Excitable Boy
by Rego Park, contributing blogger
Part of the entertainment of all things Drudge — press interviews, old Wired and AOL commentaries, and the tone of the Drudge Report itself — is observing when Matt gets his boxers in a wad. Never is this more obvious than on air Sunday night. Ecstatic clapping directly beneath his microphone, loud groans of approval that sound like he’s … multitasking, guffaws and giggles over relative trifles are all part of the package that keeps worker drones like me wide awake hours before the Monday morning grind. Some might dismiss his antics as schtick, but the more of a Drudge scholar I morph into (I didn’t see that one coming, but it’s all a by-product of a research project for my novel), the more I see that we’re getting the real deal.
Sometime back in August, Matt reported an article about Generation Y teens getting back to basics and ditching Goth and punk paraphernalia. Even Christina Aguilera had just announced that she was taking out all of her body piercings. “Oh, I’m so proud of the kids for getting all cleaned up,” he hyperventilated. (At which point, I concluded that Matt has officially become an old fart in danger of evolving into an even older fart. Come on, Drudgemuffin, you’re only 38! ) His frenetic clapping reminded me of a battery-operated monkey figurine clanging cymbals.
Face it, this dude’s so easy — and fun — to provoke. Sometimes he’s grumpy, sometimes he’s manic, sometimes he’s an unnerving combination of Beavis and Butthead. Getting contradicted by a caller is one guarantee he’ll launch into a self-preserving tirade. One reason I want Matt to settle down with a nice Jewish girl is so somebody can talk him into a reality show 15 years from now with his family. He’d be a hell of a lot more entertaining than Ozzy.
That which makes Drudge fallible also makes him more sympathetic. However you feel about the legitimacy of Drudge Report journalism, we need someone out there who can see the absurdity in the media landscape. Someone who straddles the border between being an insider and an outsider — unbound to the checks, balances and obligations of everyone else. Matt’s an endearing little boy with a soiled diaper at a formal dinner party to which he came uninvited — running around, crashing into everything and everyone, disrupting the flow of the whole “grown-up” system. Some of the guests think he’s cute, some want to smack him upside the head, some rush to comfort him when he falls on his face and bawls up a storm, others just want to find out who he belongs to and get him home to bed. Me, I just wanna find out where he’s getting all that sugar.
In Drudge Manifesto, Matt recounts being invited by Mark Halperin of ABC News to a D.C. Presidential press briefing in the late 90s. Halperin asks him to file a report from there. Not just anyone can make it into the White House, and our boy is salivating at the sight of all the familiar faces he recognizes among the media elite and Washington Press Corps. But thrill turns to disillusion when he makes it past the gates into the forbidden city — the room and hardware are surprisingly dirty and old, the scene isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be. In the middle of the press conference room, Matt notices a reporter grooming herself as the Q&A progresses — lipstick, powder, blush, dental floss, tweezers, Q-tips, nail file. Our favorite Citizen Reporter is only human, and somehow silly things like public policy take a backseat to women behaving badly…especially media women. “Nobody else notices,” he writes, “which only makes me more obsessed.”
When said reporter breaks out the pedicure gear, Matt laughs out loud and has to leave the room.
“Aren’t the people here the chosen few, the ones we rely on for information?” He rails. “Keepers of the Fourth Estate? How many reporters would kill to get into this room? Have questions for the White House but no access? Who aren’t issued credentials? Whose social security numbers ain’t clean enough…Some center of power! Some representation of the people.”
Paragraphs later, Matt’s still taking a break from representing the people. While the conference is still in session, he wanders into Helen Thomas’s cubicle and tinkers with her computer. (”Today, Matt Drudge was bestowed an Honorary Doctorate at the Columbia School of Journalism for his groundbreaking Internet reporting.” Sadly, he resisted the urge to hit Enter.)
Good to know we have a Citizen Journalist who’s always on the ball. Always focused. Always got that ingrained work ethic. Keep in mind that he’s allowed into this inner sanctum with the understanding that he’ll file a report from there — not poke around the private workspace of a veteran reporter he hasn’t met yet, and risk getting booted out by security, or worse. Isn’t that a greater misuse of journalistic privilege than the behavior he’s criticizing?
Matt, can I play with your keyboards in the Drudge newsroom while you’re in the john? I won’t hit Enter or anything.
Maybe Ms. Pedicure had a tape recorder? Maybe the press gang were all used to her multitasking idiosyncracies? Maybe if Wolf Blitzer was irritated by the smell of nail polish, he nevertheless couldn’t break his concentration — or interrupt Mike McCurry — to deal with her? Maybe the reporters present had something better to do…like…their jobs?
I didn’t rule out the possibility of comedic exaggeration, but then again, we know Drudge. But the crux of it all is that I never got the feeling he understood why the “professional journalists” weren’t all guffawing along with him…neither by the tone of the story nor from anything I’ve heard or read from him since. Maybe, instead of a brown-diapered toddler, he’s more like a Pavlovian dog…trained to go apeshit at the sound of a bell, or to the strains of “Windmills of Your Mind” (the oft-played theme of the radio show — different artists, same meandering melody).
Then again, we’ve got bloggers and pundits to do the critical thinking. We need a court jester — at least one of them — a live wire who flies by the seat of his pants and leaves the serious analysis to others.
Invariably, it takes the absurdity of an uncontrollable child to reveal the absurdity of the strait-laced adults around him. That’s one of the reasons we need Matt, and one of the reasons that I can reconcile my Drudge habit despite a few glaring rough edges I can’t rationalize away. Were he to read this blog, he’d probably jump to the conclusion that I’m some liberal detractor out to spike his career like everyone else. I see myself more as a doting Jewish mom — the first to call him on it when he does something unjustifiable, but also the first to defend and support him. To misquote from our tradition, it is better to hear the rebuke of a nonpartisan blogger with a soft spot for you than to hear the praises of a political ally who’ll kiss your ass unconditionally.
Meanwhile, keep your eye on Drudge. When news breaks, he’ll stick his finger in there to see what happens.
RegoPark is a pseudonym for a writer with a background in marketing communications. She is currently working on a novel about PR and the alternative media.
by RegoPark - 4:39 pm
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