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| Drudge Manifesto | 
 enlarge | Authors: Matt Drudge, Julia Phillips
Publisher: New American Library
Category: Book
List Price: £7.85
Buy Used: £4.24
You Save: £3.61 (46%)
New (3) from £15.43
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 618786
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reissue
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 247
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0451204913
Dewey Decimal Number: 070.4
EAN: 9780451204912
ASIN: 0451204913
Publication Date: September 2001
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Matt Drudge, Internet Clark Kent or malignant Puritan? November 7, 2001
Matt Drudge, Internet Clark Kent or malignant Puritan?
DrudgeReport.com is the website run by a self-confessed "untrained D student
who happened to get lucky" out of a poky LA flat with a modem and a 486.
Matt Drudge came from nowhere in 1998 to scoop the big boys on Monica
Lewinsky and with a little help from grand inquisitor Kenneth Starr nearly
laid low the president. His Drudge Manifesto is a funny and sharp account of
how it all happened, and also asks some big questions about the future of
the media and its role in US politics.
Now attracting over 3m hits a day to his site, Matt has that prerequisite
for any media superstar: natural-born showmanship. He bitches big time about
the modern affliction of infotainment, that blurring of the lines between
news, advertising and entertainment neatly covered here in his
asteroid-approaching-earth hoax-cum-homage to Orson Welles. But quitting his
hometown of Washington DC to work as a clerk in a Hollywood tv studio and
getting his first scoop by liberating "late century gold" Nielsen ratings
from the rubbish bins before the cleaners could, it's a world he's enmeshed
in, not least because he's so darn entertaining himself. And as he's written
this book in conjunction with Hollywood producer Julia Phillips, can the
biopic be far behind?
Drudge's paeans to the Internet's role in advancing citizen scrutiny of the
- ahem - organs of government notwithstanding, the book also provokes some
darker considerations. First off, from a post-September 11th perspective we
might now ask why was the most powerful nation on earth convulsed through
much of 1998 by the fact of a little presidential semen on a dress? Weren't
there some mighty big foreign policy issues that could have done with a bit
more attention? But the navel gaze is not new to US politics. "Anyone
speaking out on world affairs was tagged pronto as a bore and stiff-armed
socially, " said Ben Hecht in Gaily, Gaily, his memoir of his years as a cub
reporter in 1910s Chicago, before he became an Oscar-winning screenwriter,
working with Hitchcock and Billy Wilder. Hecht's friend Clarence Darrow also
fingered another curious element of the US psyche, what he called its
"malignant Puritanism". Some of Drudge's calls suggest he, too, may be a
victim. When the prez wanting to watch Boogie Nights constitutes an expose
of " the real state of leadership in the country", and the details of the
Lewinsky cigar story have "stunned all those who have heard them and
investigated them" and "now threaten to completely disgust and stun the
American electorate", a jaded eurocynic can only yell: grow up.
Accused of eschewing traditional journalistic practice such corroborating
his sources fully, Matt defends himself deftly in front of the National
Press Club. Claiming his conscience as his guide, his mantra is: "I just go
where the stink is." But someone who occupies a place in his disaffections
is San Jose Mercury News publisher Jay Harris, whom he accuses of having
"brought to the world an erroneous story of the CIA and cocaine in LA",
while Larry Nichols, an aggrieved former Arkansas Finance Development
Authority worker who launched a law suit against Clinton "in which he named
five women he swore the Arkansas Governor had p***ed", receives nothing but
bright praise. However, although they appear 40 pages apart in this book,
there's a connection between Jay and Larry, or more particularly between the
Mercury News story and the AFDA, of which a well-informed chap like Drudge
can hardly be unaware. For a fuller picture, see Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs
and the Press by old skool investigative journalists Alexander Cockburn and
Jeffrey St Clair (it includes a useful chapter titled "Making Afghanistan
Safe for Opium"). And contrast Drudge's out-of-hand dismissal of the Mercury
News story with the words of the man who wrote it and lost his job over it,
Gary Webb: "If anything, we pussy-footed around some stuff we shouldn't
have, like CIA involvement and their level of knowledge. I'm glad I did the
series because this is a story that gutless papers on the East Coast have
been ducking for ten years". Just the sort of stinky thing a free spirit
like Drudge would want to take up? But hey, Matt, just say no. Webb
published his own account of his researches into the CIA's drug links, Dark
Alliance, in 1998.
So where's Drudge's place in the scheme of things? Some of his pro-Internet,
pro-creativity statements make him sound like William Blake. But alone in
his Hollywood flat with only his cat for company, he's also a dead ringer
for Blake's "solitary shadow wailing on the margin of nonentity", pallid
next to the full-blooded Hecht. For all that, I hope he gets his movie, with
Clare Danes as his gal, a Cagney for the 21st century crying: "I'm King of
the Ftp*ing World!".
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