had her own magazine. I mean, she was a one-woman industry. I remember following her and just to find out what’s going on with Marlon Brando or what’s going on with whoever.”
As far as Black hot topics go, Gonzales says there was an appetite for the semi-scandalous that was satiated by legacy magazines like Jet and Ebony. Jet’s “What People Are Talking About” section was an open velvet rope leading to details on who was dating who, new movies, nightclub happenings and even media layoffs that involved big names. “I mean, it wasn’t like there was whole magazines or radio shows devoted to Black gossip, but there was always some Black gossip put into what people were reading,” he says. He also mentions Flo Anthony, a friend of the Jacksons who was a pioneer of keeping up with the lifestyles of the Black, fly and famous.
The difference between Wendy Williams and all the others? Her focus on hip-hop, and the type of Black woman listeners perceived her to be. Both made way for a subconscious separation between what other elevated gossipers did and how she gave it up.
“I’m sure there’s some sort of bias that happens when you see her and she’s [a loud Black woman]. That’s generally not accepted,” Hope says when I wonder if race contributed to the flack Williams got. “There’s an instant kind of flinching that happens. So for her to be Black-woman-loud and gossiper, that adds a lot of heat.” Though Williams was just adding her spin on an old pastime, some people may have not been able to take her seriously—even when her capability as a broadcaster was obvious. “It’s almost like an instant dash to her credibility, especially if people are looking at someone during that time in media, like Oprah and making that comparison.” It’s arguable that Williams has had more input in what keeps the internet ticking.
“I consider myself the original,” she said to the New York Times in 2019. “I’ve been doing this for years and been vilified. Now everybody’s doing it.”
Philip Lewis, the front page editor of HuffPost, agrees that Williams helped shape social accounts fueled by gossip moonlighting as news. “A lot of these people who are doing this today, whether that’s on TikTok, YouTube or podcasts, they are her sons and daughters, especially if they’re Black,” he says via phone. “Even Charlemagne [Tha God], like Charlemagne worked on Wendy Williams’ show. So there are these people who really do owe [her] their careers. Also, she did shape, for better or for worse, how people consume gossip, like you said, through the news, through the lens of celebrity.”
The mental mingling of bloggers, journalists and media personalities have made it confusing for audiences trying to tell who does what. Some then struggle to define which group operates with clear rules. The terms used to describe all three have made it even more arduous. There’s been a noticeable shift from “story” to “content,” “journalist” to “creator” or “publication” to “platform.”
Lewis believes it contributes to the waterfall of misinformation and disinformation that threatens to engulf the Black community. He finds that the distinction between Joe Blow with a mic and camera and Williams was that she was a trained journalist who decided to bring heat to information bearing. “People trying to replicate it, however, they don’t always have the skills and the talent. She was somebody who went to Northeastern, she’s somebody that majored in communications, minored in journalism. She understood the tenets of journalism. She just decided to do it a different way.”
For readers, listeners and viewers, there’s also a contemporary desire to be quickly entertained by news, as opposed to strictly being informed by it. It’s a transformation that’s been years in the making and one that tends to velcro itself to young people. Truthfully though, it can become a preference for anyone, regardless of age. How many of us have seen our pop-pops and g-mommas in the comment sections?
Twenty years ago, The Los Angeles Times published a feature on the impending flat circle that is news and entertainment. “I think young people — those in their late teens and 20s — are particularly susceptible to these one-sided, half-baked news mcnuggets. Thanks to MTV, and instant messaging and other rapid-fire features of the Internet, most young people today want everything in quick, small bites,” David Shaw wrote. “They get their news — to the extent that they get any — inadvertently, almost by osmosis, absorbing bits of it on various websites or between the radio play of their favorite songs or while clicking the television remote control.”
When news has to have a celebrity slant or come from a lively personality that feels homegirl-ish, or either have a monopoly on what’s being covered, there’s an issue. Williams was a foremother of that expectation of media, with her radio shows and OG gossip site, www.gowendy.com. The people and problems within news that have sprang up since Williams’ heyday aren’t her fault, or just on her, if you must demand accountability. She never flat-out told anybody to Xerox her formula. They saw that her style got her attention, so they gave it a new pair of slacks and did it too. “I think people need to give credit to Wendy for launching a template of what gossip even involves; how you can make it entertaining, while keeping it under the umbrella of gossip and not confusing it with news,” Hope says.
Real talk, Williams was a line crosser. She was homophobic and transphobic. She obsessed over who she believed to be closeted and outed Don Lemon. She aired the news of Method Man’s wife having cancer before the woman had a chance to share the diagnosis with her loved ones. People’s lives were fodder for her bonfire. Her controversy-courting is also a blueprint for the bold black letters atop a photo format that’s become a signifier of problematic, and possibly unfactual, commentary. Certain online spaces, like The Shade Room, have been criticized for the way they cover the LGBTQ+ community and allow their followers to engage in verbal cruelty. Those too are Wendy Williams’ ripples.
“She’s a pioneer for a lot of what we see today insofar as gossip bloggers, bloggers and all these accounts that have popped up,” says Lewis. “They are basically trying to follow in her footsteps, whether they realize it or not. She was somebody who was obviously very controversial. And I think what popularized her with audiences is that she stood in it.”
In Williams’ eyes, she was a woman doing a job that she loved. The apologies weren’t plentiful and she wasn’t torn up over cuss outs from A-listers. In fact, she loved when top dogs would name-drop her. She has a devout fanbase that made her as famous as the people whose lives she inserted herself into. Talking about her in terms of “is” instead of “was” is a tug-of-war— multiple illnesses, including Graves’ Disease, Lymphedema, primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia, have altered her life and she’s been off-air since July 2022 (with a health-related infrequent presence on her talk show in the years prior). Her time as the active, premier Black tea-stirrer seems to have come to a close. She still looms large, in the form of a polarizing Lifetime documentary, the people who ran with her model and the whooping audience members who hung on her every word. She’s no doubt loud and proud about it all.