Update: Instapundit links to Blogging Matt Drudge. Welcome, visitors!
Revolution — A sudden or momentous change in a situation.
I moved to the Washington, D.C., area in January 1998. I was staying with a friend while I searched for a job and an apartment, and I was focused on that. I wasn’t into the Internet at the time, but I began to hear rumors about the president and a White House intern. I didn’t pay any attention because I didn’t think Bill Clinton was that stupid.
Along with the rumors, the name “Drudge” was uttered here and there. When he broke the Clinton-having-sex-with-intern story, I doubt many people knew who he was or how big the story would be. He did what Newsweek didn’t want to do. These are the reports that made him famous.
Drudge doesn’t call himself a conservative, but whatever he is, one thing is for sure: liberals don’t like him and the liberal media detest him. I was working for a liberal senator on Capitol Hill in 1998 (I was liberal back then.), and whenever someone saw me checking the Drudge Report, they’d look away in disgust. Part of my job was to read the news, so I was reading the news. But Drudge was the man who brought down “our guy,” so he was reviled.
In 2000, Drudge’s how-I-became-famous book came out. Check out this CNN review of Drudge Manifesto:
The refrain of “Manifesto” is that Drudge, a “nobody,” is now a “player” in medialand. And though the book strains to emphasize that how Drudge became a player is what matters — you know, the Internet revolution and all that — what comes through more powerfully is Drudge’s sheer excitement at having obtained entree to the circles in which the news is ostensibly made.
The kind of name-dropping that the “Manifesto” indulges in — to prove Drudge’s “player”-ness, I suppose — makes for fairly unpalatable reading. Still, there is one moment in the book when Drudge becomes almost likable. He has been smuggled into a White House press briefing by a pal from ABC, and after it’s all over, touring the premises, he peers in on the Associated Press’ Terence Hunt and swoons at the sight of Hunt’s computer…
That pretty much exhausts the charm of “Drudge Manifesto” — a disorganized melange of shrill media criticism, incoherent diary entries, aimless notebook dumps, Beat-style streams of consciousness and rap rhymes, and the inevitable column reprints. Drudge has often boasted that his brand of “publish first, check later” journalism does away with the need for editors, but this book makes a poor case for the abolition of that honorable profession.
Hopefully someone pointed out to Mr. Rosenberg that his review was pretty shrill, too. What did I think of the book, you ask (I heard something)? I rushed out to buy it. I admit it’s the sort of book you have to “get,” and I got it. Quite simply, it is the story of how Drudge became “The Drudge Report.” You should buy a copy. Some of the references may be dated because the World Wide Web has exploded since 2000, but it’s still worth reading.
More on Matt Drudge? Read this Wikipedia entry about him. By the way, the Wikipedia is a collaborate encyclopedia-type of thing, and it’s another web spawn to keep an eye on. It’s a “wiki,” a term familiar to most bloggers. A wiki is a collaborative site where anyone can add or edit the content. The Internet is wild, uncharted and ever-expanding stuff! I would tell you to get in on the ground floor and start a blog, except the ground floor is always shifting.
Thanks to the fake memos scandal, blogging is being talked about. The media have known for quite awhile that bloggers are out here, but now they’re forced to acknowledge us in print. The liberal Los Angeles Times (registration req.) faced the facts: they are under scrutiny by conservative bloggers:
These days, CBS News anchor Dan Rather and his colleagues at the network’s magazine program “60 Minutes II” are enduring an unusual wave of second-guessing by some of the public and fellow journalists….
That story began Wednesday, 19 minutes after the “60 Minutes II” broadcast began, when another FreeRepublic poster, TankerKC, noted that the documents were “not in the style that we used when I came into the USAF….Can we get a copy of those memos?”
Less than four hours later, Buckhead pointed to “proportionally spaced fonts” in the memos, which CBS said had been written in the early 1970s by Bush’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who died in 1984. Buckhead concluded that the documents had been drafted on a modern-day word processor rather than a typewriter.
“I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old,” Buckhead wrote. “This should be pursued aggressively.”
And it was — with startling speed.
Not a ringing endorsement, but the press is good. The only role I played was linking to the big bloggers like Power Line, but that’s good enough for now. More blogger coverage: Blogs v. 60 Minutes, Slate, NRO.
So how does Matt Drudge fit into all this? He doesn’t call himself a journalist or a blogger, but he’s definitely a forerunner of the idea that ordinary people like you and me could go after stories. He started out posting on Usenet sites in 1994, then other web sites paid him to post content on their sites.
Drudge went national in 1996 when he was the first to report that Jack Kemp would be Bob Dole’s running mate (exciting scoop, right?), and you know what happened in 1998. That was it. Drudge became the 10 million+ hits-a-day man, and advertisers pay him an arm and two legs for placement. Not bad.
So what does this all mean for blogging, which has been described as “nascent” and “underground?” We’ve been referred to as “a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas,” and I once heard Hugh Hewitt describe bloggers as pamphleteers (“A writer of pamphlets or other short works taking a partisan stand on an issue.”), like the ones from the old days (see Thomas Paine).
Paine’s most famous publication, Common Sense, was a defense of the Revolutionary War. Bloggers are the new pamphleteers, defenders of independence, free from reliance on mainstream (liberal) media. I like the sound of it.
I have a feeling Drudge wouldn’t call himself a pamphleteer, either.
(Drawing swiped from Lonely Pamphleteer Review)
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More Forged Memo Stuff:
Update II: More info from Shot Across The Bow.
Update (9/14): Vodka Pundit discusses the dog-eat-dog media business.
American Digest discuss the abuses of power.
Semi-related: Medienkritik discusses the Hitler Diaries scandal.
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Donald Sensing says Memogate might be over. And see Dean about Xerox machines.
Allahpundit has Wizbang news, and Blogs for Bush as a forged memos web of connections. Read Outside the Beltway’s take on the LA Times story.
