-Caveat Lector- [Intersting stuff. Personally, I find it hard to dislike this guy. --MS] http://magazines.enews.com/103000/trb103000.html For more commentary by Andrew Sullivan, visit http://www.andrewsullivan.com The New Republic 10.30.00 TRB FROM WASHINGTON Scoop by Andrew Sullivan If you're an American romantic, it's hard to beat the story of Matt Drudge. Paperboy in Takoma Park, Maryland. High school dropout. 7-Eleven shelf stocker for ready cash. Never makes it to college. Moves to California. Spends his days working in the CBS studio gift shop; spends his nights listening to talk radio and police scanners. Picks up advance TV-ratings reports from the trash cans of Hollywood executives, posts them in Internet newsgroups, gets a following, starts his own website: drudgereport.com. Helps almost bring down the president of the United States. Why hasn't Hollywood rushed a biopic into the movie theaters? Beats me. They did it with Watergate, elevating Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to superhero status for parlaying a source's leak into the resignation of Richard Nixon. Woodward and Bernstein, of course, were liberals, and therefore heroic. They were also employees of The Washington Post, anointed sons in an old medium, and so had instant credibility. Watergate was also a different category of scandal than the Monica Lewinsky affair. But still.... Drudge is not only uncelebrated. He's vilified. The Lewinsky mess, whether or not you think it merited impeachment, was a massive story. And Drudge was a key player, making history from his basement apartment with a Radio Shack computer and no journalistic training or institutional support against a White House almost as ruthless as Nixon's. I tip my fedora to him. You can tell the phoniness of the anti-Drudge consensus by its blustering incoherence. Former White House spokesmen Joe Lockhart and Mike McCurry often refused to answer press questions that emanated from rumors circulated by Drudge. It was, they averred, beneath them. Did it ever dawn on them that for almost a year Drudge was telling the truth and the president was telling grade-A, USDA-approved whoppers? You'd think the man who helped break the Lewinsky story would have gained some level of respect in its wake. But no. In the official wisdom of Washington, the hacks who rewrite White House press releases day after day are far more distinguished than the man Bill Clinton once referred to as "Sludge." (Full disclosure: Drudge's site has carried a link to my work for months, along with links to dozens of other writers.) When Drudge's ill-conceived TV show was canned last year, his critics salivated. Frank Rich, a reliable barometer of bien-pensant liberalism, unloaded this bizarre opinion: "Journalistic watchdogs should be overjoyed at their nemesis's ignominious exit from the tube. We should be thrilled that he no longer has the power to terrorize the nation's news cycles with his apocalyptic bulletins." The pooh-bahs of journalism schools were equally dismissive. Marvin Kalb, Harvard's chief press chin-stroker, has called Drudge a "conveyor of gossipy information." Joan Konner, big macher at the Columbia Journalism School, has said Drudge is "by no reasonable measure working in the public interest." Give me a break. You can understand why the White House or Hillary Clinton might be happy to see Drudge take a fall. But fellow journalists? "Thrilled" that the man who was the first to air the Lewinsky story might be silenced? "Overjoyed" that a lone hack with a phone and a modem might be quashed? Here's a brief list of stories Drudge has aired first: the intern, the dress, the cigar, the MSNBC merger, Jack Kemp's vice presidential nomination, Seinfeld's $1 million-per-episode salary, Kathleen Willey's trauma, Princess Diana's death. In recent months, Drudge has pioneered the story of Dick Cheney's openly lesbian daughter and Hillary Clinton's hospitality in the White House for her campaign donors. I don't know why Rich and Konner think airing these stories is not in the public interest, but it seems to me that hypocrisy, law-breaking, and corner-cutting among our political leaders are subjects worth raising. Hasn't Drudge gotten lots of things wrong? Yes, he has. The worst was the vile rumor that White House aide and TNR alum Sidney Blumenthal was a wife-beater. But Drudge was contrite--more contrite than The New York Times was after it virtually convicted Wen Ho Lee of espionage; he withdrew the story and issued an apology within 24 hours. He's gotten other things wrong, too. But his site is transparent and accountable, and it doesn't pretend to be the finished version of the news. I see no problem with different news sources having different levels of reliability. And no one in their right mind thinks they're getting The New York Times when they read Drudge. On the other hand, the difference between Drudge and the "mainstream" media is subtler than the press establishment would like to admit. Drudge, for example, didn't erroneously report as front-page news that the polar ice cap is melting fast (that was the Times), and he didn't agree to pay Richard Jewell a reported $500,000 for all but accusing him of being a terrorist (NBC). He hasn't published self-conscious fabrications, like The Boston Globe or, ahem, The New Republic. He's far more likely to be accurate than the talking heads on television. He does piggyback on others' stories, but he doesn't plagiarize them. His occasional partisan provocations--the obsession with Al Gore's fibs, for example—are not always enlightening, but they have counterparts elsewhere. How else to explain the Times' page-one airing of a nonstory about subliminal rats, planted by the Democrats? I think a large part of the reason for the excoriation of Drudge is the defensiveness of a trade guild beaten at its own game. Many American journalists like the notion that they're not just hacks but rather guardians of our communal truth, a truth so precious it has to be vetted and approved and blessed by the media elite before it is fit for the benighted masses to imbibe. The notion that anyone with a modem and a laptop can be a journalist is truly terrifying to these people. When Drudge homes in on the journalists themselves--exposing their stories before they can, pressuring editors to be as open about their own affairs as they are about others'--panic sets in. After all, this little misanthrope now pulls in far more readers than he did in the Lewinsky era. In numbers of visitors to his site, he rivals large entities like Slate and Salon. In terms of what e-people call "pageviews"—i.e., the number of times repeat visitors actually click on and look at a page on your site—Drudge kicks e-butt: more than Slate and Salon combined and in the same ballpark as washingtonpost.com and abcnews.com. This year alone, according to numbers posted daily on his site, his hits are up almost one-third, and his new, lively, subliterate book, Drudge Manifesto, is on the New York Times best-seller list. The numbers tell you something. If you trust readers to separate quality from dreck (and I trust them far more in this respect than I do the Columbia Journalism Review), Drudge is not just a commercial success but a journalistic one. If he were completely unreliable, readers would turn off and move away. But they haven't--and won't. I'm a Drudge addict myself, a recipient of his constant instant messages--and the better for it. Anyone committed to open journalism--a fallible, haphazard endeavor to find out more things and let more people know about them--should be copying Drudge, not scorning him. Vive la révolution, I say. My fellow hacks have nothing to lose but their pretensions. ANDREW SULLIVAN is a senior editor at TNR. Copyright 2000, The New Republic ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends ================================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
