We’ve all heard it, the famous line uttered by Bill Clinton when he was accused of having an affair with Monica Lewinsky, an intern at the pentagon. It all begins with Linda Price, a colleague of Lewinsky who knew about the affair and felt the moral need to tell the public about what was happening. The story was not run immediately but was eventually exposed by the now famous journalist, Matt Drudge. The story of this scandal has gone down in journalism history and is known to have given credibility to citizen journalism.
I always thought that journalists, and news sources in general clawed and scratched to be the ones to get the best story, cover the biggest scandal, and expose the deepest secrets. It puzzled me as to why NewsWeek stopped publication of the scandal. After looking into it, an interview with the former Newsweek editor explained that “his staff didn’t feel they were on firm enough ground” and that if they had been wrong, it would have ruined the magazine’s reputation…..Sucks to be them. On January 17th, 1998, The Drudge Report, a small website run only by one man had the headline “Newsweek Kills Story on White House Intern: 23-Year-Old, Sex Relationship with President”. Traffic on the site exploded and there were numerous reports of it being so busy that people couldn’t even access it. It was thanks to that single story that the website is now considered “an international clearing space for news”.
When you go the website, you sure wouldn’t think its getting millions of hits a day. It almost seems to be an amateur blog at first glance. If you take a second to really look though, I can guarantee you will quickly be intrigued. As mentioned in the presentation, Matt Drudge has a knack for drawing people in and getting them to read what he posts: with titles such as “400+ SLAUGHTERED…”, “I saw bodies of women and children lying on the roads, beheaded…”, your curiosity is undoubtedly sparked. I found it interesting and quite clever that he uses the ever mysterious “dot dot dot” in every title, you just can’t helping wanting to know what comes after it.
Matt Drudge is known to mostly run the site himself, but he actually gets help from two fellow journalists; Joseph Curl and Charles Hurt. It is also said that Matt Drudge spends his days constantly working on the website, literally posting hundreds of times a day. It’s not that he’s incessantly typing away on a keyboard; there is an occasional story written by Matt Drudge himself but the website mainly consists of his opinion on links to stories by other news websites. The goal of the website is to expose honesty in the media and provide news to the public that would not have otherwise been shown by the main stream media. To summarize; no secrets.
Nevertheless, secrets do exists and finding out about them is pretty scary stuff. The story of Matt Drudge reminded me of the “wikileaks” scandal. The result was an immense backlash and everyone from governments, to media, to corporations seemed to have something to say about it. Although the publication of government documents wasn’t technically a journalistic act, it also exposed government secrets on the basis of “True information does good”, stated by the founder of the website, Julian Assange. However, true honesty seems to come with it’s consequences. Drudge has various lawsuits against him and Assange is constantly hunted, forcing him to have no permanent address or citizenship.
Thinking about it: what don’t we know? What are governments, politicians and powerful people in general really up too behind closed doors? If Newsweek was prepared to withhold the story on the Lewinsky scandal, what else are media sources keeping from us? The necessity for citizen journalism is more obvious than ever. People such as Linda Price and the anonymous sources that sent documents to wikileaks must sadly put themselves at great risk to expose what they know. They are the only link we have to the truth and we need them. The truth is that we really have no way of knowing what’s being kept from us nor how much is being kept from us. However, I get the feeling that one of these days, we’re all in for a shock.