He has scooped the national news media time after time, but cyberscribe Matt Drudge gets no respect from so-called "professional" journalists.
Addressing a National Press Club luncheon in Washington recently, Matt Drudge of "Drudge Report" fame tried to explain to his baffled and begrudging audience why his website full of inside information and educated speculation generates as many as six million "hits" in a single month. Drudge attributes the spiraling popularity of his homepage to "a hunger for unedited information, absent corporate considerations." He describes the technologically egalitarian times we live in as "an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be," he explains. "The difference between the Internet [and] television and radio, magazines, [and] newspapers is the two-way communication. The 'Net gives as much voice to a 13-year-old computer geek like me as to a CEO or Speaker of the House. We all become equal."
Drudge sees development of the Internet as "history repeating. When radio lost out to television, there was anxiety," he recalls. "Television was very nervous about other mediums coming forward: cable [for instance]. The movies didn't want sitcoms to be taped at movie studios for fear it would take away from the movies. No, television saved the movies. The Internet is going to save the news business." Drudge foresees "a future where there'll be 300 million reporters, where anyone from anywhere can report for any reason."
That "freedom of participation" is to be celebrated, not bemoaned. "Our republic and its press will rise or fall together," Drudge declares. "An able, disinterested, public-spirited press can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. The power to mold the future of the republic will be in the hands of the journalists of the future generations."
Unlike Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and various two-faced technophiles working feverishly behind the scenes to impede the progress of the "Information Superhighway" they claim to support, Matt Drudge really does believe that development of the Internet should be "faster, not slower. Create," he encourages everyone. " Let your mind flow. Let the imagination take over. And, if technology has finally caught up with individual liberty, why would anyone who loves freedom want to rethink that?"
Why indeed! And why the delicate diffidence of "professional" journalists, those pedigreed and licensed lapdogs quibbling over "qualifications" and questioning "credentials," just to deny Drudge his due? A man reporting the news is, by definition, a reporter (i.e., a journalist). Case closed. With more than 20 years of my own in this trade posturing as a profession, and with insights gleaned from parents who between them shared nearly 100 years of journalistic experience, I feel "qualified" to declare that Matt Drudge is exactly what a reporter should be (the very model of a modern major journalist). Most of my "colleagues" make me ashamed of my profession; Drudge, Ruddy, and Evans-Pritchard are among the few who make me proud.
