January/February 2001

January/February 2001 | Contents

Journalist or Kangaroo?

BY TOM GOLDSTEIN

Drudge Manifesto: The Internet's Star Reporter vs. Politics, Big Business, and the Future of Journalism
by Matt Drudge
New American Library. $22.95. 247 pp.

Opinions about Matt Drudge tend not to be nuanced. Reviled and ridiculed by some, praised by fewer, and read by many, Drudge inspires the worst sort of hyperbole. That is too bad, for Drudge, in what he has reported -- and misreported -- and in what he symbolizes, is a seminal figure in a transitional age of journalism.

Drudge first came to wide attention in the summer of 1997 as a target of a lawsuit. A White House aide, Sidney Blumenthal, who had a distinguished career in journalism, filed a $30 million libel suit against Drudge and America Online, which carried Drudge's Web site, for the posting on the Drudge Report of a rumor about Blumenthal's "spousal abuse past." Drudge's was an accurate report of an inaccurate rumor. Blumenthal protested. Drudge retracted the next day. Blumenthal sued anyway.

In the spring of 1998, Federal Judge Paul Friedman in the District of Columbia excused AOL, concluding that the 1996 Communications Decency Act immunized Internet service providers, absolving them of responsibility for monitoring customer content. (Consider the consequences for the development of the Internet had the judge ruled otherwise.)

Drudge, who lives in California, argued that he could not be sued because he was a newsgatherer, and newsgatherers were exempt from being sued under this particular statute.

In a footnote, the judge dismissed that argument. "Drudge is not a reporter, a journalist, or a newsgatherer," he wrote. "He is, as he admits himself, simply a purveyor of gossip." (Contacted by a reporter afterward, Drudge said: "I'm not a journalist. I'm a kangaroo.") As far as I can tell, no journalist or journalism organization protested after this federal judge took it upon himself to determine who can be called a journalist.

Drudge's detractors are plentiful. His admirers are harder to find. Drudge's most forceful recent advocate is Andrew Sullivan, the writer and editor, who described himself as a "Drudge addict" in a recent issue of The New Republic. Sullivan lists some of Drudge's scoops: "the intern, the dress, the cigar" and more. Yes, Sullivan argues, Drudge makes mistakes, but his site is "transparent and accountable, and it doesn't pretend to be the finished version of the news." Sullivan adds, "I see no problem with different news sources having different levels of reliability."

Anyone committed to open journalism, Sullivan writes, "should be copying Drudge, not scorning him. Vive la revolution, I say. My fellow hacks have nothing to lose but their pretensions."

Blumenthal's lawsuit, dormant and almost forgotten, has re-emerged. In November, Lloyd Grove, in his Washington Post column "The Reliable Source," said he had obtained a list of twenty-five journalists and politicians whom Blumenthal planned to depose in order to uncover Drudge's source for his 1997 item. That search coincides with the publication of Drudge's very odd memoir, Drudge Manifesto, a book described even by ardent admirer Andrew Sullivan as "subliterate."

By any standard, Drudge's book is padded. Of its 247 pages, forty-one are entirely blank. Another seventeen contain just a number or a name ("George W. Bush") or a phrase ("you're boring"). It is a weird, stream-of-conscious mixture of telling readers how he got his stories and mocking his critics.

As an appendix, Drudge includes the question-and-answer portion of a speech he delivered to the National Press Club in Washington in June 1998, months after he led the journalistic pack in disclosing President Clinton's embarrassing problems with Monica Lewinsky.

The speech is more provocative, charming, and persuasive than his book (the speech is still available on Drudge's Web site, drudgereport.com, which offers, along with his own writings, perhaps the most comprehensive set of links to journalists and journalism sites on the Web).

In that speech, Drudge said:

"We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be . . . . The Net gives as much voice to a thirteen-year-old computer geek like me as to a c.e.o. or Speaker of the House. We all become equal . . . . Now, with a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world -- no middle man, no big brother."

That language echoes the Supreme Court, which early in the summer of 1997 struck down the "indecency" provisions of the Communications Decency Act. In that opinion, the justices found no particular medium to be deserving of special constitutional protection. On the contrary, the court's central premise was that in cyberspace "any person or organization with a computer connected to the Internet can 'publish' information."

Commenting on the court's observation, Robert O'Neil, a First Amendment authority who runs the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression at the University of Virginia, wrote in 1999 that "the line that separates traditional news media from unfamiliar electronic media has become blurred in ways that no previous technological change ever caused. We are still struggling with the resulting conceptual issues -- and, quite frankly, not doing too well at that task."

This book notwithstanding, Drudge is an important phenomenon in journalism, and we dismiss him at our peril. He surely makes the mainstream press uneasy, but it seems wrongheaded to excommunicate him summarily.

Deciding whether Drudge should be part "of the press" is at the very core of whether the press deserves special legal status. "At a time when we all knew and agreed upon what we meant by the term 'press,'" writes Professor O'Neil, "we were at least reasonably clear on what entities would be protected, as well as why. Before asserting or bolstering the case for protection, we need a much clearer sense of who ought to be protected."

O'Neil mulled over Drudge's status in a paper that he prepared for the Committee of Concerned Journalists on the "public service" role of the press. But he reached no conclusion. It is not easy to categorize Drudge. Like reporters, he disseminates what he finds out, but he does not necessarily take pains to verify his items, and he operates without an editor or other gatekeeper. He has had his scoops and has made his mistakes. Quite often, he reports on what others have reported. Indeed, in his book, he describes his modus operandi as that of a tipster, not a traditional reporter. Publishing the rumor about Blumenthal is, he wrote, "classic Drudge: coverage of the coverage offering dual accounts; a denial next to a charge." (The punctuation is his. The book seems unacquainted with rules of grammar and punctuation, which are easier to avoid online than on the written page.)

But he is hardly alone in publishing rumors or material that cannot be vouched for, and that is what we need to come to grips with. Should the same journalistic standards apply to everyone, or should leeway be given to certain types of journalists? Can different news outlets have, as Andrew Sullivan suggests, different levels of reliability?

Compare Drudge to Jim Romenesko, must-reading for many journalists, particularly in the eastern corridor. Romenesko, who now operates under the auspices of the Poynter Institute, does a remarkable job combing the press for stories about the press, relying heavily on many sources, including Page Six of the New York Post (which for some years has actually been on page eight) and various gossip columns of the New York Daily News. Most often, these items are not independently verified.

Romenesko's approach has been to publish what has appeared elsewhere. That changed last summer when he carried an 11,000-word e-mail -- actually an article -- that had not been published before. Eugene Kennedy, identified as an author and columnist who at one point had taught clinical psychology at the university level, wrote the e-mail/article in question. Kennedy revisited a 1998 controversy involving Mike Barnicle, a popular Boston Globe columnist who had resigned under duress after being accused of plagiarism and fabrication. Kennedy's article, which defended Barnicle, had been rejected by this publication and several others. Once Kennedy's account was posted, celebrity responses cascaded in, almost as if on cue. Norman Mailer, for instance, said Barnicle had not received a "fair or balanced" judgment by the Globe.

The New York Times, which owns the Globe, picked up on this controversy, printing pictures of Mailer and other celebrity supporters of Kennedy and Barnicle (but no picture of Romenesko, the supposed subject of the article).

In the Times article, Jim Naughton, president of the Poynter Institute, was quoted as saying that "we weren't vouching" for Kennedy's long e-mail, "but we weren't holding it out of the dialogue about a substantive ongoing issue in journalism."

Just change the syntax a little, and Naughton, a journalist of sterling reputation who was a highly regarded reporter at the Times and editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, sounds a lot like Matt Drudge.

Tom Goldstein is the dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.