This week on Larry King Live, discussing the James Frey butt-whipping with Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff and Smoking Gun editor William Bastone:

CALLER: What is The Smoking Gun all about?

BASTONE: We’re a CourtTV-owned Web site and what we do is we obtain documents, whether they be police reports or FBI memos, mug shots, primary source documents, and we post them on our site with accompanying stories so the visitor can come and look at actual documents.

And it’s a different way — when we started the site almost nine years ago, we decided we were going to do a Web site that was paper based. So you can come and actually look at the actual documents surrounding a news story.

And hopefully you look at them and you take a look and you determine if the newsworthiness, if they’re of interest to you. So it’s kind of giving you a different perspective of the news than one you would get from kind of a cable television outfit or kind of a newspaper.

…KING: Michael, what do you think of the concept of The Smoking Gun?

WOLFF: It seems incredibly boring to me, but — and I don’t know why anyone would possibly be interested in it. And I have spent the past nine years trying to avoid it.

BASTONE: I’d say it’s kind of interesting that Michael says that. He also avoided reading James Frey’s book. So I bet it’s not stopping him from commenting on it.. So take that with a grain of salt.

WOLFF: Well, I seem to be the only intelligent one who avoided reading the book.

BASTONE: Ah, OK.

Hopefully I’m not the only intelligent one disturbed that a journalist publicly declares the concept of a site specializing in primary source documentation “boring”. Not that a network-owned website can be completely unbiased (even Consumer Reports cannot), but it’s certainly an invaluable resource. Matt Drudge, who has linked to reports on the site, pointed out months ago on the radio show that Smoking Gun primarily posts plaintiffs’ documents and not the other side. So it has limitations, yes. But something I wouldn’t be possibly interested in? Eliminating the media middleman — or at least reducing me dependence upon him? Oh, I forgot. Vanity Fair decides that for me.

Wolff – and his VF editor, Graydon Carter – might be interested to know that I have spent the last nine years trying to cut through layers of news interpretation and commentary from media critics who are too intelligent to review the details of a story before commenting on them.

(On a side note, Drudge claimed in Drudge Manifesto that on a Vanity Fair photo shoot, the magazine fudged his wardrobe credits, identifying his thrift shop shirt as Ralph Lauren and his tie as Echo from Saks Fifth Avenue. I’m honestly not sure if he’d even wear that stuff now that he can afford it.)

You know, I don’t have my head in the sand. The Drudge Report has limitations, just as The Smoking Gun or any other news source. But it’s blatant arrogance like this interview that makes me feel not-so-dirty about patronizing The Drudge Report.

We can only guess what kind of arrangement, informal or formal, that Drudge might have with Yahoo!. He’s been using their news images for years. I’m not so quick to assume he hasn’t worked with them in some way on it. And if you pay (money or other arrangement) to use images, you generally don’t have to credit them. Or Yahoo! just doesn’t mind, due to the fact that he has very prominent Yahoo links and occasionally links to a news story on Yahoo! News. Your guess is as good as mine. I’m giving Drudge the benefit of the doubt on this one…..

Via discussion on this blog, it appears that Matt Drudge is being careless about copyright issues when he uses photos from other sites. I knew that Tom Tomorrow had accused him of using his photo without permission a few years back, but from Tomorrow’s inflammatory comments and projections on the subject I read online, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take them.

Following is the most recent viewer comment on the subject:

He’s mostly going to Yahoo images. From there, if he sees a pic of a person or object he wants to put on his site, he’ll look at the source code of that page and he’ll grab the pic out of the page’s source code (for an example, he’ll copy the image tag - - and paste it in his source code on his own page).

How do I know this? I did a copy cat the other night of a pic of the whale that was in the Thames River in London (this was displayed on Drudge Report’s page). I looked at his source code, went to Yahoo images, type in “whale in London”, found an article w/ the same pic of the whale (which was an AP photo) that was on the Drudge Report, looked at the source code, found the image tag and copied/pasted it on a test page of mine - it was the same photo.

…This link goes directly to the pic of the whale. Pretty simple what he does actually. I really do think that he should have put “AP Photo” underneath the jpg since it really is the property of AP.

I don’t think for a second that Matt has dishonorable intentions. He probably uses the same logic of many, if not most, bloggers and site owners: everyone knows I’m not passing this off as mine. I think he’s being careless and getting stories out there as soon as possible…but that doesn’t relieve him of responsibility. Especially when some of his special reports have read “XXX MUST CREDIT DRUDGE REPORT XXX”.

Unlike Drudge, I’m crediting Mark Shrigley for his work in tracking down several of his recent photo sources. Thanks for your input, Mark.

Since Matt has always waxed philosophical about media’s one big happy inbred family– journalists too chummy with one another, sleeping with their sources (in a literal and figurative sense) — I found it kind of amusing last night when he mentioned a little secret a Senator told him on the phone. (Nothing big — he thinks Osama is hiding in Iran).

If mainstream journalists are sleeping with their sources, does this mean…No. NO! Matt, babe, you gotta get out more.

Seriously, maybe it’s inevitable that successful outsiders get sucked into the game. But if we pay our public servants’ salaries, they’d better talk dirty to us once in awhile…(But you’re excused from phone duty, Senator Frist…)

It’s funny, a bit scary, and makes a point all at once. Did I mention scary… It gets more unnerving the longer I look at it…

“The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left,” announced UCLA researchers whose recent media study may be “the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.”

(Of the 20 major media outlets UCLA studied, only Fox News’ “Special Report with Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter. )

“One thing people should keep in mind is that our data for the Drudge Report was based almost entirely on the articles that the Drudge Report lists on other websites,” representatives maintain. “Very little was based on the stories that Matt Drudge himself wrote. The fact that the Drudge Report appears left of center is merely a reflection of the overall bias of the media.”

Don’t want to say I told you so…because it’s too much of a pain in the buttocks to hunt down the links to the entries where I told you so. (It takes more time to insert links than it does to write a full essay.)

But people see what they want in Drudge. Matt’s wit — and his weaknesses — affirm what media consumers want to believe. I was actually a little surprised to hear him characterized as left-leaning because he’s very libertarian. I’ll speculate that he might go a little out on a limb on stories that cover issues he doesn’t see represented in the media.

By RegoPark
Contributing Writer

More FAQs coming up. I just thought I’d address a few items that I haven’t answered in previous posts.

Q. What is Matt Drudge’s relationship with the hosts of Drudge Blog and Drudge Forum?

A. Matt, as it says at the bottom of the screen, is not connected with either site in any way. We have neither initiated nor received any communication from him and our educated guess is that we’re unlikely to.

Q. Are you concerned that he might take legal action for using his name?

A. Were he ever interested in pursuing that, he would first go after Drudge Retort (drudge.com) and perhaps other Drudge parody sites. We would have no legal protection were we to employ the term “Matt Drudge Blog” or something to that effect. For example, “BillO’ReillySucks.com” is a legally unprotected domain name, but “O’ReillySucks” is protected.

Matt has passed up opportunities to sue people over more serious issues than this, and I can’t imagine him initiating a lawsuit of any kind unless in the case of an unforseen catastrophe. If Matt Drudge had continued his relationship with FOX News, I am sure that the network attorneys would have gone after actionable legal claims on his behalf.

Q. So who are you guys?

A. Um, we’re just…innocent blogging types? Like the Drudge Report, this is a two-person operation headed by Lance, the administrator of Drudge Forum, which RegoPark (yours truly) started posting her “Drudge research” in the fall of 2004. (Not unlike how Matt Drudge himself started out…but that’s for another entry…)

My personal observation is that both Lance and I agree with Drudge on some issues and disagree on others.

I won’t reveal identifying information, but both of us have worked in marketing communications in some capacity in the past. We have never met in person and our communication has been limited to brief Drudge Forum postings and PMs.

Come to think of it, I don’t really know who this Lance character is.

Q. It’s been a long time since the Lewinsky and Blumenthal dramas. Isn’t Matt Drudge past his peak a bit? Is he the same powerhouse he once was?

A. Most of the early DR pages are not archived, but what I’ve gleaned looks like mostly superficial changes. He removes links to sites that charge for content – or people who have burned him (although he has added a link to Sidney Blumenthal and others who don’t like him). Maybe he’s more careful about the Blumenthal lawsuit. Otherwise, not that much is different. He has more friends in higher places, but DR is still known as the place to link an anonymous tip – if he’ll notice it amongst the tons of daily e-mail he sifts through. (He got thousands of daily e-mail even in the early years.)

I’ve heard that now all he does is post links, that he’s obsessed with everything from the weather to Democrats’ sexual peccadillos to photos taken out of context. He’s always done that. I suspect what really changed was the public perception of Drudge and expectations of what his site is supposed to represent. Readers are more aware of brand attributes that have, for the most part, been there all along. I’d say he has decidedly more power and clout than the webloggers, but still in the “citizen journalist” camp. I see him somewhere in the middle of the respectability continuum - still an outsider, just no longer a pariah.

I think DR changes only with the items in the news. It’s twofold. On one hand, he generates publicity on obscure news stories; on the other hand, the daily links to a certain extent reflect what the major media players have already deemed newsworthy. I don’t think for one second that Matt cares about Jessica Simpson’s divorce or Paris’s supposedly hacked Sidekick. He scrutinizes their press coverage. He wants to keep his finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the world.

This is someone who, for better or worse, really does not care what people think of him. He has stated in several different interviews that he doesn’t expect his reign to last. People could tire of him, something else could come along to outshine or supplant him, a major computer virus or too many online news sources charging for content could throw a monkey wrench in it all. I see him as someone who enjoys what he is doing and wants to carry on as long as he can. Maybe that’s what I like most about him.

Q. What got you interested enough in Drudge to work on a website?

Lance:I find the Drudge Report fascinating. Matt Drudge and his Drudge Report have had a major impact on media, newsgathering, politics and the internet as a whole. I think there are many reasons why the Drudge Report is very intellectually stimulating and unique. This goes way beyond just his politics or the news that he posts. What I’ve found to be missing out there is any detailed analysis or discussion of what goes on each day on the Drudge Report. Sure, some bloggers discuss it on occasion, but it’s usually focused only on the news stories themselves - not as much the unique way that the story came to be, or what happened before or after, or how it relates to a story Drudge ran previously.

I thought it would be fun to take on a blog that’s focused on the day-to-day happenings and analysis of the Drudge Report. I’ve talked about some Drudge topics on Drudge Forum, but haven’t really gone into the detail that I wanted…I think many Drudge fans are very busy or want to remain anonymous or even on the sidelines, so a forum may not be best for some. Let’s face it, the Drudge Report is probably a “dirty” little addiction for many people. You just have to look at it every day, but you may not want to tell anyone. That’s just the kind of thing I want to talk about here!

RegoPark: A friend of mine, a former political employee whose privacy I am protecting, ended up on the Drudge Report. What started out as a joking comment mushroomed horribly out of hand thanks in part to Matt’s original reporting. When I scanned my friend’s “news coverage” online, I thought Matt Drudge must be some pompous College Republican with a very ambitious home page. Who else but a kid would design a site like that? So I moved on to the “real” news, unaware that this Alex P. Keaton WAS the news generator.

Searching for freelance projects one day, I saw that Raw Story was establishing itself as a liberal equivalent of Matt Drudge. They were recruiting a corps of freelancers to duplicate what one guy did by himself. Still later, I spotted Matt’s profile in a public relations textbook – in one of his painfully cheesy posed shots, looking like a rat in a fedora. I figured I’d better do some media catch-up and that led to an evening of surfing the web.

“A Gay Who Backs the Gay Bashers!” pops up when you Google Matt Drudge. Mel Gibson’s “token Jew” at the Passion of the Christ premiere! The son of liberal parents with master’s degrees, who barely graduated high school and couldn’t finish the religious school requirements to have a bar mitzvah.

But a different picture emerged when I read actual interviews with Matt Drudge and carefully isolated the quotes from the reporters’ edits of their conversations. Matt clearly believes in what he is doing. He is more ethical than I first made him out to be, and he definitely has a legitimate place in the media landscape. He can come off as an alarmist, a suck-up, a buffoon, but he knows the media and is an inspiring entrepreneur story. If the New York Times is the superego, Drudge is the id. He’s the anti-perfectionist, with no pretentions. He knows his strengths – his extensive connections, reporting news items first – and doesn’t try to be anything he’s not.

Ultimately Drudge is the “nice Jewish bad boy”: a news source – and person – with many redeeming, menschlike qualities once you study him without prejudice. You introduce your parents to the Wall Street Journal. You take CNN to a charity function. You sneak around with Drudge, but if he knocks you up one day, you’ll both make the best of it.

I view Drudge from a PR angle, and he is one fascinating case study. When you get past the hype and the crap, this is one of the most genuinely interesting people in the media. A Drudge interview on C-SPAN is compelling. But he typically makes an ass of himself on Hannity & Colmes, where the guys push all the wrong buttons and bring out the worst in him.

Ultimately Matt inspired a character in a novel I’m writing, so I began accumulating an extensive Drudge archives to research the logistics of running a site like the Drudge Report. That’s how I discovered Drudge Forum and began sharing facts and interesting trivia, correcting other members’ misunderstandings about all things Drudge. About a year ago this writing, Lance invited yours truly to contribute postings on this space, The rest is history.

More on the rising star of Andrew Breitbart and his relationship with Matt…No, not THAT kind! Though they would make a cute couple…Andrew’s Heath Ledger to Matt’s Jake Gyllenhaal…

Come on, now! That’s a joke! I already told you why those rumors aren’t true!

In all seriousness, I guess I could blog an entry on “The Year in Drudge”, in which the birth of the Huffington Post and the departure and subsequent return of Andrew Breitbart would go down in history as the biggest 2005 news in Drudgeworld. Or the Biggest False Alarm. But that’s so Dish.