Wow, man... who put the sand in your vag today?
Anyway, let me explain to you the concept behind a "rumors" column, something that has existed for centuries in journalism. While covering their beat, reporters often hear a lot of off-the-record inside chatter. If you can't get a source to go on record, or the source himself is just relating hearsay, you can't actually "break" it as news, and most often, the tidbits aren't really worth putting time and effort into pursuing.
Thus, you have the occasional "rumors" column, in which the paper's reporters dump a bunch of the random stuff they've heard during the course of reporting on other stories, stuff that either doesn't bare further investigation, or which they don't believe will be verifiable. So in a way, you're dead on when you call it "garbage"... it's basically the writers' dumping ground for unused or dead stories.
On the other hand, you're wrong to call it "speculation," at least on PFW's part. If they put it in a "whispers" column, it's because they've heard something from someone. How reliable that source is and the extent to which that source knows what he/she is talking about, though, is indeterminate, so no, this isn't hard news, and doesn't really tell us much, but it's not pure speculation like it would be when a columnist simply shares a hunch.
