New medium fuels ancient passion

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 9, 1998 | by Michael Rust, | Tiffany Danitz

While some denounce Drudge as a purveyor of "electronic graffiti;'many Washington reporters have monitored his site since the Lewinsky report. Drudge even appeared on Meet the Press, the venerable bastion of establishment Washington punditry. "I think it was hysterical to see him in the mainstream media at the same time that they were denouncing him," says Turner. In fact, having granted the dishevelled Drudge the imprimatur of a national TV appearance, fellow panelists began to distance themselves almost immediately, she points out. "You had the feeling the poor guy hadn't left the green room."

And Drudge has made life for his critics rather easy. Before the Lewinsky revelations, his brightest moment in the Washington spotlight had occurred when he reported that newly appointed White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime political journalist with close personal ties to the first couple, had a record as a "spousal abuser" that had been "covered up" by the Clinton administration. The report turned out to have no basis in fact and Blumenthal filed a lawsuit against Drudge and America Online.

"Don't shoot, I'm just a reporter," Drudge has said, defending his material, which he estimates is 80 percent accurate, according to reports.

But, being online magnifies the 20 percent inaccuracy. Goulden, who likens the Internet to a gaggle of old women jabbering in the marketplace, says the cyber beast has "made reporters more eager to get things out," often rushing on the air or into print before all the facts are in. Case in point: While Starr was taking depositions, the Wall Street Journal first released and then pulled a Web story about alleged sightings of Clinton and Lewinsky in a compromising position. Predictably, White House press spokesman Mike McCurry blamed the snafu on daily journalists "reporting hour-by-hour, not giving the White House any chance to assemble any facts and respond."

Certainly the allure of the quick scoop makes Internet journalism appealing to many news people. Indeed, Scripps-Howard media columnist Terry Mattlingly has suggested that the competition provided by online journalism may revitalize small-market newspapers. But what editors regard as discretion reporters sometimes regard as suppression. And the Internet complicates things further.

"Ready, fire, aim is what they call it," says Goulden. This was obvious with the Lewinsky story Newsweek had decided not to publish Michael Isikoff 's story about the ex-intern, but it appeared on the Drudge Report. Goulden says he suspects that someone at Newsweek said, "The hell with the editors -- let's get it out there." Reporters impatient to get their stories past cautious editors may find leaking to the Internet a useful source of pressure.

This has been a not-so-secret fear of the White House, whose 1995 controversial 331-page report, The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, states that "the right wing has seized upon the Internet as a means of communicating its ideas to people." But it is not just the right wing. The outside-the-Beltway gossip consumers who gulp down online reports about politicians differ in political outlook, but they feel alienated from what they sense as the powers-that-be in society.