INSPIRED BY BRITAIN

The Internet's muck-raker gives William Cash

his first interview since he caused President Clinton so much trouble

Los Angeles MONICA LEWINSKY'S allegations against President Clinton were first made public not by some great American news organisation but by a columnist on a new medium for columns: the Internet. The columnist in question has been avoiding interviews. But he talked to me, perhaps because he admires Britain; or rather, as we shall see, he admires something about Britain which not all Britons admire. His name is Matt Drudge (it's his real name), and I found him in a grimy $600-a-month, one-bedroom office/apartment on the 9th floor of a tatty old downtown Hollywood apartment building. It's a low-rent LA neighbourhood popu- lar with crack dealers and prostitutes and hasn't been fashionable for over 30 years. His cramped quarters are sparsely fur- nished. The decor is reminiscent of the would-be assassin Robert De Niro's apart- ment in Taxi Driver a rug, a cheap couch, two cats, three television screens, three Inexpensive computers, a satellite dish and a small stove. A police scanner is turned on at all times.

`The Monica Lewinsky story was so old,' said the infamous 31-year-old Internet muck-raker in his atonal nasal voice. 'Why did a story this big have to break out of a dirty apartment in Hollywood? The White House press corps have been asleep.' Drudge, as it happens, is a new breed of would-be presidential assassin. Exactly a week after he broke his latest scandal in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, 18 January (back in July, he had scooped Michael Isloff of Newsweek again by leaking his story about Clinton's alleged sexual harass- ment of the White House aide Kathleen Willey), Drudge was sitting on a plane to Washington, his ticket paid for by NBC's Meet the Press. On arrival, he was greeted by five television camera crews who chased him across the airport to his hotel. Broadcast from Washington every Sun- day morning, Meet the Press is America's oldest and most respected round-up of the week's politics. 'Our issue this morning', began the NBC host Tim Russet, 'is the Presidency in crisis.' Sitting as guests on the VIP 'political round table' with the unknown-looking Drudge, with his geek chic oiled black hair and wide-lapelled 1930s-style pinstripe suit, were the New York Times columnist William Safire, Stu- art Taylor of the National Journal and Michael Isikoff. The show had its highest rating since the Gulf war in 1991.

Drudge has no background whatsoever as a journalist. The only son of a Washing- ton social worker and an attorney mother, he barely made it out of high school. His last job was selling souvenir T-shirts in the CBS gift shop in Studio City. His journal- ism training — of sorts — comes from years of flicking through the airmail edi- tions of the London and New York tabloids at the local newsstand.

Drudge's Report has grown from 5,000 to over 100,000 subscribers in two years. After breaking the Clinton sex scandal, his website crashed, with over 400,000 'hits' a day, making him the most widely read columnist in America. His scoop of the Clinton sex scandal has done for the Inter- net what the Kennedy assassination did for television news. Drudge's website has a cir- culation approaching that of the New York Times. He has ushered in a glorious new age of journalism whereby the American press have finally caught up with Fleet Street — i.e., the public gets to read not only 'all the news that is fit to print' but also what journalists gossip about after the dangerous third martini.

Drudge is a self-styled 'media pirate' whose waking life — his official working day starts at 3 p.m. when he scrolls down through the Times of London and the Daily Telegraph — is devoted to surfing, plunder- ing and pilfering from the Internet's ocean of on-line new wires. His motivation, he says, is not money — he claims to have been offered book deals, syndication deals and 'blank cheques' — but simply an irre- sistible urge to blurt out what he is fed by his 'sources'. His idol is Walter Winchell, who shook up American journalism 50 years ago with his spiky cocktail of Wash- ington and Hollywood insider tattle. Winchell would sit in the Stork Club get- ting all the dirt. I'm sitting here hugging the wires getting all the dirt. My Stork Club just happens to be Netscape, booth 3.0.'

Drudge says he was given the original Clinton sex scandal tip-off (like the Sun he has a hot-tip line with 'confidentiality assured') by 'concerned citizens in and out of government'. He gets at least 450 tip- offs a day. He has become a 'must read' daily item for America's political and media elite. These include movers and shakers like, for example, the former New Yorker political correspondent turned Clin- ton adviser Sidney Blumenthal, who received a nasty shock back in August, the day before he was about to start working at the White House. Pulling up the latest Drudge Report, he read a 'red alert' item stating that 'Sidney Blumenthal has a spousal abuse past that has effectively been covered up'. Although Drudge hastily retracted the story and apologised, after it turned out he had been 'had' by a Republi- can who planted it, Drudge has been slapped with a $30 million law-suit, endorsed by Clinton. 'I didn't know what I was writing about,' Drudge admits dourly, who is quite aware that there are no short- age of people who want to see him ruined.

Still, he boasts that the stories are right `about 80 per cent of the time'. And his record of accurate scoops — albeit some of them pinched — has been noticed. He named Bob Dole's running mate a week before it was announced. Drudge knew that TV anchor woman Connie Chung was to be fired before she did. He knew that Seinfeld was demanding $1 million an episode; that Steven Spielberg was being investigated over Whitewater. He told me he has just been sent a story that Time magazine isn't running this week. 'Wash- ington likes to judge what the public should know. To me that's fraudulent and should be exposed.'

America, until recently, had hardly any daily tabloid culture to keep the main- stream media on its toes; the supermarket tabloids, as Drudge notes, usually cover `just showbiz'. The heavyweight political stuff is left to the Washington boys. As a vox pop media source, the Internet has helped change all that, and Matt Drudge, trawling each night through the dark waters of the wires, producing his peculiar brand of news, politics, showbiz and gossip has surfaced as the court jester of the American media. The level of self-inter- ested public censorship that has infected the crippled pachyderm of American jour- nalism for years was simply waiting to be exposed.

Drudge's way of life is the opposite of the average Conde Nast-employed, expense-account journalist. He rarely eats out: when he does, it's the local Taco Bell down the street. He has no expense account. His only income comes from a modest contract with America On-Line and a voluntary $10-a-year subscription to his report. Mostly, he stays in. He doesn't go to power breakfasts, lunches or pre- mieres. His idea of a night out in LA, he says, is hunting down a scoop at night in his red Metro Geo, which he says is cur- rently experiencing engine trouble. 'I love chasing a story in my little car. I don't have anything. I'm broke. I have nothing. I've got enough for cat food and I've got enough for spaghetti. I don't think reporters should be wealthy.' (For his sake, let's hope that statement is only 80 per cent true.) His 'inspiration' when he starts pound- ing, he says, has always come from the British tabloids, whose quirky blend of politics, entertainment and just silly stuff he likes. think you guys have much bet- ter news,' he says. 'I like the mix. It's much more alive than this American crap, where the second they do anything interesting they have to apologise for it.'

Drudge has a point. In the aftermath of his Blumenthal blunder, he became an advertisement for everything that's wrong with quickie Internet news. But a much better case can be made that Drudge's scoop holds up a mirror to everything that has been wrong for decades with the main- stream American media. 'I think the lesson learnt is that they had better stay a little more alert,' he told me.

For his part, Drudge takes all attacks as compliments. They validate him. He says he's less interested in breaking stories though he says that's 'good for attention' — than in creating a valid new news and entertainment medium. 'The panic out there is a lot like the early days of TV when the radio people were trying to sabotage it, saying it was freaky and ridiculous and nobody would want to watch it.'

`It's a populist movement,' says Drudge, who likens himself to the pamphleteer tra- dition of Thomas Paine. 'I like the immedi- acy of what I'm doing; my mind is set where I'm typing something and you're going to see it in five minutes. It's all about getting the best stuff out. I'm just a guy who reports what I hear. It just happens to be magical because it's on-line, it's interna- tional, quick and sexy, and it's been a long time since anybody's really mixed up Wash- ington and Hollywood.'

His new-found fame, he says, hasn't tempted him to upgrade his lifestyle, or even his apartment. He's hardly living the Hollywood Dream: he hasn't had a girl- friend for three years. 'My personal life has been screwed up since I started this thing. It's very consuming as it's a one-man show,' he says. 'I've had marriage proposals on e- mail, but I ignore that stuff.'

How long will it be before a Labour politician in Britain is brought down via the Drudge Report remains to be seen. He says that about 6 per cent of his subscribers are British. Currently, he says, he gets a lot of e-mail from Britain, including some `very juicy' political dirt. 'I get a lot of stuff, but the trouble is I don't get the references.'