drudge blog

It’s a frightfully busy month out in DrudgeBlogLand, with Lance changing diapers and me excising my own disposable waste from my book manuscript. To tie you over for the interim, I assembled some random quotes from Drudge Radio that I jotted down all those weeks I was multitasking.

A “commonplace book”, by the way, was a common compilation in merrye olde Renaissance England before the days of floppy disks and tape recorders. When you wanted to remember something…(fill in the blank here). You can bet on it that Shakespeare’s Globe Theater was filled with voracious “thought collectors,” busily scribbling pearls of wit onto their books.

Think you know what has or would come out of Matt Drudge’s mouth? Quiz yourself with What Do You Really Know About Drudge, Anyway?

“I’m in that wonderful Drudge cynical mood.”

“News is where you find it. Don’t you agree, you Internet pioneer, you?

“I find comfort in historical context – that we’ve been through this before.”

“Blog – a nasty, demeaning, obnoxious word for people who dare to publish without a symbol on the New York Stock Exchange. Not part of the clique, not part of the crowd. Marginalizing individuals on the Internet with words that sound stupid.”

“They wanna call us blogs, we call them dogs.”

“The state bird is a crane, here, down in Southern Florida…”

“Here I am, paying 35% taxes, plus plus plus plus …”

“Just one analysis from one greasy web monkey on a Sunday night.”

(After a compliment): “Well, uh, thank you, thank you for the suckup there, but…”

“That’s apples and oranges, or, that’s gefilte fish and horseradish…”

“The whores are in the press room instead of the oval office.”

(On Michael Jackson): “If you’re going to besmirch him…if you’re going to put someone away the rest of his life, the accuser should face the accused.”

“I’ll never forget the time 60 minutes came after me and I said ‘I’ve got mace.’ They left me alone after that.”

“I could have sold out a long time ago. I could have had a seat in Davos…I want to build a foundation, some roots…I want to build something real, not something in the air, not something that builds a buzz.”

“I just bought a new Mustang…I am trying to save the American dream…Buy American and buy something that are based on something besides Earth Google maps…And all of you driving around in Toyotas, shame on you…Made in America, folks! This is what is going to get us through…Every auto I’ve ever owned has been American – because I have a heart!… Why wouldn’t you choose America first?”

(Claims a Senator told him on the phone that he thinks Osama is in Iran.)

(On Google stock): “Buy shares in a company that you believe in…There’s no way it’s more stable than Boeing. The Internet’s too new, it’s too unstable.”

“I spent a fantastic week out in Las Vegas at the Wyn. It is like a fantastic dream town…and it breaks my heart, because this is one of the best places on earth.”

(On Dan Rather): “I think he’s a patriot, I really do.”

(On the media): “The real stinky fishbowl”

(He’d leave the country if Hillary’s elected because) “she would tax the hell out of my tax bracket. I’m not some Alec Baldwin.”

“I’ve been getting my MP3s at allofmp3.com”

Random notes (not verbatim):

(MD and Donna Brazile are friends. He’s her home page.)

(He claims to have three IM screens open during the radio show.)

One constant bugaboo of Matt Drudge’s is the One Big Happy Inbred Family known as the media industry. Reporters “sleep” with their sources, literally and figuratively. This too-close alliance compromises the quality of news reportage one way or another…but is perhaps unavoidable.

Independent journalists, perhaps, must lean even more heavily on allies than their inbred cousins in the mainstream press. Just as Matt Drudge has acquired a stable of sources, he owes his success (and survival during a $30 million lawsuit) to a certain stable of allies. The most-utilized ally seems to be Ann Coulter, who gets her usual dose of book PR on Drudge this week.

However you feel about Ann Coulter, she’s mediagenic. She’s unafraid to push the envelope to the limits of social acceptability. Someone who states in an interview that she’s never seen anyone enjoy their husbands’ death so much as some 9/11 widows is not someone who lives in fear of fallout. Not only does she say what others are afraid to say, she says it how they would never say it. But what would happen if she crossed a line that alienated even many supporters – including Matt Drudge?

Ann is one of Matt’s most frequent radio guests. He diligently plugs her projects. When Time posted a front-cover shot of Ann’s legs (she was somewhere in there as well), we heard it on Drudge first. Ditto when a syndicate refused to print an edition of her column. He even posted a pic of a flying pie headed toward her head. Yes, Ann Coulter is news and Matt Drudge reports on the news. But like anyone else, Matt Drudge is as much arbiter as he is reporter. At what point does a reporter of news become an arbiter of news? And how do his allegiances affect the balance?

The friendship between Matt Drudge and Ann Coulter goes a way back. A video of a 1998 National Press Club luncheon shows Coulter was one of two “guests of the speaker” invited to hear Matt’s keynote remarks. That was around the time she told the Washington Post that Drudge was shy around women and once went to a pool with every inch of skin covered. If Modest Matt found that embarrassing, it didn’t stop him from listing her among his friends in Radar back in ‘03. He also survived being dubbed Ann’s “Sexiest Man Alive” in her 2004 interview with the New York Observer.

Relationships count in journalism. Take other friends/allies, whose influence on Drudge outweighs their news relevance. Matt doesn’t cover the book industry save for hot new tomes on politics or pop culture. He was among the last to link to stories on James Frey and Kaavya Viswanathan. So he certainly wouldn’t have issued an original report on a book of poetry, if not for his rapport with Camille Paglia. Likewise, Matt’s short-lived TV show extended Lucianne Goldberg’s fame beyond her 15 minutes as Linda Tripp’s confidante – and well beyond the dish-loving literary agent’s importance. No matter how genuine his irritation at journalists rubbing each other’s backs at parties, Matt Drudge can’t possibly keep his own hands clean other people’s germs – no matter how many Lady Macbeth moments he has in the bathroom sink.

It’s the era of relationship marketing: merchant-customer, vendor-vendor, and journalist-source. Who has your back, and who has scratched it? Whom can you count on to scratch that spot next time it itches? The gossip industry is based on quid pro quo information currency: often something appears on Page Six not because the writers find it particularly newsworthy, but because the source had a scoop on someone else.

Ann’s outrageous hyperbole is her shtick. It’s what people expect from her. But might there ever come a time when it is advantageous for Drudge to distance himself from Coulter – at least in the media? And if the time came, would he do it? And how would he do it? Should he do it now? Those questions could haunt anyone in the mainstream media, but they’re especially provocative for Drudge. With no bosses or industry monitors over him, the only people he has to answer to are his allies and his readers. And there’s no conflict between those two groups…for now.

Hopefully you all made it out alive on 6/6/06. I guess all the hype and the promos for the movie “The Omen” were the real things we had to survive. Drudge joined in the celebration with several 666 links all day.