Newsweek Profile
Matt Drudge
February 16, 1998, U.S. Edition, p. 78
New Media's Dark Star
By Steven Levy
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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