March 12, 1998

Matt Drudge: Cyber-Gossip 
Revels in Washington's Scandals

By FRANCIS X. CLINES

ASHINGTON — The first question in the air as Matt Drudge, cyber-gossip extraordinaire, sidled up to the pack of news workers camped endlessly outside the federal courthouse was whether Drudge even belonged in their midst.

Related Article 'The Web Made Me Do It' (February 15, 1998)

"Are you a reporter?" a news reporter shouted in the cold at Drudge, demanding the bona fides of a man variously rated as somewhere between fame and infamy for regularly muckraking rumor, gossip and facts into an Internet melange that, among other effects, helped propel the Monica Lewinsky sex-and-mendacity investigation to the fore.

"Do you check sources?" boomed another edgy questioner as Drudge, just in from the small Hollywood apartment where he composes into the night as a one-man phenomenon, took to the microphone cluster to reply to the credentialed pack who wait there daily because of the Lewinsky inquiry and its rare scraps of fresh information.

Drudge clutched his summer-gray straw hat in the stiff wind, squinting like a character actor blown East from a noire film. Reporters laughed unsympathetically when a squirrel darted into Drudge's photo op as he firmly defended his professionalism and insisted he was one of them.

"I'm a working reporter who has written thousands of stories and driven dozens of news cycles," Drudge shot back with a tight-eyed glare. "I check all my sources."

The exchange was precisely to the point of Drudge's courthouse visit, for even as the Lewinsky matter was being pursued in private before a grand jury, Drudge was arriving to defend himself in a $30-million libel suit brought by Sidney Blumenthal, a ranking strategist to President Clinton and no free-speech stranger himself in the courthouse's separate Lewinsky inquiry.

Credit: Associated Press  Matt Drudge talking to reporters on Wednesday outside the courthouse.

"At worst, it was an accurate report of an inaccurate rumor," Drudge declared of his report last year, an exclusive built of false and nasty accusations that Blumenthal had a history of spousal abuse. A full Drudge retraction soon followed. But Blumenthal, far from satisfied, waited in a sixth-floor courtroom to seek emphatic damages from Drudge and his more richly endowed Web patron, America Online.

By the time he arrived upstairs for a pretrial hearing, Drudge had proved to be enough of a reporter, at least, to be unabashedly feeding information to working reporters and other corridor denizens for Wednesday's Lewinsky story, a closed tale taking place three floors below.

"No grand jury witnesses today," Drudge was soon confiding avidly of the secret grand jury workings as he waited rather blithely to be sued. "They're playing audio tapes down there, Linda Tripp tapes."

Before the judge arrived for a pre-trial hearing, Drudge wandered the courtroom, incorrigibly working the sparse crowd, displaying the latest profile piece on him in The Wall Street Journal, laughing loudly in chats as Blumenthal silently waited.

Drudge is a bold, angular, furiously curious man of 31 years who suggests an odd collaboration of Dickens and Raymond Chandler. He scoffs at being criticized as a wayward amateur by journalism-school deans and news media Brahmins. He seemed undisturbed as the two unconnected stories converged on him in the very same courthouse. But his pride showed when the pack -- his pack, he insisted -- shouted the question of why, for of all the reporters working the sex-and-politics stories he helped uncover, Drudge is virtually alone in pleading a First Amendment defense in the Internet libel suit.

"It's baffling," he answered, noting that he was first to break several aspects of the presidential inquiry story. "What does it say about the Washington press corps?" asked Drudge, who, like many reporters, has no formal journalism training but who, unlike most reporters, also has no editors checking his product after he hits the "Enter" key.

"The media is my mistress," he said in an interview, describing his life as a news junkie who fell asleep as a boy listening to the police scanner for breaking crime news. "I hug the stories," he said, referring to his endless fixes of television, radio, print and Internet news.

From all this curiosity and mania to break secrets, he said, he makes at best $3,000 a month as a provider to America On Line, the web feeder that argued in court on Wednesday that it is not liable for Drudge's errors because the communications law guarantees "robust and diverse speech" for the Internet.

"I had 6.7 million visitors in the past month," Drudge said of his website, listing some genuine, uncontested exclusives and explaining why he feels vindicated, come snub or libel suit.

"I love not knowing where any of this is going," Drudge suddenly exulted in a conversation, speaking of both the Lewinsky and libel stories but savoring even more the scandals of Washington still to be told in the Drudge Report. "There's too much money coming into this town, too much heat, too many satellite dishes!"