IDEA No 57
THE DRUDGE REPORT
When Matt Drudge was working in the gift shop at CBS in 1994, he started sending out studio gossip to a few friends via email. He called it the Drudge Report. A couple of years later, the newsletter moved to the Web, where it would change the face of journalism forever.
Matt Drudge, founder and editor of the Drudge Report.
During Bill Clinton’s first term as president (1993–97), he was accused of sexual harassment by former state employee Paula Jones. Her lawyers subpoenaed women they suspected Clinton had had relationships with, one of these women was Monica Lewinsky. She denied it, which outraged her colleague Linda Tripp, who had taped conversations with Lewinsky admitting the affair. Tripp gave the tapes to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who now had his smoking gun.
Reporter Michael Isikoff had been investigating the story for over a year and Newsweek was due to publish on Saturday 17 January 1998. Moments before the magazine was due to go to press, the editor pulled the story. Accusing the president of having sex with an intern in the Oval Office was just too big a deal: he needed time to double-check the facts. Matt Drudge got wind of the scandal that evening and had no such qualms. The story broke on the Drudge Report website shortly before midnight.
Journalism would never be the same again. It was Newsweek’s story but the Drudge Report got the scoop; Newsweek had lost its nerve and paid the price. Clinton ignored the story until the Washington Post covered it three days later, when he famously claimed: ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman.’
Nine months later, the Starr Report was published on the Web. For the first time, if you were not online, you were missing history. This was 1998, the year before Blogger, six years before Facebook and eight years before Twitter. A lot of people were not online. That was soon to change. Web traffic doubled overnight – 20 million people read the report within 48 hours.
The Starr Report led to the second impeachment trial in history of a US president. Luckily for Clinton, the Senate decided that oral sex lay outside the definition of sexual relations as defined by the Court, and he was not convicted. Clinton survived the scandal but Newsweek never recovered. Fifteen years on, it does not exist, whereas the Drudge Report gets millions of visitors each month. (See also Aggregation.)■
‘Newsweek had lost its nerve and paid the price.’
‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman.’ Bill Clinton, 26 January 1998.