Dish (2 page)

“He loved to do wild, provocative things to draw attention to himself,” according to David Cohen. Once, when Drudge and
Cohen were dating, they went to a nightclub, and by Cohen’s account, Drudge got kicked out for throwing a pitcher of beer into the air that came raining down on everyone around them. “He loved to freak me out by telling me gossip that he found out about me,” said Cohen. “It was very personal stuff and I have no idea how he found these things out about me.” Cohen said that Drudge seemed very comfortable and open with his sexuality, though they never talked about it. “In all the time I knew him, I don’t think we had a serious, in-depth conversation. It was always gossipy or shallow stuff. We were very young.”

At twenty-two, desperate to start a new life for himself, Drudge moved across the country to Los Angeles. He moved into a grimy $600-a-month one-bedroom apartment on the ninth floor of a run-down apartment building near Hollywood and Vine. He lived there with a six-toed cat named Dexter. Drudge hoped to get a job in the entertainment business or writing for
Variety.
Instead, he got a $5-an-hour job as an errand runner for
The Price Is Right.
From there, he landed a job at the CBS gift shop in Studio City where he worked for five years.

Sensing that Matt was directionless, his father flew from Washington to Los Angeles to visit his son and dragged him into a Circuit City store on Sunset Boulevard to buy him a cheap 486 Packard Bell computer. “Oh yeah,” Matt told his father. “What am I going to do with that?”

Drudge had long been an irrepressible gossip. He loved the way that knowing things made him more popular, made people want to talk to him, and, quickly figuring out what to do with his computer, he began to surf various web sites for gossip. Using the computer, it was easy to read foreign publications and wire news. Drudge got his information from places other than his computer, however. He eavesdropped on people’s conversations, he volunteered in the CBS mailroom and intercepted memos, he fished around in the garbage and found discarded Nielsen ratings and confidential box office numbers.

Soon, he had so much gossip that he wanted a better way to spread it. Going to an established newspaper was out of the question. He had no experience and no college degree. “If I’d knocked on the door of the
Los Angeles Times
they’d have laughed at me,”
he recalled. So, in 1995 he set up a web site and began e-mailing his tidbits to friends, calling it “The Drudge Report.” He began with only a few readers, then a couple of dozen, and within no time, one thousand. Drudge thought it had peaked there, but he kept adding more subscribers. In 1996, he was getting 10,000 hits a day and soon America Online offered him $36,000 a year to carry “The Drudge Report.” Matt quit his job to work on his web site full time. By the summer of 1997, he was averaging 15,000 hits a day.

In many ways, Matt Drudge was still a loner, still working out of his crummy Hollywood apartment, which by now was furnished with a tattered rug, cheap couch, a satellite dish, and a police scanner that was on at all times. But his name was becoming well-known among his readers. He was getting hundreds of E-mails a day. His rogue status gave him a freedom and flexibility that more established journalists didn’t have. “It takes ABC News twenty minutes to post a headline to their web site. It takes me ten seconds,” Drudge once boasted. “I had Diana dead seven minutes before CNN did.”

Some believed that one of the ways Drudge got his information was a high-tech version of the way he intercepted memos at CBS. Although Drudge insisted that he got the information from “sources” within the various news organizations, some editors began suspecting that Drudge had figured out how to hack into their computer systems. Editors at the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
were alarmed that Drudge got stories that weren’t available on its web site and then posted stories just as they would be sent to the news organizations that subscribed to their wire service—with certain key words and phrases intact. “Our presumption is that Drudge has someone who has access to the news service wire, and that’s what he’s put out,” according to John Geddes, deputy managing editor of the
New York Times.
On other occasions, however, he posted stories well before they were released to the wires, and some media people suspected that he discovered a way to hack into the paper’s computers. At one point, the
Times
considered legal action against Drudge, but decided that would be good publicity for him. Hacking into
News-week’s
computer system is how, some believed, Drudge in July
1997 scooped
Newsweek
on its own story by reporter Michael Isikoff that Clinton allegedly groped Kathleen Willey. A furious Isikoff blasted Drudge for “rifling through raw reporting, like raw FBI files, and disseminating it.” Drudge maintained that he had “a source” at
Newsweek
—not Isikoff but one of his co-workers—who tipped him off about the story.

The Willey story, however, was nothing compared with the story that Drudge got on Saturday, January 16: Clinton was having an affair with an intern. Again, it was a story reported by Isikoff and again Drudge had the details from an unreleased story. Drudge hammered out the story in his typical hysterical fashion:

It was Sunday morning, January 17, when Drudge finished writing his story. The sun still hadn’t come up. Drudge paused as he stared at his Packard Bell computer and his eyes began to fill with tears. “My life won’t be the same after this,” he thought, and he hit the Enter button.

For the next four days, no mainstream publication touched the story. A petrified Drudge hid out in his apartment, wearing boxer shorts, his chair jammed up against the door. Over 400,000 people tried to log on to “The Drudge Report,” sending it crashing. To calm his nerves, he periodically did push-ups or scrubbed his bathtub. Finally,
Newsweek
published an on-line version of the story, confirming everything the cybercolumnist had written. Soon, it appeared on front pages of newspapers around the country.

Matt Drudge was being profiled in major newspapers and discussed on the television news. Then, on January 25, something
astonishing occurred: NBC’s Tim Russert invited Matt Drudge to appear on
Meet the Press.
The program was one of the oldest and most respected news shows on television. The other guests on the segment were some of the most revered journalists in the country: William Safire of the
New York Times,
Stuart Taylor of the
National Journal,
and
Newsweek’
s Mike Isikoff. Isikoff was still furious that this cybercolumnist had scooped him on his own story. “He not only poisoned the atmosphere for real reporting,” Isikoff had said of Drudge, “he was reckless and irresponsible and he did a disservice to everybody involved.” But, explained Russert, he’s part of the story. The show had its highest rating since the Gulf War.

When Drudge exited the Washington offices where
Meet the Press
was shot, he was met by a cluster of reporters, television and print, who wanted to interview him. He launched into a lecture about the responsibilities of journalism. “What does this say about you—all you people here with all your resources—that a story like this can break out of a little apartment in Hollywood?” he said. “What are you guys doing here besides interviewing yourselves? There’s a new paradigm here. That I can do this out of my stinky apartment and you’ve got your fancy newsrooms with your fancy rules!”

Suddenly, his outsider status was an asset, a subject of pride. It was the persona that Drudge would embrace, one that would lead his defenders to describe him as the “Thomas Paine of the Internet” and a “A town crier for the new age.” Drudge also took pains to distinguish what he did from the work of conventional reporters. “I don’t call it journalism,” Drudge told students at New York University. “To me, that is a cuss word, simply because I think there was a period in the past twenty years when we got away from aggressive reporting.”

Drudge was embraced by the far right, who claimed that ever since the Kennedy era, the left-leaning media had ignored stories that hurt the liberal cause. Drudge insisted that his only allegiance was to scandal. “I’m a partisan for news,” he was fond of saying. “I go where the stink is.”

The impulse to “go where the stink is” seemed to the dismay of many people—journalists, celebrities, the rich and powerful,
and ordinary citizens—to have come to define the entire news industry. Gossip had coexisted vigorously—if not always easily—with more serious news during Walter Winchell’s heyday. It had then disappeared almost completely from newspapers and television during the 1960s, only to reemerge during the 1970s, spread through the media like a virus in the 1980s, and completely consume it by the end of the 1990s. To understand how the modern media could have reached this bizarre state, how someone like Matt Drudge could come to play a pivotal role in American journalism at the end of the millennium, it is necessary to go back to 1957.

That year, there was an episode that has been all but forgotten by most media students today, but it was a pivotal event that shaped the direction of journalism for decades to come. It was the trial of
Confidential.

Spectators spilled into the corridor of Los Angeles’s Hall of Justice those muggy days in the summer of 1957. Some wore their fanciest evening clothes, some wore short shorts or tight toreador pants, some even brought ballet or tap shoes and danced; they all hoped to catch the eye of the guard who had the power to grant them one of the few seats that had been set aside for the public. Court clerks had searched for hours trying to find a room big enough to accommodate the stars, defendants and witnesses, reporters and photographers, and hundreds of curious onlookers who crowded into the eighth floor of the Hall of Justice, craning their necks, hoping to catch a glimpse of the unfolding drama of America’s favorite spectator sport: celebrity scandals. In its relatively short history, Hollywood had survived scores of sensational cases, but inside the packed green-and-gold filigreed courtroom that summer, scandal itself was on trial.
Confidential
—the magazine that had shocked and riveted America with tales of celebrity excesses and debauchery—had been indicted by the California Attorney General’s office on charges of “conspiracy to publish criminally libelous, obscene and otherwise objectionable material.”

“We will convict the filth peddlers that smear the names of Hollywood,” vowed California Attorney General Edmund “Pat” Brown. The movie industry had been good to Brown and to California; it had endowed the state with millions of dollars in business and international fame. The film world is built on images and appearances, on fantasy and facades;
Confidential
made its money destroying those images, said Brown, “dragging people’s names through the dirt and mire of gossip.” Brown was a rising political star, a popular prosecutor who was planning to run for governor of California. He had already threatened to prosecute newsstand dealers who sold
Confidential,
effectively banning the magazine in California. Now Brown was going to finish the job, promising to “end
Confidential’s
reign of terror.”

Celebrities had long endured—even embraced—gossip. The cleverly placed tidbit about a star’s lavish lifestyle could actually help his career—or help keep a wayward actor in line. For years, celebrities and studio publicity departments worked with columnists like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons—planting items that were often concocted—about romances and marriages, and feuds and fights over film roles. The studios and stars controlled that sort of press; they used the gossip columnists as high-powered publicity machines. Despite their reputation for nastiness, the old-line gossip columnists were usually most vicious when it came to fighting with each other. Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky was so certain that rival Louella Parsons got him fired from the
Los Angeles Examiner
because she didn’t want the competition in her most valued outlet, that one day he retaliated by sinking his teeth into her arm. The gossip business had gotten very competitive.

The formula pioneered by Walter Winchell in the 1920s was so successful that by the 1940s gossip columnists were among the best read and most influential journalists in the country. Most newspapers carried several gossip columns; by the 1950s, there were more than four hundred full-time reporters covering Hollywood. Show business columns with announcements of romances and casting news like Hedda’s and Louella’s were becoming old hat. So were the New York columns like Walter Winchell’s that chronicled Cafe Society and the Broadway scene. America was
hungry for juicier scandals. In 1952 a flamboyant publisher named Robert Harrison gave it to them.