Over on Slate, Timothy Noah has a short but good article on one of Jack Paar's more dubious achievements: He helped finish off the career of the gossip-monger (and occasional tyrant-in-print) Walter Winchell.
In the essay, Noah makes reference to an anti-Winchell book published by Lyle Stuart. Stuart later became a wealthy (but still controversial) publisher with an empire that was financed in part by his profits from a libel suit against Winchell. At the time he published the book Noah mentions, his other line of work was serving as Business Manager for Bill Gaines at EC Comics. One of the many reasons EC was targeted by law enforcement officials and distributors was that Winchell was using his considerable influence to get them to go after Stuart. New York Police even once raided the EC offices, apparently at the incitement of Winchell, and arrested Stuart for selling what they termed pornography but what we would term great horror comics. (The reason they arrested Stuart and not Gaines was that Stuart, being of stronger stuff than Gaines, deliberately took the heat…a very heroic gesture. The case was soon thrown out of court.)
Paar had other feuds but the one with Winchell seems to have been the only one that proved fatal to his opponent. As Noah points out, Winchell was already in decline but Paar's evisceration of the man was much-welcomed within the show business community. And it was as good a piece of evidence as any that television had outpowered the power of the press.