Dish Read Free

President of the United States!
    It was Sunday morning, January 17, when Drudge finished writing his story. The sun still hadn’t come up. Drudge paused as he stared at his Packard Bell computer and his eyes began to fill with tears. “My life won’t be the same after this,” he thought, and he hit the Enter button.
    For the next four days, no mainstream publication touched the story. A petrified Drudge hid out in his apartment, wearing boxer shorts, his chair jammed up against the door. Over 400,000 people tried to log on to “The Drudge Report,” sending it crashing. To calm his nerves, he periodically did push-ups or scrubbed his bathtub. Finally,
Newsweek
published an on-line version of the story, confirming everything the cybercolumnist had written. Soon, it appeared on front pages of newspapers around the country.
    Matt Drudge was being profiled in major newspapers and discussed on the television news. Then, on January 25, somethingastonishing occurred: NBC’s Tim Russert invited Matt Drudge to appear on
Meet the Press.
The program was one of the oldest and most respected news shows on television. The other guests on the segment were some of the most revered journalists in the country: William Safire of the
New York Times,
Stuart Taylor of the
National Journal,
and
Newsweek’
s Mike Isikoff. Isikoff was still furious that this cybercolumnist had scooped him on his own story. “He not only poisoned the atmosphere for real reporting,” Isikoff had said of Drudge, “he was reckless and irresponsible and he did a disservice to everybody involved.” But, explained Russert, he’s part of the story. The show had its highest rating since the Gulf War.
    When Drudge exited the Washington offices where
Meet the Press
was shot, he was met by a cluster of reporters, television and print, who wanted to interview him. He launched into a lecture about the responsibilities of journalism. “What does this say about you—all you people here with all your resources—that a story like this can break out of a little apartment in Hollywood?” he said. “What are you guys doing here besides interviewing yourselves? There’s a new paradigm here. That I can do this out of my stinky apartment and you’ve got your fancy newsrooms with your fancy rules!”
    Suddenly, his outsider status was an asset, a subject of pride. It was the persona that Drudge would embrace, one that would lead his defenders to describe him as the “Thomas Paine of the Internet” and a “A town crier for the new age.” Drudge also took pains to distinguish what he did from the work of conventional reporters. “I don’t call it journalism,” Drudge told students at New York University. “To me, that is a cuss word, simply because I think there was a period in the past twenty years when we got away from aggressive reporting.”
    Drudge was embraced by the far right, who claimed that ever since the Kennedy era, the left-leaning media had ignored stories that hurt the liberal cause. Drudge insisted that his only allegiance was to scandal. “I’m a partisan for news,” he was fond of saying. “I go where the stink is.”
    The impulse to “go where the stink is” seemed to the dismay of many people—journalists, celebrities, the rich and powerful,and ordinary citizens—to have come to define the entire news industry. Gossip had coexisted vigorously—if not always easily—with more serious news during Walter Winchell’s heyday. It had then disappeared almost completely from newspapers and television during the 1960s, only to reemerge during the 1970s, spread through the media like a virus in the 1980s, and completely consume it by the end of the 1990s. To understand how the modern media could have reached this bizarre state, how someone like Matt Drudge could come to play a pivotal role in American journalism at the end of the millennium, it is necessary to go back to 1957.
    That year, there was an episode that has been all but forgotten by