Drudge

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Matt Drudge

Publisher

The Drudge Report

Fedora-topped Matt Drudge proves two things: that the Internet has become a powerful new communications medium and that the old rules for becoming a nationally known commentator don’t apply anymore.

Drudge, 31, a former 7-Eleven clerk, began his career in electronic journalism when he developed a Web site in his one-bedroom Hollywood apartment in 1995.

Today, The Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com) is visited by an estimated 7 million people daily. Drudge also has his own talk show, which airs on the Fox News Channel.

Though lacking any kind of journalism training or experience, Drudge definitely has a nose for news. While working as manager of the CBS-TV gift shop in the Fairfax District two years ago, Drudge spent some of his spare time “intercepting memos, overhearing conversations and checking through photocopy room trash bins,” according to his official Fox biography.

His daily and frequently updated reports on the Web have been a blend of news, gossip, political happenings and scandal. Much of his earlier “reporting” was the work of others he reprinted newspaper and magazine stories, weekly box-office results and TV ratings. But he also became a repository for gossip that mainstream news organizations wouldn’t print.

Thanks to tipsters, many of them in the media, Drudge began scoring small scoops. Then lightning struck.

In January, Newsweek had an exclusive story on the alleged affair between Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton. When editors decided to hold the story, someone passed the material on to Drudge, who ran with it. Suddenly, he had the year’s biggest news scoop.

“He’s good,” said Richard Reeves, a syndicated political columnist and journalism professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication. “He’s gotten information that other people don’t have. He sets the agenda for many people.”

Drudge thinks of himself as a modern-day Walter Winchell, another fedora wearer, who was the pre-eminent gossip columnist and radio commentator of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.

But Winchell stood on the shoulders of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Mirror. Drudge showed that one person with a computer doesn’t need big-time media sponsorship.

“He is the first superstar on the Internet,” said John Moody, Fox News’ vice president of news editorial. “He is the first to use the medium that traditional journalists had not used. His brand of gossip and chatter and early warnings have struck a real nerve, which is why people log on to him.”

Mainstream journalists caution that Drudge does little of his own reporting and does not have editors challenging him to prove his assertions.

“He has gone from being an idiot with a modem to an idiot with a modem and a TV show on the most irresponsible network in America,” Keith Olbermann fumed one night on his rival gabfest, MSNBC’s “The Big Show.”

But Reeves said he has no problems with Drudge’s new journalism. “I have no prejudice against sensationalism,” he said. “Sensationalism is the first guy who yells that the emperor has no clothes.”

Frank Swertlow

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