drudge blog

By RegoPark
Contributing Weblogger

I’m a bit short on time this week, so more FAQs are coming shortly. If you’ve posted a question that I haven’t addressed yet, it will be soon. Meanwhile, check out last entry’s first FAQs batch and feel free to post new questions below in the comment box.

What’s with the hat?

The hat is “a persona”. Don’t believe anything you read about Matt walking around town with it or having done so back in his younger days. (Especially if it’s followed by a comment like, “he was a loner, but he talked to me because I didn’t judge the Drudge.”) He said in one 2000 interview that he doesn’t even wear it that much anymore, and that’s apparently accurate. In general, he seems to wear one where he wants to be recognized and avoids it when he wants to be alone. He always shows up with one at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner (paired with a tux). He chose to pose with one for a Washington Post article this spring on the Drudge Report’s 10-year anniversary. He also wore one for a Phoenix radio station’s June anniversary celebration at which he participated in a panel discussion. He wore that same hat a few days later when he appeared on Hannity & Colmes. However, he went without the hat for the Republican National Convention dinner, a Hannity appearance via satellite back in February, and does not wear one when he appears each year on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal.

The hat is reminiscent of Walter Winchell and the old muckrakers of the early 20th century. Despite the hype, Winchell is NOT Drudge’s idol. He has, however, studied his style and radio delivery.

Whatever happened with the Blumenthal lawsuit?

Sidney Blumenthal dropped the lawsuit for financial reasons. It didn’t get that much coverage, but Matt is apparently his own publicist and e-mailing a message “Why aren’t you writing about me?” isn’t a very effective way to generate coverage from the New York Times. At any rate, the dropping of a lawsuit or criminal charges tends to be less newsworthy than an arrest or the initial filing of a suit.

On one hand, an economic “might makes right” might have prevailed in this situation. Matt’s supporters set up a legal defense fund in his name and the Blumenthals were pursuing the libel suit with their own savings.

Regardless of how you feel about the merits of the Blumenthal suit or Matt’s decision to post a rumor about covered-up spousal abuse, the likelihood of the plaintiffs collecting $30 million was not good. Drudge retracted the story within 24 hours. We can debate over the sincerity or sufficiency of his apology, but the legal burden was on the Blumenthals to prove malicious intent. It’s interesting to note that while Drudge had little money at the time the suit was filed, AOL was a co-defendant because it was contracting with Matt at the time. (AOL was later cleared of liability).

This is my understanding from my reading: Matt Drudge maintains Sidney first demanded the source for the story, and that Matt refused, and the Blumenthals then filed their suit after that. Interestingly enough, Matt claims to have heard the news of the suit from the radio.

Did Matt Drudge really write the poetry in Drudge Manifesto?

I can’t offer a definite answer, but I’ll provide the facts for you to make up your own mind.

The free verse is consistent with the writing style of the early “Drudge Report” e-mails in which he did have to write more featurey intros than he does now.

Drudge Manifesto was written “with” his friend Julia Phillips. Julia wrote the 600-plus Hollywood tell-all You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, which used some postmodern literary devices, but she really let loose on her second and final book, Driving Under the Affluence. This book contains much of the same vocabulary, literary devices, and actual phrases you find in Drudge Manifesto – including the talking pet. I also question whether Matt would have chosen on his own to say that his parents divorced in one sentence and claim that Dad “…shacked up with Someone New” in the next sentence right after naming his parents’ first names. Julia spent the entirety of her two autobiographies bitching about her dear dead neurotic hypocritical mother.

The epilogue is definitely Matt’s. The combined corporate combination names are also his.

Matt does not feel confident in his own ability to write. He told Playboy in 1998 that he can’t do it and can’t even spell or write cursive. While I’d personally argue that he writes better than he thinks he can in the evidence I have, I can say this for sure: he definitely appreciates free verse.

Where did he get the story about the Clinton/Lewinsky affair?

I originally understood — and posted here before — that Matt’s source was Lucianne Goldberg, a literary agent who relishes taking credit for her role in leaking this scandal. Lucianne had been working with Linda Tripp on a book project that, if I understand correctly, did not ultimately materialize. She urged Linda to tape record her conversations with Monica Lewinsky. It turns out that he’d gotten communication on this rumor before which he didn’t at first act upon.

At Matt’s first phone call to Lucianne, she knew that Newsweek had killed a piece by Michael Isikoff about the intern story and that there were shouting arguments in the office. She offered to transmit Monica’s resume to Matt, which he posted on the Drudge Report. The breaking news story was as much about Newsweek’s decision to ax the piece as it was about the Presidential scandal itself.

Does Matt check his facts or sources?

I guess some mysteries are meant to be left unsolved. He definitely does not have time to check all of them. But he does pursue a few sources. When the story of Paris Hilton’s Sidekick hacking got out, he called some of the numbers and eventually got an on-air interview with one of her acquaintances. When I compared the entire speech and Q&A at the Washington Press Club in 1998, the transcript reads Matt as saying that he knocked on Monica Lewinsky’s door in L.A. The Drudge Manifesto transcript inexplicably eliminates that line. The elimination may have come from the publisher rather than Matt himself, but that piqued my curiosity.

More FAQs to come when time permits. Stay tuned…