Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [360]
Instead, responding to the public fascination with the Lewinsky story during the summer of 1998, the media had turned up its jets. Cronkite would later say, shaking his head, “That story could have been broadcast without the details that would have awakened the curiosity of every five-year-old.”
Part of the willingness of journalists to go out on such a big limb on the Lewinsky matter, Cronkite believed, related to the fact that many of the editors and publishers who were calling the shots relating to this story had cut their teeth during Watergate. Tenacious investigative reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had been their heroes. Now, here was a chance for a new generation of editors and writers to help deliver a story that, like Watergate, might change the course of American history. The result, Cronkite feared, was the proliferation of “lazy journalism.”
Yet the king of the Internet gossip web, Matt Drudge, viewed this transformation in a far more positive light; he saw it as a shining moment for a new brand of reporting. The quirky and semireclusive thirty-one-year-old publisher of the Drudge Report had beaten Newsweek to its own scoop relating to the Lewinsky story, yet he drove a cheap Metro Geo and lived in a $600-a-month apartment in Hollywood with a six-toed cat as his roommate. Drudge’s Internet “news site” had soared from attracting a hundred stray readers to six million visitors per month during that wild summer of 1998. The Lewinsky scoop had made him internationally famous. Many conservatives, especially, flocked to Drudge’s easy-to-navigate site believing that the national print media could not be trusted to cover the Clinton scandal fairly. Now, as the world awaited a conclusion to his astounding story, Drudge rode that crest of celebrity to deliver a keynote speech at the National Press Club, where Doug Harbrecht, president of that institution and an editor at BusinessWeek, observed in introducing the Internet gossip king: “Like a channel catfish, he mucks through the hoaxes, conspiracies and half-truths posted on-line in pursuit of fodder for his website.”
With the Lewinsky thriller in full bloom, Drudge now stood before the crowd of Washington writers, declaring that journalism was undergoing a metamorphosis and that he was proud to be in the middle of it. The public maintained a “hunger for unedited information,” he told the group. “We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter. The Net gives as much voice to a … computer geek like me as to a CEO or speaker of the House. We all become equal.”
The self-made gossip hound, who referred to himself as a “modern-day Walter Winchell,” had skipped college and worked in a CBS gift shop before launching the Drudge Report in 1995. A skeptic and cynic who thrived on exposing contradictions and hypocrisies, Drudge saw a brave new world in gestation. “Now, with a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world—no middle man, no big brother,” proclaimed Drudge.
He reveled in the fact that the biggest story of the century, involving the president of the United States and an “obscure intern,” had been his story, exclusively, for four days. “Everyone was afraid of it… and then everyone jumped on it.”
Rather than viewing the dissemination of raw information in the Lewinsky saga as a negative, Drudge saw it as a high point in an ongoing revolution. “The Internet is going to save the news business,” predicted Drudge. “I envision a future where there’ll be 300 million reporters, where anyone from anywhere can report