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AmericanHeritage.com: How Drudge Changed the World of News
How Drudge Changed the World of News
Posted Thursday January 18, 2007 07:00 AM ES
By David Rapp
Eight years ago today, on the morning of January 18, 1998, readers of the Drudge Report were treated to a brand-new experience: a major news story breaking on the Internet. According to the 31-year-old writer Matt Drudge’s unnamed sources, Newsweek had decided not to run a story by its reporter Michael Isikoff about a scandal at the highest level of the government. “A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!” Drudge proclaimed. His initial 400-word blog post would be the start of a chain of events that would almost cause Clinton to be removed from office. And the long-term effect of the scoop would be to take news reporting out of the confines of the newsroom and blast it into cyberspace.
The scandal surrounded the extramarital affair that President Bill Clinton had carried on with the 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky, beginning in late 1995. In early 1996 Lewinsky had gone on to work in the public affairs office of the Pentagon and met a 46-year-old government worker named Linda Tripp, with whom she became friends. By the summer of 1996, she had confided to Tripp details of her affair with Clinton. In 1997, on the advice of a literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, Tripp began tape-recording her telephone conversations with Lewinsky, while encouraging her to discuss the affair. In October 1997, Tripp told Isikoff and other Newsweek reporters about the conversations.
The brewing Lewinsky scandal was only one of many problems besetting the President at the time. A lawsuit was still underway against him by a former Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, who claimed she had been sexually propositioned by then Governor Clinton of Arkansas in 1991. At the same time the independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr was conducting an investigation into the President’s financial involvement in the 1970s and ’80s in the Whitewater Development Corporation, a failed Arkansas real-estate venture.
On January 7, 1998, Lewinsky gave a deposition in the Jones suit and signed an affidavit claiming that she had “never had a sexual relationship with the President.”
Then on January 17, President Clinton was deposed in the Jones suit. During the questioning, he said: “I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. I've never had an affair with her.” By this time, Linda Tripp had met with Kenneth Starr and informed him of her conversations with Lewinsky. Soon FBI agents were questioning Lewinsky as part of Starr’s investigation.
Later that night, The Drudge Report dropped its bombshell: NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN, ran the banner headline. The blog report became a sensation, and on January 21 the story was in the Washington Post. A week later the President was forced to hold a press conference to address the scandal. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” he said. In the months to come, salacious details about the Clinton-Lewinsky encounters were the talk of the nation.
The story soon went beyond the relationship itself and into the realm of possible high crimes and misdemeanors. Starr’s investigation appeared to show that Clinton had lied under oath about the affair, and Starr’s report to the House of Representatives would lead to Clinton’s impeachment in 1999 on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. It was the first time a President had been impeached since Andrew Johnson, in 1868. After a 21-day trial, Clinton was acquitted on both counts by slim margins, but his reputation was permanently tainted, and the President, perhaps more than anyone else, knew it. “What I did with Monica Lewinsky was immoral and foolish,” he wrote in his 2004 autobiography, My Life.
Matt Drudge, meanwhile, who broke the story, became a celebrity. He had a short-lived television show on the Fox News Network in 1998 and 1999, and he published a book, Drudge Manifesto. Just this year he was selected by Time magazine as one of a hundred “people who shape our world,” and not without cause. As he told the National Press Club in June 1998, “Now, with a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world—no middle man, no Big Brother. And I guess this changes everything.” Like him or hate him, there’s no arguing that by breaking the Lewinsky scandal Drudge helped make blogging a major—if still not quite fully respected—force in our lives.
—David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review, and Out.
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/web/20070118-drudge-report...
Posted Thursday January 18, 2007 07:00 AM ES
By David Rapp
Eight years ago today, on the morning of January 18, 1998, readers of the Drudge Report were treated to a brand-new experience: a major news story breaking on the Internet. According to the 31-year-old writer Matt Drudge’s unnamed sources, Newsweek had decided not to run a story by its reporter Michael Isikoff about a scandal at the highest level of the government. “A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!” Drudge proclaimed. His initial 400-word blog post would be the start of a chain of events that would almost cause Clinton to be removed from office. And the long-term effect of the scoop would be to take news reporting out of the confines of the newsroom and blast it into cyberspace.
The scandal surrounded the extramarital affair that President Bill Clinton had carried on with the 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky, beginning in late 1995. In early 1996 Lewinsky had gone on to work in the public affairs office of the Pentagon and met a 46-year-old government worker named Linda Tripp, with whom she became friends. By the summer of 1996, she had confided to Tripp details of her affair with Clinton. In 1997, on the advice of a literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, Tripp began tape-recording her telephone conversations with Lewinsky, while encouraging her to discuss the affair. In October 1997, Tripp told Isikoff and other Newsweek reporters about the conversations.
The brewing Lewinsky scandal was only one of many problems besetting the President at the time. A lawsuit was still underway against him by a former Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, who claimed she had been sexually propositioned by then Governor Clinton of Arkansas in 1991. At the same time the independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr was conducting an investigation into the President’s financial involvement in the 1970s and ’80s in the Whitewater Development Corporation, a failed Arkansas real-estate venture.
On January 7, 1998, Lewinsky gave a deposition in the Jones suit and signed an affidavit claiming that she had “never had a sexual relationship with the President.”
Then on January 17, President Clinton was deposed in the Jones suit. During the questioning, he said: “I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. I've never had an affair with her.” By this time, Linda Tripp had met with Kenneth Starr and informed him of her conversations with Lewinsky. Soon FBI agents were questioning Lewinsky as part of Starr’s investigation.
Later that night, The Drudge Report dropped its bombshell: NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN, ran the banner headline. The blog report became a sensation, and on January 21 the story was in the Washington Post. A week later the President was forced to hold a press conference to address the scandal. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” he said. In the months to come, salacious details about the Clinton-Lewinsky encounters were the talk of the nation.
The story soon went beyond the relationship itself and into the realm of possible high crimes and misdemeanors. Starr’s investigation appeared to show that Clinton had lied under oath about the affair, and Starr’s report to the House of Representatives would lead to Clinton’s impeachment in 1999 on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. It was the first time a President had been impeached since Andrew Johnson, in 1868. After a 21-day trial, Clinton was acquitted on both counts by slim margins, but his reputation was permanently tainted, and the President, perhaps more than anyone else, knew it. “What I did with Monica Lewinsky was immoral and foolish,” he wrote in his 2004 autobiography, My Life.
Matt Drudge, meanwhile, who broke the story, became a celebrity. He had a short-lived television show on the Fox News Network in 1998 and 1999, and he published a book, Drudge Manifesto. Just this year he was selected by Time magazine as one of a hundred “people who shape our world,” and not without cause. As he told the National Press Club in June 1998, “Now, with a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world—no middle man, no Big Brother. And I guess this changes everything.” Like him or hate him, there’s no arguing that by breaking the Lewinsky scandal Drudge helped make blogging a major—if still not quite fully respected—force in our lives.
—David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review, and Out.
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/web/20070118-drudge-report...
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