The flap over the latest rumor to blow up in cybergossip Matt Drudge's face has met with only the most predictable results. The news world's worst Cassandras have flocked from the woodwork to shout "Told ya so!" at the top of their lungs and denounce all information that is delivered, as Feed's Steven Johnson puts it, "via the incendiary platform of the zero and the one." Yeah, we get the picture already. Web bad. Paper good.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the story: A few weeks ago, Drudge, whose Drudge Report has made him the print world's poster boy for That Iwwesponsible Web, published an item depicting President Clinton's newest advisor, Sydney Blumenthal, as a wife-beater. The story proved false and Drudge retracted it with a red face, but Blumenthal and his lawyers filed a $30 million libel suit all the same. And now all of the nation's "respectable" news outlets and their defenders are lining up to take pot shots aimed not just at Drudge, but at the entire online world.
Todd Purdum of the New York Times preached that "Drudge works in a frontier medium, established by academics but now also infested with the phantasms of conspiracy theorists, kooks, and disinformation specialists." (Apparently no one's ever published conspiracy theories on paper. Or maybe conspiracy theories don't show up when printed in ink. Hmm -- sounds like a government plot...) Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reached deep into his bag of patronizing drivel with this one: "Drudge seemed to overreach as he moved from titillating fare to serious scandal... he stepped on a land mine. The grown-up world, Drudge learned, has ways of fighting back." Even William McDaniel, Blumenthal's lawyer, got into the act, saying that "people who use the Internet feel they're not subject to the same constraints as everyone else." That's a lot of people you're talking about, isn't it Counselor?
Personally, I'm torn when it comes to Drudge. He's an incorrigible gossip, yeah, and he rarely wanders too close to hard journalism. But so what? Same goes for the supermarket tabs, and I enjoy those every bit as much as the next guy (so do you, I'll bet, though you might not admit it). The point is, he's one guy. He can't represent the entire online medium, any more than the Weekly World News represents the entire world of print journalism. There are well over 1,000 papers online, and probably even more online news services. We can't all be "conspiracy theorists, kooks, and disinformation specialists," can we? Or is that just bad journalism?
Dan Reines is co-editor of Tripod's Issues and Health/Sports sections. He says the rumors are always true.
