Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

  diSh

  how gossip became

  the news and the

  news became just

  another show

  JEANNETTE WALLS

  For John,

  with love

  and gratitude

  CONTENTS

  1 “citizen reporter”

  2 the war against confidential

  3 mike wallace—shaking the building

  4 the birth of a tabloid

  5 “they’ve got everything on you …”

  6 the divas

  7 tabloid glory days

  8 60 minutes

  9 gossip goes mainstream

  10 the death of a king

  11 the networks go tabloid

  12 celebrities fight back

  13 tina brown

  14 the good old gal and the tycoon

  15 the rise of tabloid television

  16 the gatekeepers

  17 p.r. muscle

  18 a struggle for respectability

  19 the tabloid princess

  EPILOGUE

  SOURCES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  About the Author

  Praise for diSh

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  “citizen reporter”

  “My reaction to having our speaker today at the National Press Club was the same as a lot of other members,” Doug Harbrecht, the club’s president and Business Week’s Washington bureau chief, told the two hundred journalists gathered before him on the afternoon of June 2, 1998. “Why do we want to give a forum to that guy?”

  “That guy” was Matt Drudge, who, said Harbrecht, “mucks through the hoaxes, conspiracies, and half-truths posted on-line in pursuit of fodder for his website.” Six months earlier, Drudge had posted the sordid story that had subsequently exploded into the biggest political scandal since Watergate. But while journalists had gloried in the heroic part they had played in Watergate, most reporters were repulsed by their role in the Lewinsky affair. Despite charges of Clinton’s alleged perjury and obstruction of justice, this story was driven not by issues or by questions of national security and the abuse of power—but by sex. It was the stuff of gossip columns. Yet because the scandal dominated the news for months, Matt Drudge, who never studied journalism and had never worked for a news organization, became one of the bestknown reporters in the country. Matt Drudge was the personification of how scandal had hijacked the news—and those in the establishment media hated him for it.

  “So, Matt, know this,” said Harbrecht. “There aren’t many in this hallowed room who consider you a journalist. Real journalists pride themselves on getting it first and right; they get to the bottom of the story, they bend over backwards to get the other side. Journalism means being painstakingly thorough, evenhanded, and fair. Now, in the interest of good journalism, let’s hear Matt Drudge’s side of the story.”

  An awkward moment of silence followed, and then polite applause. Matt Drudge stepped up to the podium. He was only thirty-one years old, a young man dressed in old man’s clothes: a cream-colored suit with unfashionably wide lapels, a blue shirt and striped tie, and tortoiseshell glasses. He was pale with a somewhat asymmetric face and small but intense dark eyes. He somehow appeared more vulnerable without his trademark fedora, which made him look more like a vaudeville character than a pasty-faced, self-described “computer geek” with a slightly receding hairline.

  “Applause for Matt Drudge in Washington at the Press Club,” Drudge joked. “Now there’s a scandal.” He was nervous at first, but just as his voice was about to falter, he reached over and grabbed his fedora and placed it on his head. With his talisman, this relic that evoked populist tabloid journalism of Walter Winchell’s days, Drudge found his voice. For the next forty minutes, he spoke passionately—if not always eloquently—about his love of journalism, about the importance of the unfettered flow of information, about how scandals, while sometimes ugly, were important to democracy and to “individual liberty.” Drudge spoke of being a loner, a little guy in a business dominated by conglomerates, about the importance of persevering to tell the truth, even when it embarrassed and infuriated powerful people.

  “‘Freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns one,’ ” he said, quoting the legendary journalist A. J. Liebling. The Internet, Drudge’s medium, was a great equalizer, he insisted. Now, everyone who owned a laptop and a modem could be a publisher and a reporter, a “citizen reporter”—as Drudge called himself. He looked forward to the day, he said, when everyone in America would have an equal voice and the country would be “vibrating with the din of small voices.” The Internet was going to save the news, he declared: “It’s freedom of participation absolutely realized.”

  Many journalists in the crowd were unimpressed. It was that elitism, those rules, they maintained, that had long kept lurid, irresponsible stories like Drudge’s out of the press. The real reason that Matt Drudge had come to Washington that day, most of them knew, was that he was being forced to testify in his own defense in a $30 million libel lawsuit. Drudge had inaccurately reported that Sidney Blumenthal, a former journalist who had become an aide to President Clinton, had beaten his wife. Soon after he posted the erroneous item, Drudge posted an apology and correction. But he had made plenty of other bloopers, as well: He had posted items saying that Clinton had a bald eagle tattoo in his genital region, that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had seventy-five pictures of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky together, and that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted. He once estimated that he is accurate eighty percent of the time.

  “Could you succeed as a journalist,” someone in the crowd wanted to know, “if you worked for an organization which required an accuracy rate of one hundred percent?”

  “I don’t know what organization that would be,” Drudge shot back.

  There was some embarrassed laughter, and then applause. Despite Harbrecht’s pronouncements about high standards of journalists, Matt Drudge and everyone else in the room knew that by the late 1990s, the media was in a state of absolute crisis. The always fuzzy line between news and gossip had become a complete blur. Tabloid topics and sensationalism repeatedly overshadowed serious news. It wasn’t Drudge’s mistakes that angered many in the crowd; it was the stories he got right: Clinton’s trysts with Monica Lewinsky; the semen-stained dress; the infamous cigar. With the Internet, characters like Drudge could pursue—without the constraints and rules imposed by editors and institutions—scandals that were too juicy to ignore and too tawdry to explore. Matt Drudge was the future of journalism. And everyone else in the room was being forced to follow him.

  The publication and dissemination of scandalous information about the rich and powerful has existed almost as long as the written word. Cuneiform tablets from the fifteenth century B.C. discuss allegations that a Mesopotamian mayor was committing adultery with a married woman. But the commercial publication of scandal and gossip as we understand it today began in the 1830s, with the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the penny press. Although these papers were filled with scandal, their information usually came from official sources, such as court proceedings and arrest records. The late nineteenth century saw the debut of the Society column, which contained information—descriptions of yacht trips, guests lists at debutante balls—that was usually sanctioned by the subjects.

  Walter Winchell is often credited with inventing the modern gossip column by printing private and sometimes salacious information about famous people. Although some of the tidbits in Winchell’s gossip column was the stuff of the old society columns, Winchell mixed
in scandalous, unofficial information about pregnancies, divorces, and liaisons that riveted his readers. When Winchell’s column first appeared in the 1920s in the struggling New York Graphic—a newspaper that would make modern-day tabloids look respectable—other editors saw what Winchell’s column did for circulation and were quick to start up their own gossip columns. Soon, most newspapers in the country were carrying at least one gossip column and many had four or more. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, gossip columns were an integral part of the news, and gossip columnists were loved and even respected by the public. At his peak in the 1940s, Winchell reached an estimated ninety percent of the American public through his columns and radio broadcasts, and was said to be, outside politics and religion, the most powerful man in the world.

  So it is no wonder, perhaps, that Drudge would style himself after Winchell. Drudge was born in Takoma Park, Maryland, a middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., not far from where he addressed the National Press Club that day. His mother was a lawyer and his father was a social worker; he would later describe his parents as “liberal hippies.” He was a lonely only child, a stutterer and a latchkey kid who put on puppet shows under sheets and would sit in his bedroom narrating imaginary radio talk shows into a tape recorder. He constantly cut class, and was a D student. “I stopped learning at school at age twelve,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “They were not able to stuff me like a sausage. Even then I didn’t play by society’s rules. I was a rebel all the way.”

  He was not so much rebel as outcast—so much so that he, rather prophetically, began throwing rocks at his classmates. Once, when someone threw stones back, he needed stitches. When Matt was in junior high school, his mother was hospitalized for schizophrenia; his parents got divorced not long afterward. The extent of his alienation and bitterness is evident from a mock “last will and testament” Drudge wrote when he graduated from high school in 1984: “To my only true friend Ms. thing VickyB I leave a night in Paris, a bottle of Chaps cologne and hope you find a school with original people—and to everyone else who has helped and hindred [sic] me whether it be Staff or students, I leave a penny for each days [sic] I’ve been here and cried here. A Penny rich in worthless memories. For worthless memories is what I have endured. It reminds me of a song, ‘The Funeral Hyme.’ ”

  Drudge didn’t go to college. Instead, he bummed around Paris for a month, then moved to New York City for a year, where he worked in a grocery store. Still failing to find himself, he moved back to the Washington area and became the night manager at a 7-Eleven in Takoma Park. Matt Drudge hung out with a crowd of promiscuous, openly gay men and dated several of them. “He was a freak, but that’s why we liked him,” said Dan Mathews, a friend from that period who would later go on to be a highly visible activist for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). “He had a dark, brooding quality, but you never worried if he was going to snap, because it was like he already had.”

  “He loved to do wild, provocative things to draw attention to himself,” according to David Cohen. Once, when Drudge and Cohen were dating, they went to a nightclub, and by Cohen’s account, Drudge got kicked out for throwing a pitcher of beer into the air that came raining down on everyone around them. “He loved to freak me out by telling me gossip that he found out about me,” said Cohen. “It was very personal stuff and I have no idea how he found these things out about me.” Cohen said that Drudge seemed very comfortable and open with his sexuality, though they never talked about it. “In all the time I knew him, I don’t think we had a serious, in-depth conversation. It was always gossipy or shallow stuff. We were very young.”

  At twenty-two, desperate to start a new life for himself, Drudge moved across the country to Los Angeles. He moved into a grimy $600-a-month one-bedroom apartment on the ninth floor of a run-down apartment building near Hollywood and Vine. He lived there with a six-toed cat named Dexter. Drudge hoped to get a job in the entertainment business or writing for Variety. Instead, he got a $5-an-hour job as an errand runner for The Price Is Right. From there, he landed a job at the CBS gift shop in Studio City where he worked for five years.

  Sensing that Matt was directionless, his father flew from Washington to Los Angeles to visit his son and dragged him into a Circuit City store on Sunset Boulevard to buy him a cheap 486 Packard Bell computer. “Oh yeah,” Matt told his father. “What am I going to do with that?”

  Drudge had long been an irrepressible gossip. He loved the way that knowing things made him more popular, made people want to talk to him, and, quickly figuring out what to do with his computer, he began to surf various web sites for gossip. Using the computer, it was easy to read foreign publications and wire news. Drudge got his information from places other than his computer, however. He eavesdropped on people’s conversations, he volunteered in the CBS mailroom and intercepted memos, he fished around in the garbage and found discarded Nielsen ratings and confidential box office numbers.

  Soon, he had so much gossip that he wanted a better way to spread it. Going to an established newspaper was out of the question. He had no experience and no college degree. “If I’d knocked on the door of the Los Angeles Times they’d have laughed at me,” he recalled. So, in 1995 he set up a web site and began e-mailing his tidbits to friends, calling it “The Drudge Report.” He began with only a few readers, then a couple of dozen, and within no time, one thousand. Drudge thought it had peaked there, but he kept adding more subscribers. In 1996, he was getting 10,000 hits a day and soon America Online offered him $36,000 a year to carry “The Drudge Report.” Matt quit his job to work on his web site full time. By the summer of 1997, he was averaging 15,000 hits a day.

  In many ways, Matt Drudge was still a loner, still working out of his crummy Hollywood apartment, which by now was furnished with a tattered rug, cheap couch, a satellite dish, and a police scanner that was on at all times. But his name was becoming well-known among his readers. He was getting hundreds of E-mails a day. His rogue status gave him a freedom and flexibility that more established journalists didn’t have. “It takes ABC News twenty minutes to post a headline to their web site. It takes me ten seconds,” Drudge once boasted. “I had Diana dead seven minutes before CNN did.”

  Some believed that one of the ways Drudge got his information was a high-tech version of the way he intercepted memos at CBS. Although Drudge insisted that he got the information from “sources” within the various news organizations, some editors began suspecting that Drudge had figured out how to hack into their computer systems. Editors at the Washington Post and the New York Times were alarmed that Drudge got stories that weren’t available on its web site and then posted stories just as they would be sent to the news organizations that subscribed to their wire service—with certain key words and phrases intact. “Our presumption is that Drudge has someone who has access to the news service wire, and that’s what he’s put out,” according to John Geddes, deputy managing editor of the New York Times. On other occasions, however, he posted stories well before they were released to the wires, and some media people suspected that he discovered a way to hack into the paper’s computers. At one point, the Times considered legal action against Drudge, but decided that would be good publicity for him. Hacking into News-week’s computer system is how, some believed, Drudge in July 1997 scooped Newsweek on its own story by reporter Michael Isikoff that Clinton allegedly groped Kathleen Willey. A furious Isikoff blasted Drudge for “rifling through raw reporting, like raw FBI files, and disseminating it.” Drudge maintained that he had “a source” at Newsweek—not Isikoff but one of his co-workers—who tipped him off about the story.

  The Willey story, however, was nothing compared with the story that Drudge got on Saturday, January 16: Clinton was having an affair with an intern. Again, it was a story reported by Isikoff and again Drudge had the details from an unreleased story. Drudge hammered out the story in his typical hysterical fashion:

  NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN

  BLOCKB
USTER REPORT: 23-YEAR-OLD FORMER WHITE HOUSE

  INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT.

  At 6 P.M. on Saturday evening, Newsweek magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!

  It was Sunday morning, January 17, when Drudge finished writing his story. The sun still hadn’t come up. Drudge paused as he stared at his Packard Bell computer and his eyes began to fill with tears. “My life won’t be the same after this,” he thought, and he hit the Enter button.

  For the next four days, no mainstream publication touched the story. A petrified Drudge hid out in his apartment, wearing boxer shorts, his chair jammed up against the door. Over 400,000 people tried to log on to “The Drudge Report,” sending it crashing. To calm his nerves, he periodically did push-ups or scrubbed his bathtub. Finally, Newsweek published an on-line version of the story, confirming everything the cybercolumnist had written. Soon, it appeared on front pages of newspapers around the country.

  Matt Drudge was being profiled in major newspapers and discussed on the television news. Then, on January 25, something astonishing occurred: NBC’s Tim Russert invited Matt Drudge to appear on Meet the Press. The program was one of the oldest and most respected news shows on television. The other guests on the segment were some of the most revered journalists in the country: William Safire of the New York Times, Stuart Taylor of the National Journal, and Newsweek’s Mike Isikoff. Isikoff was still furious that this cybercolumnist had scooped him on his own story. “He not only poisoned the atmosphere for real reporting,” Isikoff had said of Drudge, “he was reckless and irresponsible and he did a disservice to everybody involved.” But, explained Russert, he’s part of the story. The show had its highest rating since the Gulf War.

  When Drudge exited the Washington offices where Meet the Press was shot, he was met by a cluster of reporters, television and print, who wanted to interview him. He launched into a lecture about the responsibilities of journalism. “What does this say about you—all you people here with all your resources—that a story like this can break out of a little apartment in Hollywood?” he said. “What are you guys doing here besides interviewing yourselves? There’s a new paradigm here. That I can do this out of my stinky apartment and you’ve got your fancy newsrooms with your fancy rules!”