(Note: Sorry about the dated essay, but I’ve mined the data I thought lost from a disk that got misplaced when I went out of the country months ago…)

In one of Matt Drudge’s name-dropping anecdotes in Drudge Manifesto, someone asks who’ll play him in the Hollywood movie.

“Carl Bernstein,” he shoots back.

Now that the last Watergate mine has been stripped, even Drudge has grown tired of seeing Bob Woodward’s mug on the boob tube. But while Deep Throat is as old as yesterday’s lunch, Matt is indebted to them in more ways than one – sometimes he seemed to fancy himself a modern day successor to Woodward and Bernstein. He can argue till the cows come home on the parallels between Watergate and Lewinskygate, and while Bessie and her calves are navigating their way back, we can debate on whether there is any real civic obligation to expose Bill Clinton’s sexual scruples. But I think one media lesson that can be learned from this is that the fear of risking one’s career can obstruct a lot of important investigative journalism. However you feel about Drudge or the Clinton scandal, part of Matt’s ability to break stories is in an absence of liability. Matt has nothing to lose. He doesn’t have the educational credentials to break into mainstream journalism, anyway, and if his attitude is the same as it is in his interview with the Washington City Paper a few years ago, he doesn’t feel he even deeded that barely-gained high school diploma. He doesn’t like bureaucracy, nor is he into playing by the rules. If it weren’t for the advent of the Internet, he might still be working in the CBS gift shop – until the wrong person caught him looting confidential data from executive suite trashcans. When you’re not part of an industry, you don’t have to answer to anyone.

We want to think that investigative journalists are like Woodward and Bernstein – virtuous, hardworking journalistic drones, each a cross between Cinderella and Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit out of J.R.R. Tolkein. All they needed is a mysterious insider to sprinkle stardust on them or bulldoze them into an adventure thorough Middle Earth.

Even if Matt Drudge bought into the Deep Throat legend himself, the truth is that he doesn’t need to be a Bob or Carl. He’s more useful as he is, where he is – an untethered, free agent who has nothing to lose because he doesn’t have it, anyway. Good. That’s how I like it. Citizen journalists are another voice, not just unfiltered, but unchecked. Another news source with a separate package of pros and cons.