By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

(I’m postponing today’s planned follow-up on the 1998 Playboy interview to address a favorite Drudge “schtickelah” that came up in last night’s broadcast.)

Rhyme him, slime him, warn him out of town while he still has his life, just don’t lump him together with Wonkette. One of Matt’s charming paradoxes is that he thrives on public castigation, but nothing pushes his buttons quicker than being reduced to a malapropism like the b-word. So far I haven’t heard too many charitable words from Drudge about the growing politico/journalistic bloc of individuals inhabiting what we’ve come to know as the “blogosphere”.
But today’s edition of the New York Times has moved him to defend the bloggers in a somewhat rare moment of online alt-journalism solidarity. As with the Drudge Question in the late nineties, the media is feeling the effects of the growing power of “rampant, unedited dialogue” that has a potential to both unearth truth and wreak havoc.

Matt took particular exception to Columbia Journalistic Review editor Steve Lovelady’s comments that “The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail.” That actually reminded me of something he told Playboy in 1998 : “I have my own Web site, my own slice of media, and there’s nothing my critics can do about it. I figured this out early on. If they slime me, it creates more of me. ” There’s only one Drudge, of course, but blog’s name is legion.

Now that there’s a multitude of unchecked, ungatekept Web presences, the game has changed but the hypocrisy stays the same. “The main press is vicious, slanderous. They’re constantly settling libels,” he railed against the Times last night. “We at Drudge have been doing this for ten years. This didn’t start yesterday.”

Matt sees the mainstream media as “marginalizing individuals on the Internet with words that sound stupid.” Long a word that he’s loved to hate, claiming it sounds too much like “booger”, he seems to have made peace with the “bloggers” — deriding the term “blog” as a “nasty, demeaning, obnoxious word for people who dare to publish without a symbol on the New York Stock Exchange…not part of the clique, not part of the crowd.”

Matt unearthed another word I hadn’t heard in awhile: the “me-zine”, an early epithet to describe this Internet legacy we’re all trying to figure out.

(Check out one good rundown of the me-zine/blog history here.)If this writer’s position is correct, and I do find it sound, then it would follow that the Drudge Report is actually a precursor to the blog — not an antiquated ancestor like the harpsichord to the modern piano, but a “mother” genre with its own distinct characteristics, only a step behind in the evolution of literature but just as culturally current.

Blog? Blogger? Me-zine? Internet journalist? Cyberjournalist?

The crux of the problem, as I see it, is that a “blog” or “weblog” is a vague term to cover a few different concepts, while the Drudge Report is one of the first, if not the first, site of its kind which no one has no one has really figured out a name for. To break it down, a weblog is a multiple-use Web format that can be used — or used to describe — many different things (whether correctly or incorrectly). Public journals like Xanga or Diaryland can be theoretically described as a blog. So can a political commentary like Wonkette or gossip like Gawker. If you’re recently out of college, like me, chances are you’ve been regularly referred to a prof’s weblog of links and commentary. Then again, some independent, online news reporting is done on what is best described as a blog because it is adapted to the specific “entry log” format. Is the Drudge Report a blog, and if so, what’s so bad about that?

The real problem with describing Drudge Report as a weblog is not in its supposed stigma, but that it’s a misnomer. If we think of it literally, then we could call a weblog a linear series of entries, often with links within a website’s graphic borders. Going further, we might agree that the central feature of a “blog” is the series of installments of “copy” — the blogger’s original Web copy as opposed to headlines or linked material. So what is the difference between a news blog and the Drudge Report?

First, a caveat: dictionaries don’t plop down from the heavens. They are created by normal, colon-voiding human beings whose only difference from you and me is that they’ve studied language concepts more comprehensively. You and I have as much right to coin words and play a role in the evolution of their meaning as William F. Buckley, whose name is one of several “experts” in the preface of my American Heritage Dictionary at home. On the Web, we’re all 800-pound gorillas. We can do anything we want to with or without sanction from linguists and recognized experts like the retired National Review head honcho. But like with the folks who bring you Webster’s, it takes a village to develop language, for a word to become used and accepted. Anyway…

The Drudge Report, although it’s not made up of a collection of pages, is set up like a comprehensive news site. It does not center around or focus on a daily, linear “installment” of news. Rather, its feature is the collection of headlines itself. Links are an amalgamation of stories, news columnists, and a few strays like Drudge Report Archives. Matt’s original news stories are linked both by his own name and by the headlines to the stories themselves. If he wanted to, he could include a blog within this multi-use site….but the blog would not be the site and the site would not be the blog.

On a news blog, the author’s installment is the feature and the links are secondary. On an independent news site like Drudge, the link features are the foci and the individual news stories, even his own, are secondary.

Okay. So if he considers blogging a respectable news format, why’s Matt been so ornery about being herded onto the bloggers’ paddywagon, and why is he pulling a John Kerry on them now?

I would argue that Matt, like the rest of us, is touching and feeling his way through the changing mediascape and a victim of the very same emotionally charged name manipulations foisted on the weblog authors. The mainstream press may not agree or specify exactly what a blogger is, but it’s decided what it thinks of blogs and the level of legitimacy it’s going to render unto them. Matt reminds me of straight guys whose own “masculinity” has been challenged growing up and who aren’t too eager to socialize closely or sympathize publicly with men who really are gay, but who, when put to the test, can get past their insecurities and show more understanding and flexibility than previously thought possible. Who knows? Maybe a love-hate relationship with the blogging community will continue to unfold over at Drudge. But just for today, in the face of a common enemy, Matt’s willing to be our Valentine.

P.S. Today’s Drudge Report headline - and last night’s colorful riff on Chris Rock - is even more intriguing with a little background info on Matt’s past tangle with him. Now, we at Drudge Blog do have a soft spot for Matt. We’re kinda hoping Matt’s own soft spot doesn’t come in contact with Chris’s red-blooded American foot.

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.