drudge blog

By RegoPark
Contributing Writer

In the conclusion of this essay, I discuss the allegations from David Brock in Blinded by the Right and Alec Baldwin’s claims in an interview with Howard Stern.

XXX GAY RUMOR SOURCE #2: DAVID BROCK XXX

David Brock currently heads Media Matters for America. He has compiled a 33-page dossier on Matt Drudge (not unlike the essay you’re reading right now), bullet-pointing his many alleged distortions and misreports. “We try to function not as a Drudge, but as an anti-Drudge,” he has told the press.

The buzz on Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of An Ex-Conservative implies that David Brock was a blindsided, closeted gay Republican who “saw the light”. It turns out he was a Democrat to begin with who changed camps as a UC Berkeley student after Jeane Kirkpatrick was shouted down by protesters. Disgusted at the hypocrisy of many “free speech” advocates, Brock concluded that all liberals sucked. On the student newspaper, he relished his notoriety as campus conservative — and openly dismissed his female and Hispanic colleagues as “affirmative action hires.” Of course, the devil made him do it. Or maybe ‘twas the GOP.

But Brock begins his tale with his dysfunctional parents, who were riddled with the stigma that their two children were adopted. The Brocks coached the kids to say they “looked like” them and panicked when one blabbed to a dance teacher. Neither did young David’s homosexuality sit well with his conservative Republican father. Brock grew up with a burden of secrecy – he didn’t tell his long-term boyfriend he was adopted – that compelled him to lie in his career and his personal life in the name of keeping up appearances.

In the 270+ pages it takes to get to his meeting with Matt Drudge, Brock’s launched into a routine of self-flagellation that cuts and lashes every conservative he meets on each step of the career ladder. He admits that he lied, manipulated, and used people right and left in the name of politics and professional ambition. But Brock’s greatest sin is an annoying habit of projection: manifesting every peccadillo of his own onto the bystanders he met on the road to Damascus. The internal logic: “I was hypocritical, dishonest, manipulative, insecure, so X, Y, Z and W were, too.”

In an interview promoting Blinded, David Brock further defines his analysis of Matt Drudge.

In the Drudge case, and in my case, I think that there’s another issue of hypocrisy which would just simply involve the salacious pursuit of people’s private lives, when you’re trying to essentially deny your own – guard your privacy. If need be, lie about it. It is an interesting phenomenon that there were high-ranking people…closeted gays are well represented in the extreme right…

This contradicts the assertion in his book that Matt Drudge’s “Clinton bashing appeared designed merely to drive attention to his site” and “no serious thought seemed to have gone into his convictions”.

…I mean, if you want to go into the thinking of how that happens, in my case, I think that my own extremism was kind of a way of trying to prove myself in a movement that I knew deep down had trouble accepting me. And so I would go the extra mile…

Blinded by the Right reads with a fill-in formula:

• David Brock meets a conservative.
• Brock creatively describes said conservative’s physical appearance.
• Brock describes the conservative’s past.
• Brock describes the conservative’s crappy behavior, particularly the sins Brock’s been confessing about himself throughout the book – hypocrisy, insecurity, wannabe-ism, substance abuse, and closeted homosexuality.
• Brock nicely sums up the conservative individual’s legacy.
• Brock describes, every few “profiles”, how hanging out with these people drags him down further into an emotional abyss.
• Brock moves on to another chapter of his life, where he meets more conservative jerks.

Rinse. Repeat.

Hold on. That’s an awful lot of A-1 A-holes for a book in the neighborhood of 300 pages. Did all the dozens of ex-colleagues deserve the trashing they got?

Along the yellow brick road to hell and back, David Brock describes in great physical and intangible detail the conservatives he met along the way…from close friends to people he met once. Either he’s pretty darn creative, or America’s registered Republican population is plagued with a host of troubling genetic mutations. One conservative has “skin as thick as a leather briefcase.” Jeane Kirkpatrick’s hand is likened to a bird claw. Another right-winger is described as “socially bumbling, peering out from behind owlish black-framed glasses, and shabbily dressed in big brown corduroy jackets and clodhoppers…He was so nervous that I often imagined that he had taken (my calls) while hiding under his desk.”

Another old crony gets the full ball of wax: “Michael Huffington…stood almost seven feet tall and yet still appeared slight, with his orange hair, ghostly pallor, sticklike lims, and weak blue eyes – because he was lost, numbed emotionally, and alienated from his true self…” (All the while Brock describes his own emotional numbness and inauthenticity.)

Whether an individual was a brief acquaintance or a long-standing friend doesn’t significantly affect Brock’s creative liberties. Everyone gets slammed, including friends like Arianna Huffington, who stood by him and hosted his book party after most of the others shunned him. The author Allan Bloom, with whom he talked for a whopping three hours, is portrayed as a cigarette ash-dropping slob whose friend outed him as gay after his death. Pat Buckley, the socialite wife of William F., makes a cameo appearance for being allegedly being drunk at a party where she criticized Brock’s book to his face.

David Brock describes Rush Limbaugh “liberally”, so to speak, when he never makes it clear he even met the guy. It doesn’t even make sense to discuss Limbaugh within the contextual format of this book since he imparts no new info and the story’s really about how the Conservative movement ruined Brock’s life. Or ruled his life. Or rocked his world. Or something like that.

More incredible is the level of pettiness with which he recounts slights. Like Jeannette Walls (see Part One), Brock recounts what people did when they were drunk and includes irrelevant hearsay of hearsay (including the story that his friend, Laura Ingraham, pulled a gun on a boyfriend..)

It gets better, though: Ann Coulter’s supposedly an anti-Semite (mighty interesting, since Matt Drudge is Jewish and she’s a longtime friend and show guest.) Armstrong Williams asked Brock lewd questions about his sex life in an interview. And just because your plane crashes into the World Trade Center months before his book publication date doesn’t mean you’ll be treated any differently…evidenced in his description of Barbara Olson’s lack of “talent”.

And so on.

The one right-winger he acknowledges meeting but does not slam is Mary Matalin, one of the most most important, buzzworthy conservatives of the fin de siècle. If Brock saw fit to give Matalin the same dressing-down he bestowed upon every other GOPer he breathed on, he could have found something. So why did he spare Mary? That she gave him a forum with which to promote his book is one of only two clues he provides. I’ll let inquiring minds guess the other.

Despite being a Kinsey 6, Brock apparently has a taste for liberal women. Naomi Wolf is regaled as “stunning”, a Glenda the Good Witch who gently guided him down the path to righteousness and who agreed to pass along his apology letter to Anita Hill. (When Hill took him up on his invitation to talk personally, Brock wimped out on calling her back.) Drudge plaintiff Sidney Blumenthal is a classy, nattily-dressed gentleman – so classy that Brock thanks Sid in Blinded’s preface and helps him in his lawsuit against Drudge.

It’s also a bit of a stretch to say that all these conservatives, of diverse occupations and social stations, carried the same agenda and insecurities. Drudge is not “extreme right”. Drudge did not live David Brock’s life and likely does not have the same agenda, motivation, or personal issues as he. Yet he portrays the friends and acquaintances from his GOP past through his own convex lens.

More than anything else, I sensed a real personality conflict in the interaction between Matt Drudge and David Brock. Clearly, Brock has strengths where Drudge has weaknesses, and vice versa. From his childhood, David was a fastidious and serious character, preferring to munch on a bag of pretzels than eat his own birthday cake. Oppressed by the stigma of his adoption and homosexuality, he is a driven career journalist who excelled in college and won a host of prestigious jobs and fellowships.

Drudge is the anti-perfectionist. A high-school goofoff whose pre-Internet resume ranges from 7-11 to the CBS gift shop, he appears in the book to be blissfully devoid of Brock’s hang-ups. Matt Drudge goes about his work at the speed of light without troubling to check spelling, facts, or public opinion. Walking around in an ill-fitting seersucker suit and shamelessly promoting himself, I imagine why Drudge had a knack for discomfiting Brock in the same way he turned off anyone in the mainstream media establishment.

While Brock claims to have reformed his ways, and recounts the unreliablility of Drudge and other journalists, some of his own reporting is unchecked. For example, he refers to “former John Birch Society member Phyllis Schlafly”. The liberal writer Carol Felsenthal thoroughly researched every rumor attributed to Schlafly in Sweetheart of the Silent Majority. Felsenthal found no grounds for the claim that the founder of Stop ERA and Eagle Forum was ever a John Bircher.

As the story progresses, Brock’s publication of The Real Anita Hill earns him fame within conservative circles.

In helping to clear Thomas’s name for the history books and turn back the feminist tide, I now had a grand mission to fill…There was also emptiness inside me. I had no close personal bond with anyone in the conservative movement. ..I was afraid to be my honest self; and I was too closeted and too right-wing to allow myself to connect with almost anyone else, gay or straight, which meant no real friends, no dating, and only furtive sex…

Gays were becoming a bigger issue in the GOP, but Brock didn’t want to be an openly gay Log Cabin Republican. “I was a closeted opportunist…I again put my conscience in abeyance, this time knowingly.”

Brock rationalizes his way into a checkbook journalism deal regarding the Clinton love child allegation. He reluctantly agrees to get involved in the Troopergate story “because my role…as a right-wing hit man, a hired gun in every sense of the term now – was more than a job; it was who I was. I had a hit to pull off.”

Brock receives many speaking gigs and honors from far-right groups where he rationalizes away the anti-gay rhetoric around him…until he gets outed. Since he never hid his sexual orientation from good friends, he thinks it best to cut his losses when questioned by the media.

…Not until…epithets were hurled at me would I realize that I had been on a fool’s errand in trying to carve out a place for myself as an openly gay icon in the conservative movement. Only then did I begin to see that by allowing myself to be used as a kind of gay right-wing poster boy, I had been complicit in the bigoted politics and rank hypocrisy of the conservatives.

Along the way, he comes to an inconvenient realization:

I knew I was a liar and a fraud in a dubious cause…I trashed the professional reputations of two journalists for reporting something I knew was correct… I knowingly published a lie, and I falsified the historical record.

According to a July 2005 issue of O Magazine, Brock’s book on Anita Hill is still being sold without a disclosure. Martha Levin, executive vice president and publisher of Free Press, says that since her arrival in 2001, David Brock has never requested the addition of new material to contextualize the work. And if he’s really fired up about making right – no pun intended – maybe he could try to exercise a little more control over Blinded’s promotion press copy. Maybe he shouldn’t let anyone describe him as the author of The Real Anita Hill if he’s truly sorry about distortin’ reportin’.

Pushed by agents and publishers for another book, he wrote The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, which was more balanced than his previous books and critical of conservatives who trashed her. When he sees chinks in the story of a Clinton rape rumor, he gets creeped out interviewing some sources and ultimately doesn’t use the story at all. Challenging the Gary Aldrich affair makes him the target of homophobic ad hominem attacks, which turns Brock off further from the Conservative movement.

Throughout the book, there is a blur between ethical behavior, Brock’s trueness to his own sexual identity, and his troth to his own political convictions. Whatever jerks he met on the Red State road to perdition, nobody put a gun to his head and forced him to compromise his moral integrity. I would argue, however, that whatever “conversion” took place when he turned coats, the only thing that’s changed about David Brock is his political alliance.

By Drudge’s first (and next-to-last) appearance, Brock is 280 pages into the book and in a chapter titled “Breaking Ranks”. I’ve chosen to include almost the entire text on Drudge here because most website references to Brock’s allegations don’t offer the entire context.

I had first met Drudge…in June 1997, when Laura (Ingraham), who had struck up an e-mail relationship with him, suggested we cohost a Washington Dinner party for Drudge…Back then Drudge was toiling in anonymnity…I went along with Laura’s suggestion that we assemble a few journalists and politicos to meet and take a measure of the man behind the Drudge Report…

He next sees Matt at a Christmas party later that year. A general discussion of items already reported is mentioned here, including the statement that some Drudge items proved “notoriously unreliable.”

Predictably, the right wing embraced Drudge as the newest frontier in the propaganda wars, and in the next few years he would host a talk show on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, sell a book through the Conservative Book Club…

The Conservative Book Club is just another outlet for Drudge Manifesto. His co-author, Julia Phillips, was a liberal.

…and appear as an honored speaker before organizations of the Christian Right.

But not as a member of the Christian Right! Drudge, a self-described “new age Jew” (Radar interview 2003), is into meditation and Theosophy and many other things that put him far off the same page as the Christian Right. As I discussed in Part One, he’s more a libertarian and a populist than a conservative Republican.

A mischievous imp, Drudge often was clad in an ill-fitting seersucker suit and straw fedora, in a seedy imitation of his idol Walter Winchell.Winchell was not Drudge’s idol, but rather a model.

He delighted in challenging and tweaking the media elites, a quality I had always admired. He had an unerring talent for giving his readers what they wanted, and a nebbishy, beguiling personal charm. His politics were right wing – he often expressed support for Pat Buchanan – though no serious thought seemed to have gone into his convictions.

As you will see presently, the few conversations Brock and Drudge held were in social settings. When you’re networking in a room with plenty of distractions, you don’t have time for deep dialogue.

His Clinton bashing appeared designed merely to drive attention to his site. A loner, he seemed to be looking in the wrong place for attention. In all of these ways, I identified with Drudge, all the more so during an amusing interlude in which I learned that Drudge and I had even more in common than I thought…

Again, I submit that Brock is projecting the same self-criticisms he repeats throughout the book on the people around him.

After the June Washington dinner at my house, Drudge stayed in touch. We made arrangements to have dinner again when I was visiting Los Angeles in late July to visit my thirty-fifth birthday…

Keep this in mind: They’d known each other less than a month, and Brock is recounting the following story as “amusing”:

Drudge picked me up at a friend’s house in the Hollywood Hills in his red Geo Metro, arriving with an impressive bouquet of yellow roses. Jesus, I thought, Drudge thinks we’re going on a date.

Reread the previous paragraphs. Why would Drudge think that? Brock lived out of town and had apparently met him only once.

There are many possible explanations for this turn of events:

• The roses never happened and Brock is lying.
• The roses happened, but Brock is omitting or distorting critical details.
• The roses meant, “If you remember this, and you will, be kind.” (à la Tea and Sympathy)
• The roses meant, “Happy 35th birthday.”
• The roses meant, “Be friends/allies with me, Mr. Important Gay Guy.”
• The roses meant, “You’re gay, that’s okay, you’re easier to shop for, anyway.”
• The roses meant, “What the hell do I get a casual acquaintance/networking contact for his birthday at the last minute?”
• The roses were a recycled gift or at the suggestion of a stupid friend.

Yellow roses symbolize friendship. Red roses symbolize love. White roses…well, maybe Drudge thought yellow roses were most appropriate for the birthday boy.

After dinner at the famed West Hollywood restaurant Dan Tana’s, he suggested we go barhopping along the gay strip on Santa Monica Boulevard, which Drudge navigated like a pro.

F.Y.I.: There are two basic types of gay bars (excluding the leather variety):

• Neighborhood bars, complete with smoke and pool tables
• Dance clubs, frequented by many straight people even if they aren’t the target consumer

Gay bars are cool. I like them because my favorite DJs are there and men will leave me alone on the dance floor. Some bar-hoppers stop by as well. I’d also imagine that they could be a gold mine for gossip and anonymous news sources.

Possibilities here:

• Drudge is gay/bi/ or was confused/experimenting and frequented these bars himself to meet potential partners
• Drudge and Brock actually barhopped both gay and straight bars that night, but Brock is either misremembering or conveniently leaving facts out.
• Drudge is straight and frequented these bars to hear music, meet with sources, and/or “just because”.
• Drudge is straight but was really making an effort to show Brock a good time to cement the friendship/alliance.
• Drudge is straight but was trying to show his out-of-town gay guest the places he’d enjoy but not have time to hunt for.
• Drudge was pretending to be gay to get something out of David Brock.
• Drudge “navigated them like a pro” because he was familiar with city traffic and interested only in drinks and dancing. (The word is “barhopping”, not cruising.)

At a bar called Rage, I accepted his invitation to dance…

Do we know Matt was asking for a close-contact dance partner?

…but I was much more interested in checking out two guys who were dancing nearby. When the couple disappeared, I asked Drudge if he had seen where the pair had gone. “Yeah,” Drudge quacked. “I saw what was going on there, and I stepped on one of their feet really hard to get rid of them.”

Possibilities:

• Drudge never stepped on anyone’s feet and Brock is lying or misremembering.
• Drudge stepped on the man’s foot because he felt threatened or discomfited, whether or not these feelings were founded.
• Drudge stepped on the man’s foot because he wanted to spend the evening talking shop with Brock.
• Drudge is gay and was getting jealous for Brock’s attention.
• Drudge is not gay, but had limited social skills (see Part One) and selfishly wanted Brock’s undivided attention. He feared becoming a fifth wheel if the two strangers danced or chatted with Brock.
• Drudge is not gay but was overzealous in making Brock comfortable.
• Drudge is not gay but was at the bar to dance and hang out, and dancing with Brock would discourage other men from approaching.
• Drudge is not gay but only meant to “barhop” and move on soon, and Brock’s meeting the two guys would slow things down.
• Drudge is not gay but didn’t want to be there alone, and meeting the two guys would have interfered with his personal enjoyment.

Why were they there again? To celebrate David’s birthday, to get to know each other, to socialize.

The gesture was sweet, in a way, but also scary, and I quickly called it a night…

Wait, Dave, I thought you said this interlude was “amusing.”

Six months hence, I received the following e-mail message from Drudge, under the subject heading “XXX.”

That could mean XXX-rated, but then all special Drudge Report headlines are preceded and proceeded with XXXs.

Drudge wrote: “Laura (Ingraham) spreading stuff about you and me being fuck buddies. I should only be so lucky.”Isn’t “fuck buddy” a bit derisive for someone who’s supposedly gay? You decide.

Possibilities:

• The e-mail doesn’t exist. (In all fairness, one news article said there is a documented record of this, but I can’t prove it).
• Drudge is not gay and was saying, “What happened that night has been blown out of proportion.”
• Drudge is gay and was saying, “We can still make it happen.”
• Drudge is gay and was saying, “I know it won’t happen, but we’ll always have Santa Monica.”
• Drudge is not gay and was giggling, “Laura’s spreading this hilarious rumor.”
• Drudge is not gay and was saying, “I had nothing to do with this B.S.”
• Drudge is not gay and was saying, “I’d appreciate your help in clearing up this rumor.”
• Drudge is not gay and was saying, “Beware this so-called friend of yours.”
• Drudge is not gay and was using this an excuse to contact him and say, “let’s hang out and network again.”
• Drudge and Brock have a personality and communication conflict and Brock really took this all as a come-on.
• Brock is consciously distorting context and information.
• A little of the last two possibilities.

Brock’s footnote: “Drudge later denied a report that he was gay in the 1999 book Dish by Jeannette Walls.” Could the Walls book have influenced his later hindsight of what went on that night? And if he had such an issue with the unreliability of the Drudge Report, why quote a book written by a gossip columnist?

My talks with Drudge focused on how he was being manipulated by the right, on what NOT to do with his career. During this period, I had similar conversations with Huffington and with Ingraham…in an attempt to persuade (Ingraham) to modulate her extremist rhetoric. I thought both Drudge and Ingraham, neither of whom had ever worked as journalists, might learn something from my war stories…My concerns made no impression on them. Arianna, Laura, Drudge – sadly, they were all lost causes. They needed to enroll in Clintons Anonymous.

So, hold on…the Matt Drudge anecdotes are tied into the rise of anti-Clintonist journalism and lumped together two other conservatives of the same social/professional network but with different stories. Matt’s story is recounted only insofar as it fits Brock’s agenda for this book.

Two pages later, Brock writes the article “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man” in which he chronicles his “fall from grace” in Washington, “recounting the public attacks and private slights that I had suffered at the hands of the conservatives. I then disassociated myself from the conservative movement, and resigned for good the niche I had created, declaring melodramatically, “David Brock the road warrior of the right is dead.” He starts over east of Eden in New York and makes new, liberal, friends. One pal is Sidney Blumenthal, who considers Brock his “informant” and pumps him for any info to help his lawsuit against Matt Drudge.

Again, I have issue with Brock’s attempt to tailor the legacy of his interaction with Drudge as part of his own specially crafted epiphany. It’s interesting to see how the Drudge pages happened at the “showdown/denouement” of this book. Drudge may never have laid a hand on Brock, but he certainly helped him “climax”, didn’t he?

With his publication of this attack on Blumenthal, I now considered Drudge…to be an emblem of the most reprehensible aspects of anti-Clintonism.

When I was called for comment on the Blumenthal controversy by Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz, I criticized Drudge and told an anecdote about my first encounter with him. Seven months back, Drudge had posted a wrong, though harmless, item about me, saying I planned to leave Washington for New York permanently. Drudge had made no effort to contact me to verify the story before posting it.

I wonder if David Brock contacted his erstwhile friend Laura Ingraham – before releasing this book — whether the hearsay were true about her pulling a gun on her boyfriend.

When I met Drudge at my home, I offered him my telephone number so that in the future he could check facts about me before publication. “Why would I want to do that?” Drudge giggled.

We don’t know how the conversation actually went, however. Drudge did call before running another story about him…that he’d suffered a mental breakdown in writing Blinded by the Right, which Brock reluctantly confirmed.

Brock gets ostracized from longtime friends and colleagues, and by page 292, he’s contemplating suicide. He renews his spirit and lives happily ever after as a Democrat…which, of course, he was to begin with. He goes on to write The Republican Noise Machine, in case people didn’t get the point in Blinded. I guess if enough members of the gay community piss him off, Brock can come out as a “liberated ex-gay” and keep his publisher happy with yet another exposé – this time of some left-wing conspiracy that blinded him from being authentic to his true self.

Again.

David Brock may be more astute than Matt Drudge…he may be more educated, polished, couth, with better social skills and with political leanings closer to my own than Drudge…he may be nicer than Drudge and have done more soul searching… But it doesn’t make him a more credible source, particularly in this train wreck of an autobiography. Blinded by the Right? While he beats his breast and mouths “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” the Milli Vanilli recording that comes out is “everybody else culpa.”

I’m not as convinced as many of Brock’s critics that this book is a total lie. The writing is clearly cathartic for him. But at the end of the day, Brock makes money and extends his brand with this publication. While “making right ‘’, so to speak, he aims unjustified shots below the belt to a whole new set of victims…without following through on a tangible way of making amends for misrepresenting Anita Hill’s historical record (assuming we can believe him NOW). If he’s being unnecessarily unkind to loyal friends and people he barely knew, I can’t imagine he’d treat Matt Drudge any differently…especially with so many reasons not to question his own claims.

XXX GAY RUMOR SOURCE #3: ALEC BALDWIN XXX

By 2002, Alec Baldwin was already mad at Drudge about the publicity surrounding an offhand crack that he’d leave the country if George Bush were elected. He’d claimed in a September 2000 letter to the East Hampton Star that Fox News “provides employment to those who would otherwise be overlooked by more legitimate broadcasting outlets.” Baldwin implicated Matt Drudge, “conservative talk radio hosts,” and Fox as part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” behind Lewinskygate. “”I would put him in the wacko category,” he said of Drudge to MSNBC (a.k.a. the office of Jeannette Walls, discussed in Part 1) in December of that year.

…As I’ve learned, your political opposites, particularly in the media, are totally lying in wait to ambush you and diminish you and marginalize you in any way they can. That works really well for Drudge, Fox, the New York Post, Murdoch-that whole kind of crypto-fascist media arm.

(Sounds like it would work well for you, too, Alec.)

Then came the “cruise rumor.” With no available transcript of the actual interview on Howard Stern, the closest guess I have to the actual context of the 2002 conversation is this:

…This morning, Howard was doing a phone interview with Alec Baldwin. Now Alec is a bit peeved at the columnist at PageSix becuase of an item that was really spun against him. When asked why the columnist would do such a thing, Alec said that the columnist Richard Johnson had hit on him one time. Said he had that look in his eye. So then Howard of course asked if any other men had hit on Alec. And Alec said, “Matt Drudge.” It was backstage one time when both of them were doing Gloria Allred’s show…”

Page Six provides the following quote from Baldwin:

Matt Drudge hit on me in the hallway at ABC Studios in LA when I was doing the Gloria Allred show. He came right up to me and he looked like he had a fork and knife in each of his hands. He said, ‘Do you have any Tabasco sauce? I want to drizzle it all over you.’” (Drudge denies even meeting him.)

Whoa…Let’s get this straight:

• Alec Baldwin goes on Howard Stern, angry about what Richard “Page Six” Johnson said about him.
• Alec Baldwin claims that Johnson happened to have hit on him once.
• When asked if someone else had done the same thing, he names another guy he happens to be mad at.
• Baldwin describes both “cruisers” by the interesting looks in their eyes.

How thoughtful of Alec to give Howard Stern the exclusive. I mean, he could have shared it with so many other news outlets…And with the rather –ahem—“segmented” Stern audience, why, this scoop might have gone completely unmonitored, overlooked, and unnoticed even by Matt, whom I’m sure would be pleased to have been “remembered” by his crush.

Matt did remember to consult a legal eagle. While Baldwin’s claims are actionable, according to Matt’s attorney, the likelihood of collecting damages was small given Baldwin’s impending divorce at the time. And as I discussed in Part One, proving a statement is both false and made with malicious intent lessens those odds even further.

What are the odds that two news sources with whom Baldwin has a grudge also happened to have propositioned him? And why would a controversial conservative hit on a politically active liberal movie star who would be more than happy to expose him?

Possibilities:

• Matt Drudge really did hit on Baldwin in the ABC Studios that day.
• Baldwin is completely making the story up.
• Someone did hit on Baldwin then and there, but Baldwin mistook or misremembered him for Matt Drudge. The power of suggestion may have come into play – both Jeannette Walls and David Brock published their own “gay allegations” of Drudge in 1999 and 2000, respectively.

IN CLOSING: WHAT IT ALL MEANS

If Matt Drudge is gay, why does he categorically deny it when anyone from his past can expose him as a liar? Is he that stupid, reckless or self-destructive?

Technically, it could have happened. He may be truthfully denying rumors in the same vein that Bill Clinton truthfully asserted he never had sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. Sex is defined in the English language in terms of heterosexual coitus.

I don’t feel I have any particular right to the answer to “the Drudge gay question”. But I do have to question why this rumor has become so pervasive that it has become integrated in political discourse. In any case, these allegations serve to discredit the Drudge Report. Too many Drudge critics operate on the premise that Matt is more partisan conservative than he really is, and a hypocrite at that… thus truncating meaningful dialogue about the reports and issues Matt Drudge raises in the media.

I don’t think political or moral zeal should ever cloud critical thinking. If Drudge should be criticized, he should be criticized based on correct information, not layers of speculation parading as fact. Whatever Matt Drudge’s own limitations in terms of accurate reporting, it doesn’t behoove even the best-intentioned critic to stoop to his level…assuming he is the utterly malignant creature he is made out to be.

RegoPark is a writer with a background in marketing communications. She is currently writing a novel about PR and the alternative media.