Is Drudge Really Gossip?
Today Drudge is posting Variety’s report that New York Times is dropping its gossip column in the aftermath of the Jared Paul Stern scandal at New York Post’s Page Six.
I’ve always taken exception to the claim that Matt Drudge is a gossipmonger. His position has always been that the mainstream media have occasionally let us down in terms of accurate, unbiased news coverage. I myself have always said that a publication that posts its own gossip column is in no position to lecture me or Drudge about his legitimacy. I say this knowing fully well that Matt himself reads and links to gossip columns, and probably always will.
Ironically, I stumbled upon a fascinating book by Page Six’s Paula Froelich, It!,,in which she tells point blank how the gossip industry works. No mention of cool bribes, but basically mention in a column like hers is a “quid pro quo” game. She’ll run an item about you or your client if you can offer a juicy tidbit on someone else that can’t be disproven. Of course, seeing someone’s name in print “legitimizes” them, right? I won’t get into my own lecture on subconscious legitimization, but despite my dislike for what she does, It is a surprisingly good book and I’m not above checking it out in the library. I’d describe it as more or less PR advice that has appeared elsewhere in books like Guerilla PR, but the stories and insights make it worth the time investment. I’ve never been interested in Paris Hilton other than as a PR case study, and I’d seen silly items on her in places like New York long before her “video” came out. What I didn’t know was that her mother had been pushing her publicity since she and her sister were teenagers: “Kathy Hilton…(worked) to get them invited to all the right parties, calling 35 times in one day to get them into the Golden Globes. Kathy always refused to take no for an answer, known to take gossip columnists out for dinner when they started getting a little catty about them… ” I could say more about the relationship between gossips and publicists, but that’s for another blog.
The point of all this is digression is that a machine processes and spits out the “news” you read on Page Six, Rush & Mulloy, and the about-to-be-defunct Boldface Names. At least the questionable items on the Drudge Report are newsworthy, and not the product of a media hiearchy nor tainted by office or industry politics. (Large blogs like the ones owned by Gawker Media aren’t immune to that, not to single them out.) For all the Drudge Report’s limitations, at least I know that Matt’s reports are tainted only by him.
In my humble opinion.
by RegoPark - 1:55 pm
April 12th, 2006 at 10:28 pm
I didn’t used to like Drudge — I’m a former member of the Washington press corps and we’re about the same age and when Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post some years ago wrote several columns in a row including exclusive-to-Kurtz quotes from Drudge, as well as a feature story on Drudge, I finally broke down and emailed Kurtz. And to my embarrassment the truth came out in that email: That basically I was jealous of Drudge, that he had all this going and I didn’t and what’s more as far as I could tell Drudge couldn’t cover a local school board meeting accurately, and that most of his page was links, and that of those stories he broke he basically stole one day earlier from the publications that were going to run them. Kurtz wrote me back (surprise of all surprises) and listed several items over the years that Drudge did indeed break by himself. And he was very gentle in the email, considering. (Drudge definitely had a convert in Kurtz.)
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Since then I’ve come to appreciate Drudge much more and actually find myself defending him frequently. Part of it has to do with the crap I witnessed within the Washington press corps — I stomped away a few years ago and don’t plan on going back into journalism. The laziness. The sloppiness. The creepiness. The inability to produce original material not handed out on a press release. Did you know that AP Washington bureau reporters routinely do not even show up for the Capitol Hill hearings they cover!?! This is well known and has gone on for years — they prewrite an article based on one person’s written testimony (most reporters have testimony forwarded to them before the hearings) and that’s it. They don’t show up. Their seats are notoriously empty at the hearings themselves. They might hit on the news — but often do not; most of the news is not in what an organization’s position has been for years but in what the federal lawmakers ask, their dialogue, any indications on how they are about to change federal law. But I’m seriously digressing here. This is just one example of the crap that passes for news out of our nation’s capital. See if a local school board reporter could get away with practices like that.
Drudge, in his original reporting, might use only one source — but he doesn’t pretend he has more than one source, unlike Newsweek, for example, which got into hot water over I think it was the Koran-flushing story which the reporter originally wrote was backed by “sources.” (I know this sounds nit-picky and little but it’s important to a reporter; I’d much prefer to know upfront what kind of sourcing the piece is relying on and Matt Drudge has always told it like it is in that regard.)
As for his reporting on the media or what’s going on behind the scenes in the media and what stories they are and are not reporting, more power to him! He hasn’t gotten the credit he deserves for helping to make the national mainstream media the issue it has become in recent years.
The most amazing thing now, it seems to me in hindsight, is that he withstood the multi-million-dollar legal challenge to him coming from within the mainstream, meant to destroy him and the Drudge Report, put him out of business forever. I mean this is just one guy out there, after all. He shouldn’t have survived this long. He should have been a Where Is He Now? guy. Had everything gone the way it did with most 1990s startups his time would have been over before the year 2000. The pressure is intense in the media world and the instinct in the mainstream media to tear down anything it perceives as a threat is very real. It’s not just that Drudge continues to be an alternative to the mainstream, which in any form basically presents you with exactly the same front-page headlines as its competitors day after day. It’s that he truly is a culture creator too.
April 15th, 2006 at 9:35 pm
Layla, thanks for your insight. I’ve addressed a few of the items you mentioned in previous entries and want to go further into others as time permits…I hope you’ll stay tuned and share your thoughts again!
April 18th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
I love Drudge and am always impressed by his strategic savvy and ability to stay on top of the news. Matt seems to have uniquely positioned “The Drudge Report” as the major connection point between Internet news, blogs, and talk radio — a quickly adaptable and lethal combination against legacy newspapers and magazines in the age of the 24/7 news cycle.
If you’re interested, I record his Sunday evening radio program. Listen to the Drudge Radio Archives at:
http://www.pretendpundit.com/the_drudge_radio_archive/
April 21st, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Thanks, I’ll check it out! Now maybe I can hear what I missed when I was out of the country.