MATT DRUDGE SHOULD have been the shining star of Internet journalism. He is 
living proof that the Net hypesters are right: armed with little else than a Web site and a work 
ethic, an obscure outsider can steal click-throughs and mind share from Goliaths and even fulfill 
the American Dream, which is, of course, elevating one's moniker into a brand name. This he has 
done.  

     The Drudge Report may be a garret compared to the virtual palaces of Big Media -- it's a 
style-free zone that looks like he's banged his typewriter ribbon directly on the screen -- but as 
his exclusives pile up, he is becoming the king of online scoops, the first real crossover from 
cyberspace to the mainstream. And, indeed, his Dickensian surname is as familiar to media 
junkies as Woodward and, um, Cokie.  

     But instead of being celebrated in a field where mavericks are revered, Drudge is viewed as the antichrist of HTML. Though he has been slapped with a $ 30 million libel suit by a White 
House official, sympathetic voices are harder to find than prime-time phone connections to 
America Online. Even his mere appearance on a "Meet the Press " pundit panel was cited by  
media bigfeet as proof positive of an ethical apocalypse.  

     Is this a case of Old Media raging against a comet collision with New Media that will 
doom the former to the fate of dinosaurs?  

     A left-wing reaction to a Starr-struck Clinton-hater? Neither. The harsh examination of 
Matt Drudge is a healthy process that indicates how readers will cope with a possible explosion 
of journalism in the 21st century.  

     It started with a great idea. Drudge, a nonentity who left his home in the D.C. suburbs for 
a small Hollywood apartment (closest thing to a media job: working in the CBS gift shop), knew 
the Net well enough to figure out how to get movers and shakers to read his work: he gave it 
prime position in a densely packed list of Web links to virtually all the major gossip, 
commentary and media columns available online.  

     In true Web fashion, everything was free. His own dispatches, usually loaded with anti-Clinton scuttlebutt, began to draw readers. AOL circulated the column to its members and paid him a modest stipend. Drudge boasted of himself as a digital Walter Winchell, and was getting press as a plucky loner on the front lines of new media.  

     His defining moment came last summer, when he reported an apparently false charge made by unnamed "top GOP operatives ":  journalist 
-turned-Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal had covered up "a spousal-abuse past. " Drudge published without talking to Blumenthal. It turned out that the "court records " mentioned in the story were nonexistent. Drudge retracted the item, 
but Blumenthal sued anyway.  

     The blunder would have hurt Drudge much worse were it not for the fortuitous emergence of Monica Lewinsky. With some solid sources feeding him (including whoever tipped him off that NEWSWEEK was close to breaking the story), he has made himself a genuine player in the unfolding crisis. Since the scandal has run largely on unrefined fuel -- typically unsourced leaks revealing hearsay evidence from one of the compromised figures in the pathetic pantheon of Kneepadgate -- it is right up Matt Drudge's alley.  

     Now there are certain problems specific to Web journalism, no matter who does it.  Because there's no fixed time to publish, there's pressure to go with stories this minute. This temptation has winged The Wall Street Journal and The Dallas Morning  

     News in recent days, forcing them to retreat from articles perhaps too hastily posted on 
Web sites. So it's no surprise if Drudge is prone to this problem. But there are additional pitfalls 
for one-person, shoestring operations like Drudge's. No editors casting a skeptical eye over one's copy, no in-house counsel sweating over the possibility of lawsuits, no publisher worrying about confrontations with aggrieved sources at a dinner party. A journalist must have a strong ethical barometer to do without these.  

     And there's the pity: Matt Drudge's barometer couldn't detect El Nino. When a source feeds him something smelly, he doesn't pause to sniff -- he publishes. The rationale seems to be that unchecked allegations are news simply because they are alleged.  

     This isn't good enough. On Friday, for instance, Drudge told a Penthouse Forum-like 
story about Clinton, Lewinsky, Dick Morris and Morris's hooker companion. From Drudge's 
sourcing it seems this "supposed sexual episode " came from "investigators, " who allegedly 
heard it from Linda Tripp, who allegedly heard it from Lewinsky. Thus a third hand allegation  
weasels its way into the food chain.  

     Drudge's critics can also find fault in his accepting aid from the so-called Matt Drudge 
Defense Fund, backed by the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which gets 
funding from Richard Scaife, the deep-pocketed "Mr. Big " at the center of Hillary Rodham 
Clinton's so-called right-wing conspiracy. (David Horowitz, who heads the group, says that the  
decision to help Drudge was his own.)  

     So is The Drudge Report a disaster for cyberspace? Not really. As Drudge has become 
more prominent, so has the knowledge that one should not regard his scoops as gospel or 
disregard them totally. As we've learned to do with the tabloids.  

     But the shame of it is that on the strength of his original bright idea, Drudge could have 
done it more carefully -- and gotten some respect with his fame. As it is, cyberspace still awaits 
its first journalistic hero.  
 
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