THE DRUDGE MANIFESTO
by Matt Drudge

with Julia Phillips (New American Library) $22.95

“THIS IS THE most exciting moment in the history of news,” Matt Drudge pants–does he know any other mode?–at the outset of The Drudge Manifesto. “Anyone from anywhere can cover anything. And send it to everyone.” This is exactly the prospect that makes critics of Drudge and the Internet do some hyperventilating of their own.

“As exciting as these new [Internet] developments are,” he quotes one critic as saying, “there are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping. It is just beyond imagination what can be disseminated…. I don’t have any clue what we’re going to do legally, regulatorily.” Thus spake Hillary Clinton in 1998. (It was not, incidentally, the first time she had spoken longingly of her desire to curb the depredations of a free press, but that’s a matter for another time.) Most likely the Internet’s critics worry too much; later in the book, Drudge himself admits he could never have become the media star he is if he hadn’t gotten in on the early days of web journalism and caught a few breaks along the way–a contradiction of his everybody-is-a-sleuth Internet populism that he leaves cheerfully unexamined.

But then continuity isn’t his long suit. If you suppose the title of the book suggests something closely reasoned or programmatic, you suppose wrong. The Drudge Manifesto is all Drudge and no manifesto, a breathless fugue on Clinton/ Lewinsky, media agglomeration, and the joys of his own pariah status. The scattershot prose–in which reprinted web postings segue into hipster stream-of-consciousness meditations and on to doggerel verse–sounds like something wrought by the over-stimulated love child of Walter Winchell and Jack Kerouac. Yet despite all its self-conscious eccentricity, it’s an easy read, often entertaining and sometimes astute; like the Drudge Report website, it wants more than anything to be noticed. So who is Matt Drudge, and who’s doing the noticing?

On the first count the book adds little of biographical note. Born in the mid-1960s to a suburban D.C. couple (he a social worker, she an attorney) who split up when he was six, Drudge claims to have launched his journalistic career around the age of 12, reformatting the news hole and rewriting the headlines in the Washington Star from his seat on a park bench. Later on, after graduating high school as number 341 in a class of 355, he went to work on the graveyard shift at 7-11, living for the moment when the bulldog editions of local papers arrived at 2:00 a.m. Following a move to Los Angeles, his father bought him a computer, and young Drudge began posting to Internet news groups. An e-mail newsletter ensued, then a low-tech web page, and then l’affaire Lewinsky.

At present Drudge’s website claims over a million hits a day, and Manifesto is in its third week on The New York Times nonfiction list; it has placed consistently among the top 100 sellers on Amazon.com since well before its release a month ago. A friend of mine swears that Drudge’s audience consists almost entirely of other journalists, and while that may overstate the case, there’s no question that they account for a disproportionate part of his readership. Drudge is the man respectable journalists most love to hate, for one simple reason: His enterprise is just a coarser version of their own, especially where the electronic media are concerned. There is the same compulsion toward getting it fast and getting it first; the same insatiable appetite for petty scandal, the better to obscure the toxic consensus that is the larger scandal of duopoly politics; the same fascination with tabloid grotesqueries; the same unremitting obsession with celebrity. The difference is that Drudge does what he does more crudely, more nimbly, and without a trace of the burdensome pretense of shame that serious journalists must sometimes affect. He is an unabashed lover of salacious gossip and of his own notoriety, two things any true professional must worship in private.

Then, too, part of the official media animus toward Drudge derives from his endless barrage of anti-Clinton salvos and his ties to such unsavory characters as Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent and long-time Republican operative whose resume includes a stint posing as a journalist to spy on the McGovern campaign in 1972. The right-wing myth of the “liberal” media remains as tiresome and pernicious as ever, but it’s nonetheless true that a disproportionate share of the tone-setters and opinion-makers in major media, print and electronic alike, count themselves in the Democrats’ corner, a testament to years spent attending the same schools and playing tennis at the same clubs as the government officials they cover. The media gang hardly holds itself aloof from Republicans–ah, bipartisanship!–but the relationships are not as cozy on the whole. (“You’re too close to your sources,” Drudge griped in one interview, “you’re drinking with your sources. They’re all marrying each other or screwing each other or dining with each other; toasting each other. Tony Blair was at a White House state dinner where John F. Kennedy Jr. was bowing to Hillary. Michael Kinsley was applauding Clinton.”)

The striking thing about The Drudge Manifesto is the near-complete absence of predictable right-wing rhetoric. Drudge goes on at great length about monopoly media, but if there is a single reference to the old saw about liberal establishment media, I missed it. By contrast he spends a good deal of time savaging the chieftains of corporate media, most notably Mel Karmazin, the ad salesman who rose to the head of the CBS empire and worked to promote the kind of “synergy” whereby this summer’s affiliate news broadcasts were given over to wholesale recountings of the latest episode of Survivor. A similarly venomous passage involves a Philadelphia TV station caught selling news segments to its ad clients. “Whether online offline NewLine FineLine,” huffs Drudge, “the Corporate State would have you believe that you must begin and end your day praying to its God of Demographic Dollars.” One can only wonder what some of the more reptilian free-market Drudgeophiles of the get-Clinton days, like Rush Limbaugh and David Horowitz, made of passages like these.

Time will tell whether this departure from his traditional Republican line is just another of the many contradictions in Drudge’s world-view, or a reflection of cannier impulses. If he is genuinely shrewd in his ambitions, an equal-opportunity opportunist, now is a fine time for a reinvention. In the twilight of the Clinton era, with a couple of dullards vying for the White House, retreating partway from presidential politics in favor of a ride on the growing anti-corporate bandwagon would make eminently good sense–if, as one has to suspect, Drudge’s only abiding agenda is to promote the visibility of Matt Drudge.