Drudge at 10: Now He's Fun
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 25, 2005; 6:27 AM
On Sunday morning, April 17, Time magazine sent Matt Drudge an early copy of its controversial cover story on Ann Coulter, which he splashed on his gossipy Web site.
The transaction was a far cry from the morning in 1998 when he used a spiked Newsweek story to tell the world about Monica Lewinsky, sparking a fierce debate over whether he was corrupting the news business.
"For some reason the media elites aren't as hostile to me," Drudge says. "It makes the job easier. In some ways it makes it less controversial."
As he approaches his 10th anniversary as an online clearinghouse for forthcoming news stories, unreleased books, tabloid yarns, Hollywood chatter and unconfirmed -- sometimes bogus -- rumors, Drudge, 38, is now treated more as an amusing diversion than a threat to journalistic integrity. The white-hot debate these days is over the role of bloggers, whom Drudge says dismissively he doesn't bother reading.
Has the quirky kid from Takoma Park become an appendage of the media establishment he once tormented, a '90s relic eclipsed by smarter and more provocative online writers?
Drudge complains about new sites that are "all glib, all mockery." He grumbles about "the hideous pace" of Internet news and says "the big boys" -- the big newspapers whose scoops he used to pilfer -- are "becoming more competitive" with faster online reports. And, he admits, "I probably am taking myself more seriously than 10 years ago."
The Drudge Report is still capable of eye-catching, even outrageous, behavior, such as running only a partially blurred photo of the teenager accusing Michael Jackson of sexual abuse and several pictures of the boy's mother. "These people are marching into court making allegations," Drudge says. "I don't think they should be shielded." But, he adds, "I just see it as a way to get attention, of course, to offer something not being delivered elsewhere."
While Drudge says he zings both political parties -- and that the Bush White House won't deal with him -- the conservative gossip aims far more at liberal targets. In a recent hyperventilation on "The Truth About Hillary," a book by Edward Klein due out this fall, Drudge quoted "a source close to Klein" as saying: "The revelations in it should sink her candidacy." No details, just a blanket prediction.
Drudge also acts as a shadowy entrance ramp to the mainstream highway. During last year's campaign, he billboarded a false rumor that John Kerry was having an affair with a young woman, which was picked by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the Web sites of National Review and the Wall Street Journal, forcing Kerry to deny it and the rest of the press to cover it.
Drudge says that while he "got some facts wrong," the charge was "very valid" because "the media were chasing that story. I know my critics say that's a very sneaky way of having it both ways. I never said it was true." Plus, he says, he carried the woman's denials: "One thing about this medium, it's three seconds to a new headline. You can call that reckless. I call it updating."
He employed the same rationale in trumping up a 1999 story: "WHITE HOUSE HIT WITH NEW DNA TERROR; TEEN TESTED FOR CLINTON PATERNITY." Although the genetic test disproved an Arkansas woman's claim of having carried Bill Clinton's child, Drudge says it was true that the teenage boy was taking the test.
He also claimed that year that Bill and Hillary Clinton were beginning a "trial separation." Earlier, he retracted a phony wife-beating allegation against then-White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, which led to a lawsuit settled years later.
Whatever his mistakes and excesses, Drudge was the first entrepreneur to exploit the Internet's speed in ways we now take for granted. During a phone conversation last week from London, he suddenly realized something was happening in Rome, and within seconds a red siren and headline appeared: "Bells Ringing Signaling Election of a Pope." This was followed moments later by "Ratzinger," then "Benedict," and later a shot of the tabloid headline in Britain's Sun: "From Hitler Youth to . . . PAPA RATZI."
Starting with an e-mailed newsletter in 1995, when he lived in a one-bedroom Hollywood apartment, Drudge rode his Monica-induced fame to a Fox News show (which he later quit) and a weekly radio show (still on nearly 300 stations). And while his lifestyle has changed (he lives in what he calls a Miami Beach "mansion"), his loner status has not.
"I'm in my own little world," Drudge says. He doesn't own a cell phone, doing his reporting by e-mail and instant messaging. And he deflects questions about his personal life, although he told London's Sunday Times he's not gay and once almost got married. "I don't feel like volunteering anything," he says.
Nielsen Net Ratings says his site, which attracts corporate advertisers, draws 3 million unique visitors a month, and Drudge says he had 247 million page views in March. Drudge's biggest traffic day followed Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction. "Why? Because I showed the boob, breaking through the PC crowd," he says.
If Drudge is doing less original writing, as he admits, and news outlets are spoonfeeding him advance, is he just another cog in the publicity machine? "Yeah, I'm being used, for a buzz-hype agenda," he says. "Do I feel like I'm being co-opted? I still decide whether to run it."
What Drudge provides, by constantly trolling for tidbits and titillation, is one man's eccentric take on the news, feverishly updated so that people keep clicking back. "There so much freaking information out there," he says. "There's clutter danger, no doubt about it." He says he's not bored but understands he's no longer a novelty.
"At some point you still become old. People may grow tired of the Drudge sensibility."
Footnote : Drudge later zinged Time by quoting his friend Coulter as saying her cover photo -- in which her legs took up half the page -- was distorted. But Executive Editor Priscilla Painton says Coulter went through the photographer's portfolio in advance: "She has great looks. She has great legs. She has great ankles. All of that was on full display on the cover. Lots of women would kill for that kind of display."
The Detroit Free Press has decided to allow star sportswriter Mitch Albom to resume his column after taking disciplinary action against him and four other.
Albom was suspended after writing about a Final Four basketball game before it happened, which produced a torrent of negative publicity when two players whom Albom reported were at the game did not show up. Albom apologized and the Free Press launched an investigation.
The paper did not name the staffers involved or describe what punishment they or Albom received. Albom's critics predicted he would get off easy because he is a best-selling author, radio host and ESPN commentator -- Publisher Carole Leigh Hutton killed a negative review of Albom's latest book in 2003.
In a letter to readers, Hutton said: "We took into account many factors, including the seriousness of the offense, the importance of our credibility, the history of those involved and Albom's 20 stellar years at the Free Press."
Eric Slater, who was canned by the Los Angeles Times last week over a badly botched assignment, is the first to admit he was guilty of "sloppy reporting. . . . It was the worst story I've written in my life."
But he says the punishment was too harsh and there was no way he made anything up. "I believe the L.A. Times thought I was Jayson Blair," Slater says, referring to the serial fabricator at the New York Times.
In a March 29 piece on fraternity hazing at California State University, Chico, Slater said a pledge at a nearby college died of alcohol poisoning; he did not die but was hospitalized. Slater got Chico's population wrong and quoted the university president, although Slater did not speak to him and was citing previously published interviews.
In dismissing the 11-year veteran, the Times said an editor had gone to Chico and concluded that "the quotations from anonymous sources and from two named sources, a Mike Rodriguez and a Paul Greene, could not be verified."
"I got lazy," Slater says, adding that he conducted the interviews in bars and did not have phone numbers for Rodriguez and Greene. He says he could not prove he was in Chico because he slept 30 miles away on a side trip to pick up a BMW motorcycle. He also says the story "morphed, evolved and devolved" during a torturous editing process but that he takes "full responsibility" for the mistakes.
"Should I have been reprimanded or demoted? Yes," says Slater, who won an award for his coverage of Afghanistan. But he argued the mistakes "didn't warrant my dismissal."
In the political realm, Powell is getting plenty of play in the blogs following news reports that senators have sought his advice on the John Bolton nomination to be U.N. ambassador. Josh Marshall says he's not alone:
"The truth is that Powell is very much not the only Republican foreign policy heavyweight working in private to scuttle Bolton's nomination. But the degree to which he's going public is sort of extraordinary. While giving no comments himself and not explicitly stating he's bad-mouthing Bolton, Powell did authorize his spokesperson to confirm on the record that he has had recent phone conversations with Sens. Chafee and Hagel about Bolton while quite pointedly giving no reason to think much of anything he said was positive."
Joseph Britt at Belgravia Dispatch is, shall we say, not a Colin fan:
"I had wondered when we would hear something about John Bolton from Colin Powell, his former boss.
"How typical of the way Powell is apt to handle a difficult situation and end up helping no one: not Bolton, whose nomination he may have scuttled; not Bush, who has some cause to feel blind-sided; not Lugar and other Foreign Relations Committee Republicans who may have just gone through a week-long controversy for nothing; and finally not himself. Powell plays the good soldier by saying nothing publicly, and can't torpedo Bolton without being immediately fingered for it in the Post. He gets no credit either for public forthrightness about his doubts concerning Bolton or for swallowing those doubts out of loyalty to the administration he just left.
"If I find this conduct exasperating I can imagine how people who actually like John Bolton feel."
Remember the Iraqi elections, almost three months ago? "The protracted delay in forming an Iraqi government is imperiling the confirmation of the designated prime minister, providing a new impetus for the insurgency and fanning renewed suspicion of the U.S. role here, Iraqi and Western observers say," the Los Angeles Times reports. "Doubts are growing that the government, once formed, will have time to complete the constitution-writing process -- its principal task -- by the mid-August deadline."
New York Post columnist John Podhoretz details the GOP's woes--and doesn't blame the media (all that much):
"Republicans and conservatives are beginning to panic a little. Ever since the Terry Schiavo controversy took its unexpected turn against the Right in polls -- I say 'unexpected' because major Democratic politicians acted as though they thought the issue would benefit the GOP when it was taken up in Congress back in February -- Republicans are privately worried that they're losing touch with the American people.
"The president's decision to focus the first months of his second term on Social Security reform seems to have backfired, with the public reacting skeptically and nervously about any change to the national pension system. And the media assault on House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is beginning to pay off, in part because DeLay's undeniable tactical brilliance as a legislator is matched only by his advanced case of foot-in-mouth disease.
"Meanwhile, the president's daring nomination of John Bolton as U.N. ambassador is in danger not because of media bias but because three Republican senators are evidently afraid of voting for someone who is accused (probably falsely) of being mean to his underlings. . . .
"No question about it, the media are on the prowl against the GOP -- but there's something unseemly about the right-wing whining. Media bias isn't worse this year than last, when Republicans somehow managed to win the White House and gain three Senate seats."
Noam Scheiber spotlights one Bolton waiverer:
"John Bolton's nomination to be U.N. ambassador looks like it could be in serious trouble now that Colin Powell is apparently piling-on against him. But I think the big loser in this won't be Bolton so much as Lincoln Chafee. Recall that up until George Voinovich piped up in a Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing on Tuesday, Chafee was all set to vote Bolton's nomination out of committee. Once Voinovich delayed the vote, Chafee offered a bizarrely detached commentary on the situation, saying, 'I don't know if I've ever seen, in a setting like this, a senator changing his mind as a result of what other senators said. . . . The process worked. It's kind of refreshing.' Well, refreshing is one way to put it. Abdicating your responsibility as a U.S. senator is another.
"What Chafee is implying here is that he really wanted to put the kibosh on the Bolton nomination, he just didn't have [the courage] to do it, and he wouldn't have done it had someone else not spoken up. That doesn't sound like an especially principled position to me.
"Now that Voinovich has given him cover, all of a sudden Chafee has turned into Peter Falk. Chafee's spokesman told reporters he is 'less likely right now' to cast his vote for Bolton, and that he 'wants to get to the bottom' of the charges against him. But, of course, Chafee was aware of all of these charges on Tuesday, and yet he still gave every indication (including Chafee's own sense of surprise/relief at Voinovich's intervention) of intending to vote Bolton out of committee.
"The problem for Chafee is, now that the momentum seems to be turning against Bolton (particularly with Powell weighing in), everyone Bolton has ever so much as looked crosswise at is going to come forward with new allegations. That will only make Chafee's initial inclination to vote for Bolton look worse and worse, particularly in Rhode Island, an overwhelmingly Democratic state that overwhelmingly opposes the administration's hawkish foreign policy. Far from get Chafee off the hook, the last minute wavering by George Voinovich could deal a real blow to Chafee's political standing at home, exposing him to be utterly lacking in courage and conviction."
Newsweek's Melinda Henneberger finds some raw feelings in the Vatican press corps:
"Even as they gear up to cover a new pontificate, many reporters say they are feeling an unanticipated sense of personal loss. 'For me it was really hard and really personal,' says Andreas Englisch, a German reporter for the newspaper Bild who has been covering the Vatican for 17 years, since he was 24. 'I was so well-prepared for this moment' journalistically. 'But now that it was here I was so shocked that I had no motivation to write about it. It's been almost like losing my grandfather. I liked him. It was fun to cover him. And now it seems that some kind of period of my life is over.''
"'Marco Politi, who had the John Paul beat for 26 years at the Italian daily La Repubblica, had a similar experience. 'That night he died I was calm, with no special feeling, because we had the deadline and you had to do your job. But the next day, I felt this emptiness and was so disoriented that it was difficult to write.' "
Great little item in The Hill about one author's revenge:
"When Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley panned former Sen. Bob Dole's (R-Kan.) new memoir last week, Dole wasn't about to take it lying down. Yardley suggested that Dole was 'trying to climb aboard the highly lucrative "Greatest Generation" bandwagon' by writing One Soldier's Story, his account of his life from his boyhood in Kansas to his service in World War II and his 'long, hard, courageous recovery' from the terrible wounds he suffered. 'To say that it is a familiar story is understatement,' Yardley wrote. 'During nearly half a century in politics, Dole and his acolytes told it over and over and over again, not so much ennobling Dole as trivializing a very human and very powerful story.'
"Understandably displeased with the scathing review, Dole faxed this acerbic note to Yardley with a copy of the review: 'Some damn fool wrote this piece and attached your name to it.'"
Yardley did point out that he voted for Dole in '96.
Jonah Goldberg puts aside politics to look at a crumbling icon:
"The producers of Sesame Street have decided that Cookie Monster is gay.
"Hold the phone. I'm kidding. But try to hold onto your reaction for a moment because what they've really done to Cookie Monster is worse, they've taken away his reason for being."
He blames "the well-meaning social engineers of PBS. After three decades, they've announced he's not a Cookie Monster at all. In the interests of teaching kids not to be gluttons, CTW has transformed Cookie Monster into just another monster who happens to like cookies. His trademark song, 'C is for Cookie' has been changed to 'A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food.' And this is a complete and total reversal of Cookie Monster's ontology, his telos, his raison d'etre, his essential Cookie-Monster-ness.
"If the Cookie Monster is no longer a cookie monster, what is he?"
A question we would all do well to ponder this morning. |
