OT
The scandal-monger who unearthed Monica Lewinsky is an obsessive recluse - with a TV show. Charles Laurence meets him
<Picture: Matt Drudge>ON the ninth floor of a shabby apartment block in Los Angeles, a crazed figure in boxer shorts and a Panama hat hunches over his computer. Each night, through the small hours, he taps out the latest additions to the Drudge Report, the Internet scandal sheet that journalists and libel lawyers love to hate.
Matt Drudge's web site acquired a reputation a year ago for purveying hot Hollywood gossip and titbits about the seemingly endless succession of scandals in Washington.
Journalists began to take notice when the Report managed to announce the death of the Princess of Wales seven minutes before the mighty television network CNN. Then, on January 14 this year, Drudge broadcast the news of President Clinton's escapades with intern Monica Lewinsky. For the first time, a pioneer on the wilder fringes of the media had beaten established newspapers and broadcasters to one of the stories of the year.
The Drudge Report now has seven million hits a month and 100,000 e-mail subscribers. Many of these are journalists and Washington insiders who cannot resist reading what Drudge has written, even though they will almost certainly dislike it.
Two years ago, the man in the old-fashioned hat was scratching a living folding T-shirts at the CBS Studio City souvenir shop in Hollywood - a high school drop-out with no prospects. Now, aged 31, he has his own television show, Drudge, on Fox network's news channel. He commutes to the opposite coast to record the show in studios near Times Square, New York.
"Whoa! Own show!" he yelps. "It's so mainstream - but, man, I had to take it."
It is no accident that the set for Drudge looks like a gumshoe's office built for Humphrey Bogart playing Philip Marlowe. Drudge's Hollywood is a place where dime-novel fiction writers and their anti-hero detectives have always claimed to find the corruption and greed that lie below the chrome-plated surface of America.
When he broke the Lewinsky story, Drudge spent four days locked in his flat with only a cat called Cutie for company and a chair jammed under the doorknob for a little extra security.
"I was scared," he says. "There are people who follow me around Hollywood. You know that? Seriously. Spooks. They're there when I go out to get food or go to the news-stand. It's really like in the movie LA Confidential.
"But I tell you, nothing can stop me now. I can get this stuff out, and it goes around the world. I'm bullet-proof."
Drudge stops and looks around. We are sitting in a New York restaurant that is popular with conventional media folk and not known for violence. Nevertheless, he lowers his voice.
"I'm bullet-proof," he says, "except for real bullets. It will take violence to stop me. Who can say if there will be violence?"
Drudge's splendidly Dickensian name is his own, but the persona of Internet investigator is one that he switches on as if he were an actor. He has an expressive face, and all it takes for him to assume his character is the raising of one dark, heavy eyebrow under the brim of the hat.
He has been described over and over again as a "nerd"."This is because convention has it that anyone who spends 15 hours a day bathed in the glow of a computer screen could not be anything else.
He is obsessed - "focused" is the word he uses - but a nerd he is not. Rather, he is a charismatic figure who would have absolutely no trouble dominating any gathering he chose to attend. He is also possessed of a giant ego. "I've been on every cover there is to be on," he exclaims. "I'm not boasting! It's just true!"
His sense of humour is sharp and ironic, a rarity in America, and he performs effortlessly in front of cameras. "That comes," he says, "from hours spent doing puppet shows under the sheets when I was a kid."
From his own description of his earlier life, it is hard to imagine anyone could have predicted his success. The transformation from a name on a computer screen to a nationally recognised face has been so sudden that Drudge himself is unsure how he will fit in.
He grew up the only child of a middle-class couple in the suburbs of Washington DC. As a boy, nobody gave him a second glance: he stuttered mildly, avoided sport and failed utterly in class. He had very few friends, and no girlfriends. At night, he would fall asleep with the radio playing, a habit he thinks may have given him his obsession with minute-by-minute news.
He is a man with no vices, at least none to which he will admit. He does not smoke, take drugs, gamble or drink - alcohol or coffee. He would actually quite like to smoke, he says - smoking would fit the carefully crafted image - but he fears that any intoxicants might interfere with his "focus".
Does he have a girlfriend? A nice idea, he says, but when would he have the time? This is a man who does almost nothing other than work the computer, read at least 11 newspapers and magazines a day and keep an eye on the television. He never answers his telephone, though he does check his messages from time to time. Socialising means stopping to feed the cat.
By a strange twist, Drudge's fame seems to have preceded, rather than followed, knowledge about him. Everybody knows him. But what has he written? What, exactly, has he uncovered?
No one is quite sure of his job description. He is courted by news programmes such as Meet the Press, a terrific honour for the average ink-stained wretch, and is invited to lunch at the National Press Club, but there he is rudely reminded that he is not a journalist.
Drudge is, in a way, more of a "new media" publisher than a reporter, for what he does is take stories from "sources", often other journalists, and publish them at lightning speed. "I've been called a muck-raker, but also the most powerful journalist in America," he says. "That is because I am just seconds from publishing, without having to ask anyone, and with no money."
Unencumbered by the tedious routines of fact-finding, fact-checking, or even writing in any conventional sense, he is certainly quick. But his method has its pitfalls: he is up against a $30 million (œ20 million) libel suit for alleging that a White House aide, a friend of both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, had a history of beating his wife. Even Drudge admits there was no truth in that particular rumour.
Beyond the irony and the image-making, he is deadly serious about his mission. "Who," he demands, with an eyebrow raised to maximum height, "has been telling more of the truth this summer? Me, or the President of the United States?"
He believes that he and his computer modem are reclaiming the best of American journalism. "The American press has its roots in tabloid journalism, and I am claiming that heritage," he says. "The newspapers of the establishment aren't true to our spirit. The tabloid days were the wild days. They could produce 12 editions a day, as I can, and they got sued all the time."
Think, he says, of Walter Winchell, the great muck-raker of the Twenties, the father of the modern gossip column. If one part of Drudge is borrowed from film noir and the old "True Detective" novellas, another has come from Winchell.
The hats he wears have had a lot to do with this self-discovery. His first was a gift from a friend: he put it on and discovered his "soul". Now the Panama has become the screen logo for his television show.
True to his media-bred generation, Drudge sees nothing strange in discovering his own personality through movies and the image of a legendary old gossip columnist.
"It just happened," he explains. "I discovered these guys. Winchell never minded pissing people off; particularly the deceivers. I'm not political. I'll be giving the next president my undivided attention, too."
As he warms to the theme, Drudge traces his heritage further back. Computer communications have restored us to the pre-industrial age, when a brave man could raise his voice and be heard, he says. He invokes the memory of Thomas Paine, the English rebel who came to America before independence and helped shape its democracy. Paine's weapon of choice was the printed pamphlet.
"I'm Thomas Paine - he's the model," says Drudge. "We are nailing pamphlets to a tree, on a world scale. In the future, the media will come down to each man and his conscience. The Internet era will be like the early days of the pamphleteers."
This is a grand image and Drudge is not the first to have thought of it. But his perception of himself seems a long step from the hammy performance he gives on his television show, repeating his favourite tittle- tattle.
Perhaps that is the lesson of Drudge and the Drudge Report. He is a man of the moment because he sees no difference between movie stars and presidents, between proven malfeasance and rumours: what really counts on the new frontier is speed - and dodging the bullets.
"I've had death threats," he says, returning to a favourite theme. "Lots of 'em." They appear, of course, on his computer screen.
Drudge smiles the crooked smile of a gumshoe ready to take the knocks for truth and justice. He looks at his watch: it is getting late and it is time, he says, to get back to work. There are e-mails to be read, rumours to harvest and a Drudge Report to update. He will be up half the night, enjoying himself.
telegraph.co.uk |
