The Drudge Factor
By Andrew L. Shapiro

Matt Drudge is right where he wants to be: front and center, shaking things up, making everyone squirm a bit. It is late spring of 1998 at Harvard University's cavernous Memorial Hall, site of the Second International Harvard Conference on Internet and Society. On the stage, the distinguished law professor Arthur Miller is leading Drudge and half a dozen other panelists in a Socratic dialogue on news in the digital age. The panel includes prominent editors and writers, an esteemed professor of media studies, a leading cyber lawyer, and a well-known Washington pundit. For Drudge, the infamous Internet columnist who distributes his near-daily Drudge Report online, the formal setting is just right. Drudge's routine, after all, is about thumbing his nose at the establishment.

Miller spins out one of his intricate fictional scenarios for consideration by the group. It's about an Internet hack, just like Drudge, who publishes an online journal that is full of controversial claims. Miller grills the panel with point-blank questions: What are the writer's responsibilities to the public and to the truth? How should traditional media organizations respond to him? Should he be held to the same legal standards as other publishers? Is he a threat to the republic — or a savior?

Though the questions are hypothetical, it is clear to the panelists and the few hundred audience members that it is Drudge who is on the spot. Drudge's name has been synonymous with concerns about the accuracy of information on the Net ever since his erroneous August 1997 report that Republican operatives had court records showing that Sidney Blumenthal, an aide to President Clinton, had beaten his wife — a claim Drudge retracted a day later. (Blumenthal nonetheless sued Drudge for defamation.) As Miller presses his questions, most of the panelists agree that the ability of everyone to be a publisher is a positive development for free speech, democracy and humanity generally. But many express concern that, without a sense of limits, this new individual power may cause our information universe to become even more plagued by half-truths and lies than it already is.

"We're going to see reputations destroyed, stocks plunge, people lose money, and then maybe months later, years later, it will be 'oops, it wasn't true,'" says panelist Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. "There's going to be a whole lot of collateral damage." Drudge, his brow furrowed in mock-detective concentration, does little to convince anyone otherwise.

"We're entering the era of the citizen press where everyone's going to be a reporter and has the right to report, not just 'legitimate' news organizations," he says bluntly.

With no experience in journalism prior to launching the Drudge Report, Matt Drudge certainly has the right to distinguish himself from the professional media. Working from what he describes as a "a moldy apartment just off Hollywood Boulevard," he eschews the traditional conventions of journalism — original reporting, double sourcing, fact-checking — in favor of a vacuum cleaner mode in which all tidbits are collected and the most sensational are spewed out. In the spirit of infamous tattlers like Walter Winchell, he prides himself on having made his name by disrupting the accepted workings and assumptions of the major media organizations. He scoops their breaking news and runs the stories that they don't think are fit to print.

"The reason I'm succeeding," Drudge tells the audience, "is I reject the corporate notion of news-controlling news cycles, embargoing things, killing stories."

Drudge's first real coup, in fact, was his exclusive report that Newsweek had decided not to publish a certain story suggesting that President Clinton had had a sexual affair with a former White House intern, and that independent counsel Kenneth Starr was investigating a possible cover-up of the relationship. Here's how it began:

01/17/98 21:32:02 PST-NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN X X X X X
BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT

The implications of Drudge's report, as we now know, were devastating. Within hours, his account was mentioned on one of the Sunday morning television news programs by conservative commentator William Kristol. "The story in Washington this morning," Kristol said, "is that Newsweek magazine was going to go with a big story based on tape-recorded conversations, which [involve] a woman who was a summer intern at the White House." Immediately, former Clinton advisor George Stephanopolous dismissed Kristol's reference: "And Bill, where did it come from — the Drudge Report?"

From there, the major news outlets were all over the story, and the rest — denial, scandal, impeachment, acquittal — is history. Technically, it all started with a report typed and e-mailed from the home computer of an irksome Internet gadfly. Of course, even without Drudge, news of Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky would eventually have broken. But the facts themselves might have unfolded differently. Newsweek reportedly held the story at Starr's request because he wanted Lewinsky to wear a wire and tape incriminating conversations with Vernon Jordan and perhaps even Clinton. Once Drudge hit Send, that plan was dashed. The actions of one individual online, in other words, may well have shaped the political scandal of the decade (if not the century).

Perhaps no form of disintermediation is more starkly apparent today than the removal of layers of news middlemen that the Net allows — and that Matt Drudge personifies. Where once there were reporters, writers, editors, fact-checkers, production staff, publishers, libel lawyers and large media owners, now a worldwide dispatch may be the end result of a quirky thought and a bit of tapping at a keyboard in one's bedroom.

The emergence of small online publishers has confounded the journalistic establishment. Should these neophytes be treated as colleagues, able to claim the legal and professional privileges of traditional journalists, and eligible for the industry's top honors and prizes?

The shift in power dynamics that is causing this bewilderment has many salutary results, as we have seen. Major news outlets will be held more accountable — like Time magazine in the case of its flawed cyberporn report — and upstarts may be able to find an audience and diversify the media environment. But as with excessive personalization of experience, there is a downside, a point at which the advantages of news disintermediation are outweighed by its disadvantages.

No Need to Check

To begin with, the accuracy and integrity of information may be uncertain when it comes from sources that don't have editors and fact-checkers, and major reputations at stake. This is mostly a function of resources, as it takes time and expertise to do careful reporting and checking of facts. I remember asking Drudge at the Harvard conference whether, with his increasing prominence, he had any plans to hire a staff to help him put out the Drudge Report. He scoffed at me and said no, as if I just didn't get it. Now, I think I do get it. The Drudge factor — that is, the extreme disintermediation of our information environment — means that responsibility for determining truth rests as much with those who consume information as with those who produce it. This is an archetypal example of the control revolution, for it represents a clear transfer in power over one of our most important social functions: who distinguishes fact from fiction and ultimately determines what is true. Increasingly, we bear that burden. Increasingly, responsibility for determining truth rests as much with those who consume information as with those who produce it.

For figures like Drudge, the beauty of this is that they can appeal directly to our innate desire for total control. Who are we to make authoritative claims about truth? You decide! It means Drudge never has to say he's sorry if what he publishes is wrong. In a sense it can't be wrong, because he simply reports what he hears in offhand conversations with reporters, editors, and sources. A scandalous newspaper story is in development; a breathtaking magazine article is being killed. Rumor has it that it says X (or maybe Y or Z). Drudge needn't have any confidence that the underlying claim is right, since he's merely relaying what someone else is researching or writing. Yet these individuals, who are closest to the story, may also have expressly decided that it cannot yet be reliably reported.

No Time to Check

The Net's many-to-many interactivity means that there will be a steady increase in available information and, correspondingly, an increase in the number of mendacious smears, dangerous distortions, and wacky conspiracy theories that float around. The split-second speed at which digital material can be distributed anywhere allows these half-truths and lies to spread instantly and with little time for verification. This increases the pressure on all content providers, including the most venerable journalists and media organizations, to cut corners and lower standards in order to get the story first — or at least not to lag far behind.

Here is an example, then, of how increasing individual control not only can make the standards and performance of middlemen less relevant, but can actually subvert them. The same forces that may induce Web publishers to play fast and loose with the facts are affecting our most prominent media companies. These organizations are, increasingly, disintermediating themselves — migrating to more rushed and unfiltered news coverage in order to keep up with the quick pace of the Net.

"Feed the beast. File. Now. Now. Now!" That's how one newspaper reporter describes the pressures of "24-hour cyber-cycle" journalism. On television, we see a rise in live "spot" news coverage and talk programs where nonreporter "experts" speculate about events as they unfold. Magazines and newspapers similarly rush stories into print — or, even better, onto their Web sites — only to retract them hours later.

In the early days of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, for example, the Dallas Morning News placed an article on its Web site stating that a Secret Service agent was prepared to testify that he had seen Lewinsky in a "compromising situation" with the president. Hours later, the story had been removed with a statement from the Morning News that it was wrong. The next morning, however, the print version of the newspaper carried the story with modifications, and it was retracted altogether on the following day. Shortly thereafter, The Wall Street Journal similarly published a breaking story on its Web site stating that Clinton's personal steward had told a grand jury that he had seen Clinton and Lewinsky alone together. The report was immediately criticized by the steward's lawyer as false and irresponsible. The next day the Journal published a revised version of the story in its print edition.

In a sense, these newspapers may have been using the Web to test the validity of a controversial story before committing to it in print. By its nature, an article published on the Web is always in "release 1.0," to use the lingo of software developers. The fact that it can be modified so easily and imperceptibly prevents it from ever really being a final draft. Instead of running a correction, an author can simply change the text as it appears on the Web. The problem is that this ability to make seamless corrections after the fact can create a journalistic atmosphere in which sloppiness and inaccuracy are tolerated. With the pressure to be first to get the story out, the "publish now, edit later" school of journalism may become widespread.

No Way to Check

Another danger is that due to the novelty of the Net we may not yet have developed a sophisticated eye for judging the veracity of online information. The ability to make such communications anonymous or pseudonymous, or to manipulate dates or other identifying information, means that someone's random conjecture or joke can easily be mistaken for an assertion of fact — whether it is intended to be taken that way or not. Digital signature technology will likely allow us to authenticate who really sent an e-mail (such as one that says it's from president@whitehouse.gov). But beyond the simple question of whether the sender is really who she says she is, critical faculties for the evaluation of information online have yet to be developed widely.

As novelist and critic Umberto Eco says, "After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs. If I see the words Harvard University Press, I know it's probably not going to be a cheap romance. I go onto the Net and I don't have those skills."

This type of complaint, which is commonly heard today, should subside in years to come. Already, information brands are being established online — some from the world of old media, some intrinsic to new media. And Internet users are developing experience that allows them to distinguish the cheap from the refined, the dubious from the accurate. By the time photos of a mauled Princess Diana in her crashed Mercedes showed up on the web in September 1997, for example, most Internet users were quick to question their authenticity.

Still, because of the fast-morphing nature of information online — its ability to be there one day and gone (or changed) the next — the likelihood of being bamboozled may always be greater online than in traditional media. Who could have known that a commencement speech circulated widely on the Internet and purportedly written by novelist Kurt Vonnegut would turn out to be a newspaper column written by a columnist for The Chicago Tribune? Even the existence of fluid hyperlinks between Web pages poses difficulties. While it allows readers to gain depth and perspective on a story, it also means that a few clicks may take them from an established Web site to an offbeat site to one that specializes in delusional speculation, often with little indication that they've switched information sources.

In this environment, it will also be more difficult to distinguish editorial content from advertising, or to tell whether there's really just an accomplished charlatan behind a Web site that says "published by Big-Time Press," "classes offered by Big-Time University," or "manufactured by Big-Time Company." What's at stake is not just our news intake, but all forms of fact-gathering — by academic researchers, businesses, human rights activists, and so on.

We Have Met the Enemy

Having seen the dangers of oversteer in this context, we need to be clear about who is responsible for these hazards. It is, of course, tempting — and easy — to point a finger reflexively at the Drudges of the world. Yet simply blaming provocateurs and firebrands will do us little good. It could, in fact, cause us to miss the real challenge at hand. In a culture of disintermediated news, threats to truth have as much to do with consumers of information as with its producers. That everyone can be a publisher may be disconcerting, but it is not itself a great danger. Rather it is this fact combined with the illusion that we can all be our own editors and fact-checkers that gets us into trouble.

Paradoxically, then, a culprit here is the celebrated access to information that the Net allows. Before the Net's emergence, anyone could print up a leaflet full of conspiratorial nonsense. But their distribution methods were limited. Geography and cost were strong barriers that prevented false information from getting far. These factors acted, in a sense, as filters that prevented individuals from consuming unreliable information. The Net, by contrast, makes it easy for a few prevaricating crackpots to spread lies — and for us to read them, naïvely believe them, and irresponsibly pass them on.

Yet misinformation is only really dangerous when there is both an unreliable source and a credulous audience. As the amount of questionable material increases, then, we need to be ever more cautious and skeptical. Indeed, the control revolution is blurring the distinction between news professionals and audiences, forcing us all to deal with the same predicaments. The common challenge is one of exercising self-restraint to prevent the spread of inaccuracies. On the one hand, that means not being the originators of flawed information (though obviously, few of us intend to do that). On the other hand, it means exercising caution as information consumers. Do we blindly believe what we read? Do we weigh the accuracy of different content providers? Do we pass along, without warning, information that we know comes from dubious sources?

Even as journalists and citizens become seemingly interchangeable, though, a fallacy of the new individual control is the idea that each of us can, or should, judge the accuracy of information on our own. We shouldn't be our own editors. Rather, we should choose our own editors, and do so carefully. What we need is not less mediation, but more effective mediation.

This is, admittedly, a tall order. During the weeks following Drudge's challenge to the establishment at Harvard, one journalistic scandal after another broke at top media organizations — as if to prove Drudge's claim that he is no worse than the old guard. A writer at the New Republic was fired for littering dozens of stories with fabrications that, in retrospect, seemed so obviously false that even a high school editor should have caught them (and he was initially exposed in an online publication). Two well-liked Boston Globe columnists were dismissed for journalistic misconduct. And more heads rolled when CNN and Time magazine retracted a much-hyped joint project in which they had accused the U.S. military of using nerve gas on American defectors during the Vietnam War. Traditional news outlets, then, have no monopoly on virtue when it comes to the reliability of information. There is a difference, however, between their lapses and that of a hack who publishes from his home via e-mail. It's that no matter how much people complain about the hack, he can't be fired. As Drudge himself once said in response to criticism from the White House press secretary, "What is Mike McCurry going to do, call my boss?"

- Andrew L. Shapiro is a writer, lawyer and policy analyst interested in the legal, economic and social impact of the Internet. His byline has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Observer, The Yale Law Journal and The Nation, where he is a contributing editor. In addition, he directs the Aspen Institute Internet Policy Project and is a consultant to the Markle Foundation. This essay originally appeared as a chapter in his book "The Control Revolution: How The Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know" (1999); reprinted by permission.