Matt Drudge, the cyber gossip-hound, descended on Washington last week and you'd think the aliens were back from "Independence Day" to destroy again the nation's capital. What provoked all the anxiety was that Drudge had been invited to download a speech at the prestigious National Press Club--where such luminaries as Bill Gates, Ted Kennedy and Madonna have been the prize behind the podium in the past. The controversy was whether the club should provide a soapbox to this pseudo-journalist, who demolishes the line between gossip and reporting and who admittedly adheres to loose standards-- and, thus, convey respectability upon Drudge. Seems as if the club was taking the itself a wee bit too seriously. But even I got drawn into the storm, for Crossfire booked Drudge for that night and asked me to join in the gangbang.
I enjoy doing Crossfire. But the show carries the terrible burden of having to define issues in black and white. So the high concept was something like, Drudge: modem-menace to society or journalistic pioneer and Internet wonder? Yours truly was billed--now get this--as "representing mainstream journalists." In any event, I complimented Drudge for being one of the first to recognize the Internet as a new media and slammed him for his irresponsible sloppiness. This is a fellow who wants to have it both ways: to be regarded seriously, and to escape the burdens of serious reporting. For instance, he argued that it was the medium's fault that he does not confirm all his reports: "What we're dealing with here is a whole new medium where things move fast and you're not really able to fully, fully check out everything you'd like to check out."
Drudge achieved a notoriety with his dispatch last summer reporting that Republican operatives had uncovered court records showing that presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal had beaten his wife. Drudge did not do what any second-rate reporter would do. He did not check to see if these court records existed. (Such records do not.) Instead, he ran the item--and ran into a multimillion dollar libel suit filed by the Blumenthals.
Okay, so the guy--a former gift shop manager in Hollywood--was figuring out the ropes. But you'd think Drudge might have learned from that mess. That doesn't appear to be the case. Two days before the Crossfire show, Drudge moved an "exclusive" report claiming that at the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago, as President Clinton and Vernon Jordan were in a hotel room telling political consultant Dick Morris that he was fired, "Monica Lewinsky could be found only rooms away." Drudge pumped up the hypocrisy angle. Morris was being canned because a tabloid had outed his relationship with a whore, while Wild Bill was apparently trysting the nights away with Lewinsky. Drudge's source for all this: "a close Morris associate."
There was an obvious problem with this single-sourced tale. Clinton and Jordan were not the ones who gave Morris the heave-ho. In Morris' own book, which is consistent with press reports from the time, Morris notes that White House deputy chief of staff Erskine Bowles confronted him in his hotel room about the prostitute story. He asked Morris if it were true. Morris confessed, and Bowles left. Three hours later, Bowles, now accompanied by White House counsel Jack Quinn, returned to Morris' hotel room. It was then that Bowles pink-slipped Morris. Whoops. There had been no Clinton/Jordan showdown with Morris.
When I challenged Drudge about this on Crossfire, he said, "I did not check that story. Someone very close to Morris told me that story."
This gets to the heart of the complaint against Drudge. It would have been simple to look it up in the Morris book. If his sole source for this account had not gotten the Clinton-Jordan-Morris meeting correct, then how could she (she?--read on) be trusted to report that Lewinsky was down the hall. Drudge offered a measly defense: "If this source told you the way it was presented to me you would have run with it, also."
Not without turning to the press clips first. If Drudge wants his readers to believe his stuff, he has to prove his standards. In this case, they were non-existent. And in defending another recent item--in which he claimed encryption had been missing from a crashed Loral satellite involved in the Chinagate scandal--Drudge said he based it on one anonymous source in Loral and did no further reporting because "the guy seemed sincere." That type of vetting makes getting out a story a whole lot easier.
After the show ended and we left the set, Drudge turned to me and said, "It was Morris' wife."
"Who was?" I asked.
"The source," he said. The source, that is, for the Monica-down-the-hallway item.
"Well, why didn't you say so in the story?"
He shrugged.
"Then why did you tell me?"
"Because you care so much," he said with a smirk.
Was Mrs. Morris patrolling the hotel hallways? Where did she spot Lewinsky? How could she misrepresent the final scene in her husband's career as a Clinton consultant? Is there an axe being ground somewhere? And why did Drudge not cite her but then blow her cover to a journalist? Was he lying about the source? It seemed a genuine admission. Perhaps he was joking. So many questions--and that's the Drudge dilemma.
I called Morris. Regarding the Drudge item, he said, "I don't know how it could be true. It's not accurate." He noted that he and his wife had discussed the item: "Neither of us knew who Monica Lewinsky was until January 1998. I don't know where that item came from....The story is inaccurate."
If Morris' extra-long-suffering wife was the source--which Morris denies--she's not backing this account. Given how Morris has been dumping on the White House recently, it's not too likely that in this instance he is lying to to protect his former client. Take the error about Clinton and Jordan being in the room and the denial of Morris (husband and wife), and Drudge's latest bombshell is blown away: a dud.
What, then, are we to make of Drudge? He doesn't bother with the rudimentary rules of journalism, yet he's invited on Meet The Press. He admits he does not check his scoops, and Fox Cable News hands him a television show. It's hard to begrudge Drudge these rewards. It's the Roaring, Hyper-cyber '90s. Go for it, Matt. Especially before the Year 2000 bug wipes out all those computers. I don't expect Drudge to resolve the thorny matter of how he and his work are to be treated by established journalistic institutions which proclaim to abide by standards of accuracy. That's not his job. His interest is not in presenting carefully ascertained truth. Sure, he's free to throw out on the Web whatever he wishes. Hail, hail the spirit of the pamphleteer. But pamphleteering is not necessarily journalism. It's probably too late to be beating this horse--his schtick is out of the bag--but news consumers and news producers should bear in mind that a computer, a fedora and a Boy-Scoop attitude do not a journalist make.
Barry Beat His Kids
The send-off for Barry Goldwater, presidential loser and former Senator, was surprising. A river of accolades. Live coverage of his funeral on CNN, Fox Cable, and MSNBC. He may have been an anti-commie icon. But he was jake with McCarthyism, an unrelenting hawk on Vietnam, opposed to civil rights legislation, and a Nixon backer until the last hours. And as a Senator he left little as a legislative legacy. One wonders if George McGovern (right on Vietnam, civil rights, and Nixon) will be treated so well when his turn comes.
It was amusing to watch Goldwater in his later years scolding social conservatives, as he blasted religious rightists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and their followers for pushing an anti-gay, anti abortion agenda. It must have pained Goldwater that he is credited with sparking the movement that put these yahoos on the map. In his heart, he knew they were wrong. The day after Goldwater's funeral, this gang was at it again, trying to push through the House of Representatives a constitutional amendment that would permit school prayer and other church-state mergers. With the number of supporters far from the two-thirds majority needed for a constitutional change--the amendment won a slight majority--this was all for show. Red meat for religious right activists, encouragement for them to show at the polls come November. If the Republicans cannot turn out the born-again crowd, they will be in trouble.
What was annoying about the debate was all the braying about how the amendment is needed because people--read: Christians--are being prohibited from practicing their faith by hordes of godless government bureaucrats. Last year I dispatched my assistant at the time, Sam Munger, to a sob-session organized by the Christian Coalition to build support for the amendment. A young woman complained she received an F on a school paper because her subject was Jesus Christ. Another young woman--mentally and physically disabled!--said her school principal had forbidden her from reading the Bible on the bus ride to school. And a third young woman said her response to an assignment--a videotape that included her singing a Christian song--had been rejected by her elementary teacher seven years earlier. It did not take too much digging to determine these gals were stretching--if not breaking--one of the Ten Commandments. The F-recipient earned her grade after ignoring her teacher's instruction that she not write about Christ because she was already overly familiar with his life. That terrible school principal had reversed his decision and conceded it was a mistake. And the singer was supposed to have given a speech not present a videotape of herself. These episodes hardly cry out, "crisis!" The exploitation of such nonsense only reinforces the suspicions--denied by most of the leaders of the religious right--that what they are really after is Theocracy Lite--that is, if they can't get the real thing.
The most interesting farewell to Goldwater I saw came from Paul Weyrich, a mover of the religious right and head of the Free Congress Foundation. In a commentary he put out on the day of the funeral, he started by reminiscing about Goldwater's role as a hero to young cons in the 1950s and early 1960s, in the days when Goldwater "spoke in moral terms." On election eve in 1964, Weyrich was devastated. Flash forward to 1969 and Goldwater's return to the U.S. Senate. "Not long afterwards," Weyrich writes, "it became evident that Goldwater was a shallow man." He left the Senate every day at 5:00 p.m., regardless of what was happening, and headed to a nearby bar. When Ronald Reagan was president, Goldwater was a carping critic of his ideological heir. And, worst of all, Goldwater "became a critic of our efforts to introduce morality into the political equation....We were, he said, destroying the Republican Party."
Weyrich vowed that he would try to remember the Goldwater who once inspired thousands of conservative activists, not the politician who wanted social conservatives to leave the rest of us alone. "He is proof," Weyrich remarked, "that God can use anyone as His instrument at a given time in history." I suppose the question is, when did God speak through Goldwater. When he attacked big government? Or when he called for fair treatment for gays? Weyrich is certain he knows--and that's the whole damn problem with the fundamentalist mullah-types who so pissed off Mr. Conservative.
Free Trade 'osers
With the Stanley Cup championship series under way, here's a public service announcement for hockey fans: beware of NAFTA.
Opponents of NAFTA and similar free trade accords gripe that they allow foreign nations and corporations to use trade regulations to oppose food safety measures, environmental standards and other government policies here and elsewhere. For instance, environmental groups are now worried that current negotiations to concoct a NAFTA for Asia will weaken regulations that protect forests of ecological significance in the region. If that occurs, there will be an increase in the logging of "frontier forests," which are home to rare and endangered species and which suck up carbon gasses and, consequently, mitigate global warming. It's plain to see why enviros get so hot and bothered about unrestrained free-trade agreements. But hockey fans?
Recently Barry Appleton, a Toronto-based lawyer who specializes in international trade, appeared before a parliamentary subcommittee in Ottawa and urged the Canadian government to investigate whether hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies provided to N.H.L. teams in the United States might violate NAFTA. He suggested that Canada's six N.H.L. clubs challenge the tax breaks provided to American teams by local and state governments as an infraction of free-trade rules. Where might this lead? An official Canadian government protest to Washington? With the cry of "Fair play--on and off the ice"? The end of tax breaks for the United States' puck-jockeys? A subsequent rise in ticket prices? The anti-NAFTA coalition may have a new batch of supporters: hockey aficionados, and NAFTA-suporters ought to be scared. These guys know how to fight.Search American Politics
Matt Drudge, the cyber gossip-hound, descended on Washington last week and you'd think the aliens were back from "Independence Day" to destroy again the nation's capital. What provoked all the anxiety was that Drudge had been invited to download a speech at the prestigious National Press Club--where such luminaries as Bill Gates, Ted Kennedy and Madonna have been the prize behind the podium in the past. The controversy was whether the club should provide a soapbox to this pseudo-journalist, who demolishes the line between gossip and reporting and who admittedly adheres to loose standards-- and, thus, convey respectability upon Drudge. Seems as if the club was taking the itself a wee bit too seriously. But even I got drawn into the storm, for Crossfire booked Drudge for that night and asked me to join in the gangbang.
