August 30, 2020 Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy

Posted on August 30, 2020 by Luke Ford

Historian Claire Bond Potter writes in this 2020 book:

* Political Junkies is a history of how Americans got hooked on alternative media and ended up craving satisfaction that politics can never deliver. It is about how, beginning after World War II, some alternative media channels repurposed mass media technologies for political work, imagining new forms of journalism that appealed to a specialist audiences critical of the political and media establishment. Political Junkies is also a story about how technology creates communities out of dissidents otherwise isolated from each other, and how it forges majorities out of minorities. And it is about how enterprising alternative media entrepreneurs delivered their message to a chosen public, recycling and refreshing older technologies and adopting new ones that suited their resources, talents, objectives, and imagined public.

* In 1973, Hunter S. Thompson, a practitioner of the “new journalism” who was well acquainted with recreational pharmaceuticals, announced that he had become a “politics junkie” during his time as a Rolling Stone correspondent on South Dakota Senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign. Thompson’s sentiment is critical to how twenty-first-century Americans would come to describe the compulsion toward digital alternative media more generally: an almost physical addiction to the adrenaline rush of politics that often overwhelmed reason and objectivity. Being a politics junkie, Thompson explained, was as much about feeding a physical need as being a heroin junkie. “[When] a journalist turns into a politics junkie,” he wrote, “he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.”

* After World War II, the United States developed “a remarkable form of censorship,” critic Paul Goodman commented in 1956. Everyone had the “political right to say what he believes,” but American minds were smothered by “newspapers, mass-circulation magazines, best-selling books, broadcasts, and public pronouncements that disregard what he says and give the official way of looking at things.” If what an American was thinking was not what other people were talking about, it wasn’t considered “newsworthy.”

* The [Lewinsky] story hit the White House, and the Washington media establishment, like a truck. Not only did a major national newsmagazine decide not to publish a fully sourced and vetted feature about these serious allegations, written by one of its top political reporters, but also, this was the second time that the same reporter had been shut down on a story about Clinton’s extracurricular sex life. Previously, Isikoff left the Washington Post in part because his editors refused to publish “a meticulously researched investigative report” on Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee, who charged Clinton with sexual harassment. But the powerful did not, and could not, shut down Drudge. As of 11:52 p.m. Pacific time on January 17, 1998, the piece was whizzing its way to personal computers all over the country, ending with a reminder to the establishment about who, however temporarily, was in charge: Isikoff and Newsweek were unavailable for comment, Drudge wrote, and “The White House was busy checking the DRUDGE REPORT for details.”

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All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

Posted on August 30, 2020 by Luke Ford

Matt Bai writes in this 2014 book:

In his 1978 memoir, Theodore White, the most prolific and influential chronicler of presidential politics in the last half of the twentieth century, made John Kennedy and most of the other candidates he’d known sound like the Rolling Stones gathering up groupies on a North American tour.

“What was later written about Kennedy and women bothered White but little,” he wrote. “He knew that Kennedy loved his wife—but that Kennedy, the politician, exuded that musk odor of power which acts as an aphrodisiac to many women. White was reasonably sure that only three presidential candidates he had ever met had denied themselves the pleasures invited by that aphrodisiac—Harry Truman, George Romney and Jimmy Carter. He was reasonably sure that all the others he had met had, at one time or another, on the campaign trail, accepted casual partners.” (Yes, White wrote his memoir in the reportorial third-person voice, and he used terms like “musk odor.” It was a different time.)

Just after the Hart scandal broke in 1987, The New York Times’s R. W. “Johnny” Apple, the preeminent political writer of his day, wrote a piece in which he tried to explain how disconnected the moment was from what had come before. Apple described what was probably a fairly typical experience for reporters covering the Kennedy White House:

In early 1963, for example, a fledgling reporter for this newspaper was assigned to patrol the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel while President Kennedy was visiting New York City. The reporter’s job was to observe the comings and goings of politicians, but what he saw was the comings and going of a prominent actress, so that was what he reported to his editor. “No story there,” said the editor, and the matter was dropped.

It was this very understanding between politicians and chroniclers—that just because something was sleazy didn’t make it a story—that emboldened presidents and presidential candidates to keep reporters close when it came to the more weighty business of governing. There was little reason to fear being ambushed on the personal front while trying to make oneself accessible on the political front. In a 2012 letter to The New Yorker, Hal Wingo, who was a Life correspondent in the early 1960s, recalled spending New Year’s Eve 1963 with the newly inaugurated Lyndon Johnson and a group of other reporters. Johnson put his hand on Wingo’s knee and said, “One more thing, boys. You may see me coming in and out of a few women’s bedrooms while I am in the White House, but just remember, that is none of your business.” They remembered, and they complied.

No one should pretend that character wasn’t always a part of politics, of course, and there were times when private lives became genuine political issues. When Nelson Rockefeller, New York’s governor and a Republican presidential hopeful, divorced his wife of thirty-one years in 1962, and then married a staff member, “Happy,” who was eighteen years his junior and the mother of four small children, the story became inseparable from Rocky’s political prospects. You couldn’t do a credible job of covering the Republican schism in those years without delving at least somewhat into Rockefeller’s private life. When a lit-up Teddy Kennedy drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, off Martha’s Vineyard, in 1969, killing twenty-eight-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, Kennedy’s private recklessness became a relevant and enduring political story; no politician, let alone a newspaper editor, would seriously have argued otherwise. When Thomas Eagleton, shortly after joining George McGovern on the Democratic ticket in 1972, was revealed to have undergone shock treatment for depression, his temperament became a legitimate news story, along with the fact that he had neglected to mention it.

But reporters didn’t go looking for a politician’s private transgressions; they covered such things only when they rose to the level of political relevance.

* It was well known around Washington, or at least well accepted, that Hart liked women, and that not all the women he liked were his wife. After all, Gary and Lee Hart had fallen in love and married as kids, in the confines of a strict church where even dancing was prohibited. It wasn’t just that Hart had never played the field before marriage; he’d never even stepped onto it. And so here he was, young and famous and sturdily good-looking, powerful in a city where power was everything, and friends knew that he and Lee—as so often happens with college sweethearts—had matured into different people, that she spent long periods back in Denver with the two kids, that she could drive him absolutely crazy at times. Twice he and Lee quietly agreed to separate for months at a time, and during one of those separations Hart had even moved in with his pal Bob Woodward and slept on the couch—at least when he wasn’t gone for nights at a time. No one in Woodward’s newsroom, or anyone else for that matter, ever thought to ask for details or to write a word about it. Why would they? Whose business was it, anyway?

* It had started, everyone would later agree, with Howard Fineman, who was Newsweek’s top young political writer. The newsweeklies—Time, Newsweek, and to a lesser extent U.S. News & World Report—were still a huge deal in 1987, and they prided themselves on getting to what Newsweek editors called the zeitgeist of a story, as opposed to its more restrictive set of facts. Newspaper reporters, back then, were almost always tethered to the format of “objective” coverage—the who, what, when, where, and why, with little of the analytical voice that later generations would take for granted. For that kind of analysis, you generally had to read one of the glossy “newsmags,” whose editors didn’t mind veering widely into the lane of speculation. There was nothing a Newsweek writer liked better than getting out in front of a story (and generating “buzz” for the magazine) by writing what all the daily guys knew to be obvious but couldn’t actually say.

And so it made sense that it was Fineman, a sharp and competitive reporter, who went where others on the bus were dying to go, and whose editors let him. “The Harts’ marriage has been a long but precarious one,” he wrote in his story that would be on newsstands when Hart made his announcement at Red Rocks, “and he has been haunted by rumors of womanizing. Friends contend that his dating has been confined to marital separations—he and Lee have had two—nonetheless many political observers expect the rumors to emerge as a campaign issue.” Having thus liberally sprinkled the kerosene, Fineman lit the match with a quote from John McEvoy, who had been one of Hart’s senior aides in the 1984 campaign: “He’s always in jeopardy of having the sex issue raised if he can’t keep his pants on.”
What Fineman’s story did, more than anything, was to open the door for everyone else. Stories of Hart’s “womanizing”—a strange word, which made him sound as if he were running through random women and then discarding them on the side of the highway, rather than having squired around some of the better known socialites in Washington—were no longer “out there”; now they were in print, and by the arcane logic of political journalism, that meant they had been legitimized as a campaign issue. And so what happened next is that every reporter who scored a sit-down with Hart in the hours after his announcement, on what was supposed to be a triumphant cross-country tour, kept asking him about the long-standing rumors of his unspecified affairs, which in fact had been just as long-standing and unspecified the week before, but were only now—thanks to Newsweek—considered to have met the definition of news.

When it got back to Hart that operatives for some of his rivals had been calling reporters in the days leading up to his announcement to fan the flame (what would happen to the party if this stuff came out after he was nominated, when it was too late to get someone else onto the ballot?), Hart couldn’t manage to contain his aggravation. “All I know is what reporters tell me,” Hart seethed in an interview with a Time correspondent aboard the plane. “If it’s true that other campaigns are spreading rumors, I think it’s an issue.”

This mini-outburst constituted, as Cramer would later put it, a “fatal mistake.” If Newsweek had made it okay for the reporters to interrogate Hart about his legendary infidelity, then Hart’s quote had now made it okay for them to write their own stories on the subject. A candidate accusing rival campaigns of defaming him was a story any day of the week, no matter what the issue—that the issue here was sex, rather than, say, a proposal to tax foreign oil, only made it irresistible.

* The dinosaurs on the trail, the ones who started as copy boys and learned to write on the job, were mostly “know it when you see it” types—as in, you know a story when you see one, and you know something’s horseshit when it’s horseshit, and you don’t need a graduate seminar to figure it out. But Fiedler, who was forty-one at the time, was one of these younger, more professional reporters—the kind who learned the business in a classroom and called himself a “journalist.” Fiedler was a guy who thought there should be rules about when something was news and when it wasn’t, codes of ethics that governed the behavior of responsible and objective journalists, just as there were in any licensed profession. And he thought it raised some serious issues, this trafficking in sheer rumor about Hart’s sex life.

Specifically, Fiedler objected to the kind of innuendo that bled through the New York Post’s piece: “whispers” and “rumors” and “wagging tongues.” If you have the evidence, then by all means produce it, Fiedler thought. But it didn’t seem ethical for reporters to pass along gossip to their readers like some high school cheerleader giggling with her friends.

Fiedler’s piece on April 27 had run under the headline SEX LIVES BECOME AN ISSUE FOR PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFULS. The piece was a classic of the “news analysis” genre that enabled daily reporters to stray, though not very far, from the constraints of your basic news story. Fiedler opened with an anecdote about Hart wandering to the back of the plane during the announcement tour, to face the reporters who were demanding he refute the rumors about affairs. “Anybody want to talk about ideas?” Hart had asked them, sardonically. (They didn’t.)

“This vignette may tell us something about Gary Hart, a man with an opaque past,” Fiedler wrote. He went on to list a series of “real and serious” questions related to media ethics that he felt the Hart case had raised:

Is it responsible for the media to report damaging rumors if they can’t be substantiated? Or should the media withhold publication until they have solid evidence of infidelity?

Even if sexual advances can be proven, do the media have a legitimate interest in a candidate’s private sex life, assuming it doesn’t interfere with doing the job?

Finally, to go back to Hart’s question, can’t the media stick to analyzing his ideas?

As was (and is) the style with such news analysis pieces, Fiedler didn’t actually endeavor to answer these questions. “In a harsh light, the media reports themselves are rumor mongering, pure and simple,” he wrote. And yet, he consulted with some professors who suggested that now that such rumors were “out there,” reporters had a duty, really, to investigate them. “You aren’t protecting the people of Miami by refusing to report the rumor,” Bruce Swain, a journalism professor at the University of Georgia, assured Fiedler. The analysis ended with a quote from Hart himself. “No one has suggested what you do about vague, unfounded, and unproved rumors,” Hart said in an interview. “I think people are going to get tired of the question.”

* Eight days later, the Herald would publish its front-page reconstruction of the events leading up to and including that Saturday night. Written by McGee, Fiedler, and Savage, the 7,500-plus-word piece—Moby-Dick–type proportions by the standards of a front page—is remarkable reading, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s striking how much the Herald’s account of its investigation consciously imitates, in its clinical voice and staccato cadence, Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men. (“McGee rushed toward a pay telephone a block away to call editors in Miami. It was 9:33 p.m.” And so on.) Clearly, the reporters and editors at the Herald believed themselves to be reconstructing a scandal of similar proportions, the kind of thing that would lead to Pulitzers and movie deals. The solemn tone of the piece suggests that Fiedler and his colleagues believed themselves to be the only ones standing between America and another menacing, immoral president; reading it, you might think Hart had been caught bludgeoning a beautiful young woman to death, rather than taking her to dinner.

The other fascinating thing about the Herald’s reconstruction is that it captures, in agonizing detail, the very moment when the walls between the public and private lives of candidates, between politics and celebrity, came tumbling down forever. In a sense, the scene that transpired between Hart and his inquisitors in the alley on Saturday night, which at least two of the Herald reporters transcribed in real time, was the antithesis of Johnny Apple watching silently as the famous starlet ascended to President Kennedy’s suite, or Lyndon Johnson joking with reporters about the women he planned to entertain. Even in the dispassionate tone of the Herald’s narrative, you can hear how chaotic and combative it was, how charged with emotion and pounding hearts.

“Good evening, Senator,” McGee began, recovering from his shock at seeing Hart standing in front of him. “I’m a reporter from the Miami Herald. We’d like to talk to you.” As the Herald relayed it: “Hart said nothing. He held his arms around his midsection and leaned forward slightly with his back against the brick wall.” McGee said they wanted to ask him about the young woman staying in his house.

* Looking back years later, Fiedler would recall Hart’s besieged posture, the way he leaned back defensively, as if expecting to be punched. And he would remember his own sense of disbelief. “It was one of those things where I thought, how did I end up here?” Fiedler told me. “At that point, I was considering myself a pretty serious political writer, the kind of writer who grappled with issues of important public policy. And here I am, almost in a disguise, following a tip where I’m not really quite sure it’s all going to come together, and knowing that the story I would write would be kind of a scandal sheet story. Which was so not only out of character, but it was out of my own sense of who I was and what I was doing.”

And yet, for all that, Fiedler felt compelled to be there; he recalled no doubt about that. Hart’s hypocrisy, the falseness of his moral posturing, was a vital political story, which the Herald had now been tracking for six days. Staking out the townhouse, however unseemly, was the only way for Fiedler to confirm everything he’d been told by the anonymous caller, and this confirmation was something he owed the public—and Hart. “Seeing them together at that point and confronting Senator Hart over it, it just seemed as if it were something we were almost obligated to do,” Fiedler recalled. “As odd and surreal as it felt, it just seemed to us that we had to do it.”

In fact, Fiedler would always remember that his overriding emotion in that alley was anger. He shouldn’t have had to be there, asking about such tawdry details of a man’s private life. He was a respected chronicler of national politics, for Christ’s sake. It was Hart who had set all this in motion, who had dragged Fiedler and the others into the dirt and muck of tabloid journalism, by refusing to tell the truth about who he was. It was Hart who had disappointed and debased Fiedler, not the other way around.

“I think I felt I’d been deceived all this time,” Fiedler would remember. “And suddenly here it is, and the allegations I was probably hoping would be disproved were turning out to be true. That this is the guy who only a few weeks before had stood up in front of the world—and, in a sense me, because I was there with the press corps—and talked about ethics, and said he wanted to be held to the highest standards and said he was going to run a campaign that exemplified all that. And here I am in an alley, late on a Saturday night, confronting him about a relationship that just seemed completely sordid. And I kind of felt angry about being in that position. I felt stuck, because I was going to end up doing a story that I maybe hoped I wouldn’t do.”

* In those days before the Internet, however, the Times circulated hard copies of its magazine to other media a few days early, so editors and producers could pick out anything that might be newsworthy and publicize it in their own weekend editions or Sunday shows. And so it was that when Fiedler boarded his flight to Washington Saturday morning, eager to join the stakeout, he brought with him the advance copy of Dionne’s story that had been sent to the Herald. Somewhere above the Atlantic seaboard, anyone sitting next to Fiedler would probably have seen him jolt upward in his seat as if suddenly receiving an electric current to his brain. There it was, staring up at him from the page—Hart explicitly inviting him and his colleagues to do exactly the kind of surveillance they had undertaken the night before…

* The discovery of Hart’s infamous quote, which the Herald reporters stealthily lifted from the advance copy of the Times Magazine on Saturday night and inserted at the end of their Sunday blockbuster—so that the two articles, carrying the same quote, appeared on newsstands simultaneously—probably negated any reservations the editors in Miami might have had about pushing the story into print. By morning, everyone who read the Times would know that Hart had goaded the press into hiding outside his townhouse and tracking his movements. So what if the Herald reporters hadn’t even known about it when they put Hart under surveillance? At a glance, Hart’s quote appeared to justify the Herald’s extraordinary investigation, and that’s all that mattered.

* I mentioned to Fiedler that I had Googled him recently and been sent to his biographical page on the BU website. And this is what it said: “In 1987, after presidential hopeful Gary Hart told journalists asking about marital infidelity to follow him around, Fiedler and other Herald reporters took him up on the challenge and exposed Hart’s campaign-killing affair with a Miami model.” Why did his own webpage explicitly repeat something he knew to be untrue?

Fiedler recoiled in his seat and winced. He looked mortified. “You know what? I didn’t know that,” he said. “Honestly. I’m serious.” He stared at me for another beat, stunned. “Wow.” I knew he meant it. When I visited the same site a month or so later, I was surprised to find that Fiedler hadn’t changed a word.

* So in Denver, Sweeney and the others started pushing back with the other reporters who were calling in a mad frenzy. Not only should the Herald never have been spying in the first place, they said, but this so-called surveillance was a joke. Someone needed to ask these guys why they hadn’t been watching the blessed back door.

The two-pronged assault on the Herald story was as much for the benefit of the reporters—and their editors—as it was for their readers. In order to contain the damage, Hart’s team knew, they needed to isolate the Herald, to make sure it became an outlier among reputable news organizations. After years of changing cultural attitudes about adultery and privacy, after more than a decade of considering Watergate’s lessons when it came to the fitness of candidates, after months of building innuendo about Hart’s flawed character, the Herald had at last taken political journalism into what had previously been tabloid territory. But on this question of whether presidential candidates should be given the same treatment as a Jim Bakker or a Fawn Hall, the soap opera stars of nightly newscasts in the spring of 1987, the rest of the media still hung in the balance.

Fiedler had made his choice. Now his colleagues on the campaign bus needed to make theirs.

* FOR MOST OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, information in America was controlled and disseminated by a select group of elite institutions. By the end of the 1970s, if you lived in a typical American city, you read about national events in your local paper (if you were lucky, you had a choice between two), or perhaps in the copy of Time or Newsweek that arrived in the mailbox every Tuesday. Any other newspaper would have to be purchased, probably a day late, at the out-of-town newsstand. The locally owned newspaper—whose status as a paragon of civic virtue would be mythologized by journalists and media critics in later years, after faceless conglomerates had gobbled up most of the American media—exercised as much of a monopoly over information in some cities as the power company had over transformers and wires. Thus was it possible, as late as 1968, for some Indiana voters to know little of the Democratic primary campaign being waged in their own state, simply because the Indianapolis Star—whose publisher, Eugene C. Pulliam, had been a Lyndon Johnson supporter—all but refused to acknowledge Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign.

The most immediate means by which information traversed regional borders was, of course, the television. But this venue, too, was limited in its offerings, and, unless a network made the extraordinary decision to preempt its regular programming, not all that immediate. In big cities, you could watch the local news at six and then choose from three nightly newscasts, aired at the same time every night by the same three networks. But if a story unfolding elsewhere in the country hadn’t appeared in your morning paper, and if it didn’t rate a mention that night by one of the three somber-sounding anchormen who spoke from the pixelated ether like gods from some distant civilization, then it essentially didn’t exist, as far as you knew.

* The first technological innovation to erode the dominance of institutional media, however, and the one that made its impact felt almost immediately during that tumultuous first week of May 1987, had nothing to do with television. It was the series of clicks, whirs, and beeps known as the fax machine.

Faxes had been proliferating, commercially, since the early 1980s, but it had only been in recent years—since the 1984 campaign, in fact—that Japanese manufacturers had managed to make them small and inexpensive enough for your average office, and even for some homes. “From office workers to rock stars, more and more people are answering yes to the question, Do you have a fax?” Time reported in August 1987. “Once considered too bulky and costly to be practical, fax machines have shrunk to half the size of personal computers and dropped sharply in price, to less than $1,000 for one model.” According to Time, it cost $14 to send a one-page letter through an overnight carrier but only 50 cents to fax it instantly through your phone line. Sharp had even introduced a model that could double as an ordinary phone.

The implications of this, for news and politics, were enormous. In 1987, a Republican operative named Doug Bailey teamed up with a Democratic strategist, Roger Craver, to create something called The Hotline—a nonideological compendium of political news from the various papers around the country, plus some polling and late-night political jokes, faxed directly to subscribers every morning.

* And then there was the Woodward issue to consider. The way Woodward always told the story, yes, Hart had crashed at his place during his first separation from Lee, but it’s not like they were acting out the Odd Couple or something; Hart was over at a girlfriend’s most of the time and basically used Woodward’s place as a forwarding address. After some weeks of this, Woodward grew uneasy and asked his buddy Gary to camp elsewhere, and that was the extent of it. Still, if everyone in Bradlee’s office knew this story, that meant that half of Capitol Hill did, too. And if the Post ignored the constant gossip about Hart, and it later came to light that he was still fooling around, then the paper might face allegations that it essentially took a pass in order to spare Woodward’s buddy—and perhaps even Woodward himself—any embarrassment.

It was Broder, the voice of experience and wisdom, who formulated a compromise. The Post would shortly be in the process of compiling its in-depth profiles of all the candidates, which by that time was a quadrennial rite. There was no need, Broder suggested, for the Post to start hunting around in every candidate’s sex life just because the issue was swirling around Hart. What they needed to do was commence their exhaustive reporting on Hart’s profile and see what came up. If the reporter assigned to the piece decided there was any troubling pattern of behavior when it came to women, something that called Hart’s judgment or stability into question, they could figure out how to deal with it then.

“In ways that I thought were very inappropriate, the fact that he had a womanizing problem was becoming part of who he was as a candidate and now the front-runner coming into this next presidential campaign,” Taylor reflected when we talked many years later. “I was very uncomfortable with that. And at the Post, we said, You know, we’re not going to go there, and it’s irresponsible to present it that way. It’s rumormongering. But we can’t close our eyes to the fact that that’s part of the world we know very well—the journalists, the candidates, the consultants, the opponents, Hart’s own staff. It’s all part of their world. It’s real, in that sense. It may well make its way into becoming part of this thing. So let’s see what there is.”

As it happened, the reporter assigned to do the Hart profile, the talented David Maraniss, was at that point wrapping up another assignment. He was just turning his sights on Hart when the Herald story hit.

There was an assumption inherent in the Post’s deliberations, which was that the Post, along with a handful of other elite news organizations, would be the ones who got to decide whether Hart’s personal life should be an issue of national prominence or not. That’s pretty much how it had worked, to that point, in political journalism. If the Post or the Times or The Wall Street Journal—or, to a lesser extent, the three broadcast networks, who tended to follow the lead of the major print outlets—didn’t think a story rose to the level of serious news, then it remained a regional story or an unreported rumor. Bradlee had every reason to be deliberate before reaching a determination on Hart’s “pattern of behavior,” because he and a small group of other editors ultimately set the agenda for everyone else, no matter what a less influential paper like the Herald had to say about it.

* Alarmed by Lee’s panicked calls to headquarters, John Emerson grabbed Joe Trippi, the deputy political director, and gave him an instant (if dubious) promotion: chief of staff to the candidate’s wife. Trippi’s job was to secure the premises and, ultimately, to get Lee out of Troublesome Gulch without her being chased down the mountain by careening camera trucks. Thus it’s fair to say that Trippi, who was thirty at the time, became the first campaign operative in American history to personally confront the collision of politics and tabloid media and the sudden mobilization of a satellite-wielding army.

Trippi would forever remember being accosted by a guy, as he tried to get through the front gate, who identified himself as a reporter for A Current Affair. The syndicated show, hosted by the gossipy Maury Povich, had started airing a year earlier. Trippi, whose mind was on his candidate’s alleged adultery—and who, like most political operatives, had never heard of anything called A Current Affair—was incredulous. “You mean they have an entire show for that now?” he stammered.

* If anybody swept up in this whole fiasco should have understood how to navigate the rabid, explosive culture of celebrity media, you would think it would have been Donna Rice. She had dated Don Henley and Prince Albert of Monaco, had appeared on numerous soap operas and TV dramas, including Miami Vice and the outrageously popular Dallas. She was represented by agents in New York and Miami. If you were writing the purely fictional account of the Hart scandal, you might imagine Rice in the mold of Nicole Kidman’s character in the movie To Die For—gorgeous and manipulative, lusting for stardom, indifferent to how she got there or who got trampled in the process.

In reality, Rice was, as she described herself, a “typical Southern girl”—a former Miss South Carolina and head cheerleader, yes, but also a magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of South Carolina, with a major in biology and a minor in business, and her district’s top saleswoman of Wyeth products. She felt swept away by Hart, despite only having known him for a few weeks, and the last thing she wanted was to hurt his campaign, about which she knew almost nothing. When the reporters started congregating at Broadhurst’s townhouse, Rice repeatedly begged to talk to Hart, who was the only one in the bunch she trusted. She wanted to tell him that she hadn’t had anything to do with tipping off the Herald, and then she wanted to go home.

* In short order, the Herald’s fifty-one-year-old publisher, Dick Capen, rose from the audience to speak. (Capen, a staunch Republican and social conservative, would later be made ambassador to Spain by George H. W. Bush, which did little to quiet the conspiracy theories among Hart loyalists.) “The issue is not the Miami Herald,” Capen said. “It’s Gary Hart’s judgment.” The utter disrespect in this one line was hard to miss. Capen was talking about “Gary Hart”—not “Senator Hart”—as if he weren’t even in the room. He meant not to counter Hart’s speech so much as to hijack it altogether.

“He’s an announced candidate for president of the United States, and he’s a man who knows full well that womanizing had been an issue in his past,” Capen went on. “We stand by the essential correctness of our story. It’s possible that, at some point along the way, someone could have moved out of the alley door of his house. But the fact of the matter remains that our story reported on Donna Rice, who he met in Aspen, who he subsequently met in Dade County—he acknowledged that he telephoned her on a number of occasions. It is a fact that two married men whose spouses were out of town spent a considerable amount of time with these people. It is also true that our reporters saw him and Donna Rice leaving his townhouse on at least three separate occasions.”

Capen’s soliloquy was remarkable for a couple of reasons. He had now plainly admitted what Fiedler had written, obliquely, the day before—that Bill Dixon was right, and that the Herald’s reporters actually had no way of knowing whether Rice had stayed in the townhouse Friday night or not, because they hadn’t watched the back door. But Capen had also asserted, for the first time, that it didn’t actually matter, because what mattered was precisely the reverse of what the Herald had written—that, in fact, Rice had been seen leaving the house on several occasions, and it was this, and not her having stayed inside the house with him, that constituted the truly damning evidence. And Hart must have understood, at that point, that he had chosen a field of play on which he couldn’t possibly win. Whether Rice had stayed in his townhouse or hadn’t, the conclusion was apparently going to be the same.

* That night, his name made all the evening news shows and then he appeared live, along with his Herald colleague Jim McGee, on ABC’s Nightline, hosted by Ted Koppel. (The Hart story led the half hour program, followed by a segment on the opening of the Iran-contra hearings.) As he had in the ballroom, Fiedler nervously presented himself as a disinterested reporter who was simply following the story where it led, doing what any reporter would do when tasked with the responsibility of vetting candidates and their character. But Koppel, one of the toughest and most respected newsmen in America, showed little patience for this routine. In fact, he seemed rather disgusted by the entire story.

When Fiedler flippantly tried to dismiss a question about the back door of the townhouse—“If we are conceding that we are not as good as the F.B.I. in conducting a surveillance, I don’t think we have any problem agreeing to that,” Fiedler joked—Koppel abruptly cut him off.

“Well, hold on,” the anchor huffed. “That’s kind of cute, but that’s not the point. The point is, did she spend the night with him or didn’t she spend the night with him? And if, in fact, she left, let’s say a half hour after she got there, which is what she claims, then she would not have spent the night with him.” Koppel wasn’t finished—he also hammered Fiedler about his casual and repeated reference to the supposed “relationship” between Hart and Rice. Decades later, Fiedler would describe this first appearance on national television as one of the worst moments of his life.

* Then Wilson looked up at the mounted TV in the terminal, which wasn’t tuned to ABC and Koppel, but rather to NBC and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Just as the power of a single advertising line—“Where’s the beef?”—would probably elude modern media consumers, so, too, might today’s fans of Conan O’Brien or Jon Stewart have a hard time understanding the cultural power Carson still possessed in 1987, almost twenty-five years after he took over the show from Jack Paar. In the age of three networks, before ubiquitous cable or the Internet, Carson effectively owned America’s last waking moments, after the local newscasts at eleven. Koppel, whose show had quickly become one of the most successful news programs in American history, couldn’t begin to compete with Carson when it came to the number of viewers or the sheer power to shape public perception.

So there was Carson, coming out to do the monologue everyone would be talking about tomorrow in the office, before moving on to the night’s interviews with George C. Scott and a gymnast named Kristie Phillips. And this is how he started: “By the way, before the monologue begins, if Gary Hart is watching, you might want to hit the ‘mute’ button on your remote control.

“I really don’t need a monologue tonight,” Carson said. “I think I’ll just bring out and read the front pages of the newspapers around the country. It is getting so wild that people standing in supermarkets are rushing out to buy regular newspapers.

“Now, we have a lot of people here in the studio. Can I ask a favor of you? I am going to ask you tonight to leave by the front entrance because I don’t want anyone saying we’ve spent the night together.”

* While Fiedler sparred with Koppel on one channel and Carson bitingly ridiculed Hart on the other, the phone rang in Paul Taylor’s Manhattan hotel room. The Post’s political editor, Ann Devroy, was on the line, and filled in her star reporter on the strange things that had been transpiring back in Washington.

In the days after the Herald broke its story, the Post, like other major papers, had been deluged with anonymous tips of all kinds. One stood out. It was an envelope that contained a private investigator’s report. Someone had hired the investigator to tail Hart. And so, on a Saturday in December 1986, days after Hart and Doug Wilson returned from Moscow, the private eye had followed Hart as he gave the Democratic response to Reagan’s weekly radio address in a Virginia studio, then to his townhouse and a bookstore, and then finally to the home of a woman who was a well-known lobbyist in town. Hart had apparently spent the night with this woman, who was rumored to have been involved with him on and off for many years, going back to his separations from Lee.

Who sent the envelope, or why, wasn’t known. (Bizarrely, Dixon had heard, and campaign aides always believed, that one of Hart’s colleagues in the Senate, Maryland’s Joe Tydings, had hired the investigator because he feared that Hart was sleeping with his then wife, who was a close friend of Lee’s and worked for her on the campaign. Tydings denied it at the time.) But it was exactly what editors at the Post needed in order to reestablish the rightful order of things—the break that might transfer ownership of the entire story over to the nation’s most storied political paper. Of course Bradlee knew the woman in the photos personally (or at least he knew someone who knew her), and he even volunteered to confront her and get the truth. The Post was waiting on Bradlee’s confirmation, and in the meantime Devroy wanted to make sure that Taylor was staying close to Hart, in case he needed to get a quick response from the candidate.

* And that’s when Paul Taylor hit him with The Question. He spoke hoarsely but intensely, almost in a whisper, his voice quavering with the gravity of what he was about to do. He spoke at unusual length for a reporter in such a setting, as if he and Hart were having another philosophical conversation in the back of a car, rather than a terse exchange in a packed and sweat-soaked banquet room.

“Senator, in your remarks yesterday you raised the issue of morality, and you raised the issue of truthfulness,” Taylor began. “Let me ask you what you mean when you talk about morality, and let me be very specific. I have a series of questions about it.”

If this prelude alarmed Hart, he didn’t object.

“When you said you did nothing immoral,” Taylor went on, “did you mean that you had no sexual relationship with Donna Rice last weekend or at any other time that you were with her?”

“That is correct,” Hart replied, unflinching. “That’s correct.”

Taylor took his time, with lawyerly skill. “Do you believe that adultery is immoral?” he asked next.

“Yes,” Hart said immediately. He must have been sensing the danger at that point, aware that he was being outflanked but unsure of how to head it off. And then Taylor just came out with it.

“Have you ever committed adultery?” he rasped, while reporters gaped, and while the campaign aides standing off to the side looked at each other in amazement.

Almost three decades later, it sounds like a plausible political inquiry, if not a routine one. Have you ever committed adultery? What would you do if your wife was raped? How did it feel when your child was killed? But in the context of 1987, to Hart and his aides and to the older reporters in the room who would always remember it as a watershed moment, Taylor might as well have asked him to disrobe right there and submit to a cavity search. No reporter had ever asked a presidential candidate that kind of personal, sexual, broad question. Campaign aides had guessed that someone might, but hearing it was still a surreal experience.

Hart froze. You could see it in his eyes, the sudden loss of focus. You could hear it in the room—a long silence that sounded like the end of something, several blank seconds that lingered like a month, during which all his life’s ambitions and grand ideas seemed to flutter away. Sweeney had actually warned him, aboard the plane to New Hampshire, when they were rehearsing an exchange the way candidates and aides often do, that someone might ask him the question. Hart’s reply then had been a terse and outraged, “I don’t have to answer that!” That was perfect, as far as Sweeney was concerned—that was exactly the right response. But somehow, in the moment, Hart’s self-righteousness and fluency deserted him. He retreated, instead, into the recesses of his mind.

In those several seconds, Hart, the former divinity student, began to mull the biblical definition of adultery. Was it, as the Old Testament said, limited to intercourse when one party was married? Or could it be, as Jesus taught, a lusting in the heart? Did it count if you were separated? Or if it didn’t amount to intercourse at all? Could there be a simple answer to this question?

“Ahh,” Hart finally stammered. “I do not think that’s a fair question.”

“Well,” Taylor retorted, “it seems to me the question of morality—”

“You can get into some very fine distinctions,” Hart said.

“—was introduced by you.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” Hart said, stalling.

“And it’s incumbent upon us to know what your definition of morality is,” Taylor pressed.

“Well, it includes adultery.”

“So that you believe adultery is immoral.”

“Yes, I do,” Hart said again. And so Taylor returned to his original question.

“Have you ever committed adultery?”

Here’s what Hart would always remember: looking up at the faces of reporters, twisted with disdain and sanctimony, and seeing in his mind a flash of images from the 1984 campaign. He happened to know, thanks to the inevitable gossip among campaign aides, who in this crowd had hooked up with whom. Even decades later, Hart still wouldn’t say which of the journalists he had in mind—their sex lives, he still believed, should remain private, just like his. But casual, ill-advised “campaign sex” was rampant in those days (even more so than in the still boozy campaigns I covered later), and some of the reporters involved were, inevitably, married. Hart saw some of them now, awaiting his response to Taylor’s question, these reporters who dared to call him a hypocrite.

“I do not know—I’m not going to get into a theological definition of what constitutes adultery,” he said. “In some people’s minds it’s people being married and having relationships with other people, so …”

Taylor wasn’t through. He had the floor, having jolted most of his colleagues into silence, and he had Hart on the defensive. They weren’t in the back of Hart’s limo anymore.

“Can I ask you,” Taylor said, “whether you and your wife have an understanding about whether or not you can have relationships, you can have sexual encounters with—”

“My inclination is to say no, you can’t ask me that question,” Hart said. It was too late for that, however, and he knew it. “But the answer is no, we don’t have any such understanding. We have an understanding of faithfulness, fidelity, and loyalty.”

* When at last he arrived at the hotel where the campaign and press were staying, he saw Sweeney sitting at the bar with three other reporters, one of whom was Bill Peterson, a colleague of Taylor’s from the Post. Taylor described himself as “delighted” to see Peterson. He wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of confronting Hart in his hotel room alone, and instantly hatched a plan for them to double-team the candidate.

The problem was that Peterson, about five years older than Taylor and one of the best liked and most admired journalists on the trail, wanted nothing to do with this escapade. As Taylor summed up Peterson’s objections, “He thought the hour was late, the tip was weak and the story was sleazy.” Taylor and Peterson argued a bit in the lobby and “agreed to disagree.” Taylor, who was by this point nearly hyperventilating with nerves, headed back into the bar, alone, to grab Sweeney and tell him that he needed to see the candidate immediately.

In his own retelling of the event, Taylor didn’t mention his colleague again. But according to Cramer’s account in What It Takes, Peterson and Taylor had one more significant exchange. Taylor had just sat down with Sweeney, and was trying to marshal his breathing so he could explain the situation to the press secretary, when Peterson burst back into the lobby and tried once more to stop him. “We’re not doing this,” Peterson said, according to Cramer’s account. “Paul, you don’t have to do this. You don’t … have … to do this.”

“Bill,” Taylor replied with finality, “there’s just a lot of pressure.” (Peterson died of cancer three years later, at forty-seven. His own recollection of this event was never written.)

At last, Taylor told Sweeney that the Post had evidence of another affair and he needed to see Hart. After hearing the details, Sweeney deflated; he had been with Hart on the day that was the subject of the investigator’s report, but he’d had no idea where Hart had gone after dropping him off at home. Sweeney repaired to his room, ostensibly to see what he could do about arranging an interview for Taylor. It wasn’t until hours later, around midnight, when Taylor confronted him again, that Sweeney finally revealed to Taylor that Hart wasn’t actually in the hotel. The Harts, it turned out, wanted to be nowhere near the press and had been quietly rerouted to a hotel across the border in Vermont. Taylor would have to wait until morning, at least.

What Taylor didn’t yet know was that, in those intervening hours, a crestfallen Sweeney had called John Emerson in Denver, and Emerson had called (of course) Billy Shore in Vermont, and Shore had taken the long walk down to Hart’s door at the hotel—it was one of those two-tiered, motor-inn type structures. Shore apologized and told Hart he really needed to call Sweeney right away, and once they were on the phone, Sweeney told Hart the details of what the Post had.

“This isn’t going to end, is it?” Hart asked.

“You would know better than I would,” Sweeney said coldly.

“Let’s go home” was all Hart could say. He had concluded that he would never be able to survive another revelation, would never be able to keep campaigning or raise the money he needed. But almost as much as this, both Hart and his aides would later say, he was increasingly distraught by the idea that all the women he had known, some romantically but most not, would soon find their own private lives exposed in the pages of papers as notable as the Post. Hart told me that he had already gotten a note from a woman he had seen during his separation from Lee; she wanted him to know that if the reporters came knocking at her door, she would kill herself.

* Upon his retirement from the Post, about four years after the Hart episode, Bradlee granted a lengthy interview to the British journalist David Frost. (Like Bradlee, Frost had become famous in America for his connection to Watergate; he managed to force an apology out of Nixon during a series of sit-downs with the disgraced former president in 1977, which later became the basis for the play and movie titled Frost/Nixon.) The hour-long, edited interview with Bradlee, conducted in stateroom-type armchairs at the editor’s home in Georgetown, was part of a public television series called Talking with David Frost, and like a lot of taped shows that didn’t cry out for digital conversion, it’s long since disappeared from most archives. I was able to view it one day in a back room of the Library of Congress, wearing bulbous earphones attached to a suitcase-size, push-button videotape-editing machine that looked as if it hadn’t been manufactured since 1984. Lines of horizontal static buzzed across the screen, bringing back distant memories of Betamax and rabbit-ear antennas.

Several minutes into the interview, Frost asked the silver-haired Bradlee to name his most significant failures in a quarter century of running the Post. “There were plenty of mistakes,” Bradlee shrugged. Frost tried the question another way.

“Is there anybody,” he asked, “you feel is right to have a grudge against the Post in the last twenty-six years? A rightful grudge?”

“That we have really ruined without cause?” Bradlee asked. Frost nodded. Bradlee seemed to hesitate.

“Well. Gary Hart thinks that. He really is sore at us.” He then added, quickly, “I don’t think with reason,” although the mere fact that he had chosen to bring up Hart, with no prodding and with twenty-six years of material from which to choose, suggests that Bradlee had some conflicting thoughts about this. Having raised the subject, Bradlee then seemed eager to move on, but Frost was intrigued and wouldn’t let it drop.

“Do you think the lines you drew on a politician’s personal life, that you drew them about right over Gary Hart? And since?”

“Yeah, I don’t think we made a mistake in that,” Bradlee said. He allowed that a politician’s private life might not, by itself, have much to do with the public business, “but if you lie about it, I think it’s public domain.”

“So the crime is getting found out?” Frost asked dubiously.

“Yeah,” Bradlee replied.

Frost was an excellent interviewer, and he let this answer echo for a moment, in all its hollowness. And then at last Bradlee seemed to open up a bit. In doing so, he offered what was probably the clearest window into what he and his colleagues at the Post had come to accept during that frenzied week in 1987.

“I’ll tell you what makes this argument hard,” he said. “It’s that someone’s gonna do it. You can get on your ethical perch and make Solomonic judgments, and then some little paper’s gonna run it. And then the AP’s gonna run it. And then you don’t run it, because you made the original decision not to run it. Then someone will write a story about how you refused to do it, even though the AP has done it. And then it’s on television that the Post yesterday refused to name …”

Bradlee’s voice trailed off, and he waved his arm in disgust. “It takes it out of your hands,” he said finally, “and you end up looking silly.”

In other words, Bradlee, the most influential and recognized editor of his generation, had been forced to accept that a behemoth like The Washington Post could no longer decide what was and wasn’t a story for the rest of the media world. Now those decisions were made for him, and all the Post or anyone else could do was try to keep up.

* Where the journalism establishment ultimately netted out on the decisions made in 1987 is probably best illustrated by the career arcs of those who found themselves caught up in the moment. Tom Fiedler wasn’t immediately feted the way Woodward and Bernstein were by his sanctimonious colleagues, and after he read Rosenthal’s comments, he knew he wasn’t going to be able to make the jump to The New York Times—something he had been seriously discussing with the paper’s Miami bureau chief. But Fiedler did get his Pulitzer a few years later, for his part in an impressive investigation into an extremist cult. He went on to become both editorial page editor and executive editor of the Herald and then, after his retirement, a leading academic, oft quoted on journalistic ethics and integrity, well liked and well respected.

Among Fiedler’s colleagues on the stakeout, Jim McGee moved on to become a top investigative reporter for The Washington Post (and later a senior investigator for a congressional committee on homeland security), while Doug Clifton later became the top editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. E. J. Dionne ended up an op-ed columnist for the Post and one of the most admired liberal theorists in Washington. Howard Fineman, who set the whole thing in motion by reporting rumors of Hart’s affairs, became not just the last of Newsweek’s great political writers (before moving on to The Huffington Post) but one of the most ubiquitous pundits on cable TV. Just about everyone who had any role, integral or passing, in taking Hart down went on to scale the heights of national and political journalism.

Everyone, that is, except Paul Taylor. He emerged from the Hart scandal and the 1988 election as a famous and sought-after correspondent, clear heir to the Post’s storied political franchise. He would never cover a campaign again.

* Trippi told me that almost exactly a year after Hart left the race the first time, he got a frantic call from one of his closest friends, Tom Pappas, with whom he had worked as a kid on Ted Kennedy’s 1980 campaign. Pappas was now chief of staff to Roy Dyson, a Maryland congressman, who was being investigated by the Federal Election Commission for campaign spending violations. Pappas, it turned out, had received a six-figure consulting fee from Dyson’s campaign and failed to disclose it. But what had Pappas so distraught, the reason he had called Trippi for help, had nothing to do with money. He said The Washington Post was preparing to run a story that Sunday saying he was gay. Trippi had been dealing with reporters for years and was known to have good, mutually respectful relationships with them. He called one of the reporters working on the story and tried to talk him out of running it.

“Sunday morning, I’m shooting commercials in West Virginia for a gubernatorial candidate, when the front page of The Washington Post …” At this, Trippi’s voice suddenly caught, and to my surprise, he started to weep right there in the bar. “… When the front page of The Washington Post says he’s gay.…”

That story, which I later retrieved, was actually more complicated than Trippi remembered. The piece was ostensibly about Pappas’s strange and demanding behavior toward male aides, like one he had allegedly fired just for leaving a party. The reporters never actually came out and said Pappas was gay, but the subtext was clear. They mentioned, for instance, that Pappas was divorced and that his boss was single, and that Pappas often stayed with the congressman at his house.

“Killed himself,” Trippi told me then, choking on those two words after all these years. “Jumped out of a twenty-four-floor building. He jumped. He was in New York.” In fact, I would later learn, Pappas had hurled himself from a window at the Helmsley Palace Hotel near Grand Central Station minutes after hearing about the story. Trippi got the news from one of the Post reporters, who tracked him down that Sunday morning. “The question was not, How did I like the story or you know, something like that,” Trippi said. “It was: I need to ask you some questions for a story we’re doing for Monday. Today Tom Pappas threw himself out of a building and killed himself. What do you have to say?” He shook his head in disbelief. “That was the press.”

Trippi swigged from his Miller Lite and rubbed his eyes clear. “It just kills me, every time I even remember that guy,” he said. “I just don’t understand it. Even if it was true, it wasn’t fucking front-page news. We were just going through this whole thing where the personal stuff just wasn’t out of bounds anymore. The Hart thing just unleashed this really crazy period.”

* Sometime around 1990, Tom Fiedler spoke about media ethics at a panel in Little Rock, where state legislators happened to be meeting. Afterward, an aide to Governor Clinton approached and asked Fiedler to spend some time with the governor. In a suite at the Excelsior Hotel (the same hotel where Clinton would later be accused of having sexually harassed a woman named Paula Jones), Clinton questioned Fiedler about where he and his fellow reporters would draw the line on extramarital affairs. Was it news, he wanted to know, if a presidential candidate had cheated on his wife in the past, but wasn’t doing it currently? (Fiedler thought not.) What was the media’s statute of limitations likely to be? Fiedler found himself in the uncomfortable position of being consulted as an expert on the new category of sex scandal—which, of course, he was.

Later, Fiedler, like many others, would consider Clinton’s career in national politics proof that the Hart episode had not, in fact, led to an era where imperfections of character would overwhelm everything else. Fiedler had maintained all along that it wasn’t the reporter’s job to decide which aspects of a candidate’s life or persona were relevant to his abilities and which weren’t; those decisions were best left to the voters, who would ultimately be able to work through these disclosures and put them in context. As Fiedler saw it, in the case of marital infidelity, the voters had taken four years to process what had happened with Hart, and by 1992 they had decided that simply having cheated on your wife (and even having lied about it) was not, by itself, a disqualifying factor for a presidential candidate. Hart was the first, and perhaps he was treated more harshly because of it, but America had not become the place he warned of in his acid farewell, where politics existed only as treacherous sport. Rather, we had quickly evolved into a more forgiving society with a more complex notion of character.

There was a lot of validity in this. In the years after Clinton won not one but two terms in the White House, the list of politicians who would manage to rebound from sex scandals that made Hart’s look quaint grew almost as long as the list of those who hadn’t. Americans became desensitized to scandalous revelation, whether it involved sex or drug use or cheating on a college exam. You could disappoint us, certainly, but we were now a very hard country to shock.

And when politicians didn’t rebound, you could generally make a pretty good case that their moral transgressions were worth our knowing about. Did Eliot Spitzer deserve to be New York’s governor—and a moralizing one, at that—after it was revealed that he had routinely rendezvoused with hookers while traveling on the taxpayers’ bill? Should we not have cared that Anthony Weiner, the brash candidate for mayor of New York, was “sexting” young women, even after he had been drummed out of Congress for it and had promised to get the habit under control? It was reasonable to suggest that this hinted at some deeper compulsion or insecurity that was not unrelated to—and, in fact, was probably central to—his craving for public validation.

* And that’s when Donna Rice rediscovered Jesus—not in the eyes of a mountain lion, but in the hiss of a cassette tape. Actually, it was her mother and her grandmother who first put the idea in her head, who told her she “needed to get right with God.” Then a friend from high school, a girl she hadn’t talked to in years, sent her a package through her family. The note said she didn’t know if all this stuff she was reading was true, or what had happened to the Donna Rice she knew. But it didn’t matter, because it was never too late to ask forgiveness and change your life; she enclosed a tape of herself singing songs they had sung together in a Christian youth group many years earlier. The way Rice would later explain it, the Lord worked his miracle through that tape. He made sure, also, to steer her into the company of other devout Christians who had no agenda, other than to take her in and heal her.

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The Drudge Revolution: The Untold Story of How Talk Radio, Fox News, and a Gift Shop Clerk with an Internet Connection Took Down the Mainstream Media

Posted on August 28, 2020 by Luke Ford

From the 2020 book by Matt Lysiak:

* For those who had accompanied the Republican nominee to the debate, the sense of anticipation came with the full knowledge that the moments to follow in the debate would forever change the trajectory of each one of their lives. Perhaps no one understood that more than Steve Bannon, who had left his position as executive chairman of Breitbart.com when he was appointed chief executive of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. A Trump defeat would very likely relegate Bannon to a footnote in history, but a victory would vault him into one of the most consequential positions of power in the world. And Bannon knew it. He also understood that the chances of a Trump victory appeared to be more rooted in fantasy than political reality. RealClearPolitics polling showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton with a seemingly insurmountable seven-point lead.
Still, the campaign wasn’t without hope. Internal polling showed a much tighter race with hopes resting on the belief that non-college-educated white voters were being underrepresented in major national polls.
Donald Trump was minutes away from going onstage. His advisers needed to pull Matt out of the audience right away for a quick one-on-one with their candidate, but there was a slight problem: Did anyone even know what Matt Drudge looked like?
Over the past decade, Matt had disappeared from the public eye. He openly brags that it’s been years since anyone has managed to snap his picture. If someone does pull out a phone in his presence, Matt covers his face with his hands.
His mysterious persona was consciously cultivated in the belief that the Drudge Report would be more powerful without a public face attached to it. “Let the Drudge Report be,” he told a friend before going dark. “Remove the face. Remove the target. Just let the Drudge Report stand for itself.” And Matt’s instincts would be proved right.
By October 2016 the site’s power had reached new levels. Only weeks earlier, during a radio interview, Texas senator Ted Cruz placed the blame for his electoral defeat on Matt Drudge. And Cruz wasn’t alone. Jared Kushner, who had forged a relationship with Matt months earlier, knew from his time as publisher of the New York Observer that the support of the Drudge Report was crucial to his father-in-law’s electoral chances.
But with only minutes to go until Trump hit the stage for what was expected to be one of the most consequential debates in American political history, a senior staffer asked, “Is there anyone who can pick him out of the crowd?”
David Bossie spoke up. “I know what he looks like.”
Bossie had met Matt several times in the late 1990s. The two had formed a mutually beneficial relationship over common enemies—Bill and Hillary Clinton. Bossie raced through the underground labyrinth of tunnels beneath the stadium until he emerged through an opening facing the audience. He scanned the crowd. Several rows up he spotted an unshaven man in his early fifties wearing dark glasses and a brown fedora.
It was Matt Drudge.

* Matthew Nathan Drudge was born on October 28, 1966, the only child of two liberal Democrats, Robert and Deborah Drudge.

* Matt grew up a latchkey kid. He was a contemplative child who was naturally drawn to meditation. Radio was an early passion for young Matt, and at night he narrated his own personal radio shows into a tape recorder before falling asleep to the talk radio voices crackling through the AM stations on his transistor radio.

* Matt would later describe his mother proudly as a “pioneering lawyer”; however, her career stalled just a few years after passing the bar. Following the divorce, Deborah Drudge fell ill, and in January 1980 she was forced to leave her job owing to “severe illness.”
She became a patient of Dr. Norman E. Rosenthal, who would later become prominent for having been the first to describe seasonal affective disorder and for pioneering the use of light therapy. Dr. Rosenthal prescribed a “radical new treatment” for Deborah that appeared to worsen her condition.

* Court papers reveal that the young man’s issues extended far beyond a rebellious attitude. Matt had been dealing with “emotional problems” since the divorce.
“Physically he’s in good shape, but emotionally he has problems and he’s getting treatment for that,” Claire told the court. On June 18, 1981, Matt was arrested for making “annoying phone calls.” He was taken to Montgomery County Juvenile Court, where his issues were blamed on his father, who resented him for being “disturbed.” Coupled with his mother’s health troubles, it was suggested Claire send Matt to a foster home.
The agonizing situation was described to the court by a relative testifying in support of Claire:
After he went to his diagnosis well he got is a problem of making annoying phone calls to a girl, so that’s what precipitated the testing, and as a result of the testing the diagnosis was that the boy was disturbed. Not that he has a mental illness but because of his life situation of his mother’s sickness and his father resents him that he is disturbed and needs treatment, and their recommendation was a boarding school if we could afford it or possibly a foster home if one could be found, that is one of the reasons we are here is for more money to hopefully send him through boarding school and if not the last choice will be a foster home.

* In the early ’80s, the American media landscape was dominated by the network newscasts and a burgeoning print newspaper market. Newspaper circulation was on an upward trajectory that would continue for the next eight years, with many big-city publications putting out multiple editions per day. The influence of print spread to the network newscasts, with headlines from that morning’s New York Times, Chicago Tribune , and other prominent dailies often used as crib sheets for the producers at ABC, NBC, and CBS, and would later feature as the lead stories for the nightly newscasts. And the Big Three were enjoying a wave of success of their own, riding a formula of viewer trust and familiarity. But a cloud of uncertainty was also hovering forebodingly over this balance of power.

* Newcomer Ted Turner’s twenty-four-hour news station CNN had launched on June 1, 1980.
Meanwhile, across the ocean, Australian newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch was spreading his media empire, having just put in bids to purchase the Times and the Sunday Times newspapers in the UK, all the while closely watching the experiment unfolding at CNN.

* The new decade also delivered exciting new advances in technology.
In San Francisco, a 1981 KRON newscast told the story of a radical experiment happening at the San Francisco Examiner that had the potential to revolutionize how the public gathered news.
“Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee and turning on your home computer to read the day’s newspaper,” the newscast began. The story continues with a print newspaper subscriber named Richard Halloran, identified by the segment as a “home computer owner.” By placing a simple phone call, Halloran was able to access most of the newspaper without stepping foot outside his front door. “When the telephone connection between these two terminals is made, the newest form of electronic journalism lights up Mr. Halloran’s television with just about everything the Examiner prints in its regular edition—that is, with the exception of pictures, ads, and the comics.”
Eight newspapers, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, had already joined the computer network, with more joining every week.
“This is an experiment,” said Examiner editor David Cole. “We are trying to figure out what this will mean to us as editors and reporters and what it means to the home user . . . And we are not in it to make money. We are probably not going to lose a lot but we are probably not going to make much either.”
The segment concluded with KRON newscaster Steve Newman presciently saying, “Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer, but that’s a few years off.”

* Matt didn’t participate in extracurricular activities. He didn’t do his homework or go to football games or homecoming dances. He also didn’t join the school newspaper, but a few fellow students recall him reading the morning announcements broadcast over the school loudspeaker, including leading the Pledge of Allegiance. He said stuff to raise eyebrows and be provocative so that he could watch how teachers and other students reacted.

* After school the two usually ended up at Matt’s. His house was striking for its lack of personality and warmth. “There were no pictures on the wall. There were a few pieces of furniture, but no throw pillows on the couch or anything extra. Just the bare essentials,” Michelle recalls. Matt explained that his mom just hadn’t felt compelled to brighten the house up, telling Michelle that his mother was sad.
Matt’s mom was rarely home, but when she was, Michelle could tell that something was off. Michelle remembers Claire as a smallish, attractive woman with long brown hair parted down the middle, who looked like a hippie but without “that warm, easygoing hippie vibe.” There was something different about the cadence of her voice and the look in her eye. “She didn’t seem all there. She seemed to be struggling with something very serious.” When Michelle asked what was wrong, Matt just shrugged his shoulders, explaining that she was “still upset about the divorce.”
The other thing Michelle noticed was Matt’s strained relationship with Claire. “Matt didn’t like his mom,” says Michelle. “He talked down to her. He would sometimes just look at her and say dismissively, ‘That’s my mother.’”

On top of not feeling connected to his mom, Matt rarely saw his dad. “Except for me, Matt was a loner,” says Michelle.

As the relationship evolved, Matt began to use the notes to open up about his sexuality and his relationships with men. It hardly came as a revelation to Michelle.
“Most of the school thought of Matt as gay, so I wasn’t surprised at all. It was really no big deal to me,” says Michelle. “He was just so out there and never dated any girls, and the way he behaved and the things he would talk about . . . People just weren’t like that back then, especially in a football-oriented school like Northwood.”
While unfazed by Matt’s sexuality, Michelle was taken aback by how explicit the notes were in describing the details of his intimate relationships. On the bus rides home from school at the end of the day, Matt demanded that Michelle give him his notes back so he could destroy them.

Matt never dated classmates, but by the age of eighteen had already made himself a staple at the Washington, DC, gay club scene. Matt knew all the doormen, and even though Michelle wasn’t yet of age, he could get her in without a problem.

* At the clubs, Matt met men from all across the country. “Matt always dated older men,” Michelle remembers. “I remember him going down to North Carolina to meet with some man in his fifties. Even though he was still in high school, Matt would fly or take Amtrak to various destinations around the country and even Canada one time. Every year he would travel somewhere. He never told me how he paid to get there, but I always assumed the other person he was meeting was paying.”
Matt never drank or did recreational drugs at the clubs, but his dancing was epic. “Matt would dance the whole time nonstop. It was really remarkable. He would dominate the whole floor. He was that guy on the dance floor that you couldn’t turn your eyes from,” remembers Michelle. “Matt danced in a way I had never seen anyone dance before. He would go from side to side in these huge sweeping motions. He demanded space on the dance floor. You couldn’t stand next to him because he would knock you over. He was incredible. He would dance for hours and hours and come off the floor sopping wet from head to toe.”
One night Matt left a club late at night to meet up with Michelle, showing up at her door with his left shoe missing.
“Matt, where is your shoe?” she asked.
Matt looked down at his bare sock, then looked back up at her, smiling. “I lost it dancing.”

* Behind the scenes, Matt Drudge’s high school years were marked by increasing instability. Matt’s parents had become aware of his sexuality. Matt later confessed to a friend that they didn’t accept his lifestyle, and that they thought something was wrong with him.

* Matt’s “mental health issues” corresponded with the continual deterioration of his mother’s health, according to the Maryland Court Archives. In April 1982 Claire suffered a severe toxic reaction to a medication that caused her to be hospitalized. In June, Claire told the court, “I returned home, where I remain under doctor’s care. I have no financial means with which to meet Matthew’s special and urgent needs.”
With nowhere left to turn, Claire sent Matt to live with his father in Tyaskin, Maryland, on a soybean farm with his father’s new wife and her two sons. But after three weeks, the teenager was sent back to live with his mom.
According to Claire, “Robert Drudge rejected his natural son, Matthew, and returned him to my home, knowing that I am under doctor’s care and unemployed. His reason for returning Matthew to me after three weeks was that his wife comes first; her two boys come second, and Matthew comes third, that he did not assume any responsibility for him as his father because he has a new family; that he hopes everything turns out all right. Robert Drudge has not communicated with his son or me since that time.”
She continued, “As a result of these experiences, I believe that Matthew will require special attention in the form of psychiatric and social services as well as social educational services.”
After returning back to his mother’s care, records show that his treatments increased. In 1982 Matt received a “psychological evaluation,” a “psychiatric evaluation,” and at least twelve “individual psychotherapy sessions” at the Jewish Social Agency in Rockville, Maryland.
By September 15, 1982, Matt’s “emotional problems” had escalated. This time Matt was admitted into the facility for an extended stay as part of a psychological evaluation. It concerned Matt’s dad enough to provoke a rare visit.
“Matt told me he had pneumonia and that was the reason he was away,” remembers Michelle.

* Matt would later sum up his time in public education: “I don’t like authority and I didn’t like structure. My expertise in high school was cutting classes. Boy I knew how to do that. I never got caught. I got suspended a few times.”
In 1984 Matt graduated from Northwood High School ranked 341st out of 355 students.

* One of the female roommates had developed a crush on Matt, and the feelings weren’t mutual. And as tensions in the apartment began to rise, Matt found himself in a relationship with a man he had met in New York City, and it had turned abusive.
“Matt kept what was going on to himself, but we knew it wasn’t good,” a friend remembers.
Matt had nowhere to turn. His mom was struggling with mental illness, and his dad had all but disowned him. Michelle hadn’t heard from Matt in several months. She had become worried and decided to reach out. Matt answered the phone, sounding panicked.
“Hey, I’ve been trying to reach you. How are you doing, Matt?” she asked.
Matt answered, “Well, I’m getting my ass beat by my boyfriend, and I have no place to go. So that’s about it, so, bye.”
He hung up on her.
After just a few months, Matt fled the New York City apartment in the middle of the night. He didn’t tell anyone, not even Seymour, where he was going.
Seymour recalls, “We just woke up and Matt was gone.”

* In 1987 Matt moved again, this time leaving Takoma Park for Los Angeles, where he found a small one-bedroom apartment for $600 in a section of Hollywood “they’re always promising to clean up but never do.” He adopted a six-toed cat named Cutie. From his ninth-floor apartment at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, Matt found himself in the entertainment capital of the universe . . . with a view of CNN’s local headquarters and the high-rise where E! Entertainment’s offices were located.
Matt’s goal in Los Angeles was the same as it had been in New York City. He knew he had ability. He believed he understood more about the entertainment agency than the writers covering the beat, so now all he needed was for someone to notice.
He walked the famed Sunset Strip, sometimes stopping at Ronald Reagan’s brass star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to wipe the epithets off, or at World Book & News at the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga to note any interesting tidbits. One day, while perusing the news rack, Matt spotted an advertisement in Variety for a job as a runner for the game show The Price Is Right. He interviewed and got the job. The pay was five dollars an hour.
The job proved fortuitous. Not only did it earn him enough money to pay his rent and afford his steady diet of thirty-nine-cent tacos, but it also gave him his first real glimpse into Hollywood. And Matt was finally being noticed. He soon impressed his bosses at the game show and was promoted to the CBS Studios gift shop. Once there, he was bumped up the ladder again, this time to assistant manager, where he became responsible for all the books and purchasing. The higher-ups were so enamored of his work ethic that they flew him from Hollywood to New York City to show CBS’s New York employees how to expertly manage their store.

* Matt’s father, Robert, had married for a third time in 1989, this time to a woman named Rita Foust, also a Maryland native. Rita recalls that during their two years of marriage Robert didn’t have a single interaction with Matt. She says she never asked Robert why the two never spoke, only that “it was a very strange family. Very reclusive.”
But Robert did have a fixation that he would soon share with his son—computers. He had bought one in 1991 and had “spent hours messing around on it,” according to Rita. “He got very into it,” she says. “He took up programming and writing code and became very good at it.”

By early 1994 Robert Drudge had reconnected with his son, paying a visit to his Los Angeles apartment. He became convinced that Matt was spinning his wheels at his gift shop gig. Robert hoped to jump-start his son’s career, and possibly provide an outlet for him to focus his seemingly boundless energy and intellect.
“Matt’s mind goes a thousand beats a second and then the next second there’s something else,” Robert would later say.
On the drive back to the airport after his visit, “sensing some action was needed,” Robert made a detour to a strip mall off Sunset Boulevard. It was there that he purchased his son his first computer, a $1,500 486 Packard Bell. He thought it would be good for Matt to apply his mind to something new and different.
“Oh yeah,” Matt thought. “What am I gonna do with that?”

* But it was 1920s-era columnist Walter Winchell who would become Matt’s biggest influence. Winchell had made a name for himself by printing private, often salacious, information about famous people for the struggling New York Evening Graphic.

* Matt would later acknowledge the columnist’s influence, but with a caveat: “To me it’s only the Winchell spirit that I’m gravitating toward, as opposed to the man. He put himself in the center of situations. I do just the opposite. I remove myself from the fray and monitor everything from above.”

* In July 1997 Matt stopped by Brock’s house to celebrate his thirty-fifth birthday holding a bouquet of yellow roses. “Jesus, I thought, Drudge thinks we’re going on a date,” Brock would later write of the incident in Blinded by the Right, which detailed his departure from the conservative movement.

Brock’s account continued, “After dinner at the famed West Hollywood restaurant Dan Tana’s, he suggested we go bar hopping along the gay strip on Santa Monica Boulevard, which Drudge navigated like a pro. At a bar called Rage I accepted his invitation to dance, but I was much more interested in checking out two guys who were dancing nearby. When the couple disappeared, I asked Drudge if he had seen where the pair had gone. ‘Yeah,’ Drudge quacked, ‘I saw what was going on and I stepped on one of their feet really hard to get rid of them.’ The gesture was sweet, in a way, but also scary, and I quickly called it a night.”

Brock claimed he soon received an email saying, “Laura [Ingraham] spreading stuff about you and me being fuck buddies. I should be so lucky.” Brock decided it was time to unceremoniously end his relationship with Matt.

* Longtime conservative operative Barbara Ledeen couldn’t believe her eyes when the man showed up at her door with an order for her to appear in court as a witness in a lawsuit between Sidney Blumenthal and Matt Drudge.

“I didn’t know Matt Drudge,” said Ledeen. “But I knew enough to know that we needed help.”

Ledeen and her husband, author Michael Ledeen, may have never met Matt, but they had more than enough experience with Blumenthal, whom they described as “vicious” and “vindictive” for his attacks on their conservative advocacy work. After receiving the subpoena at their home asking them to turn over “all kinds of information,” Leeden called her friend, libertarian activist David Horowitz.

“You have to help Matt Drudge,” she said to Horowitz.

Horowitz, who had founded the libertarian Individual Rights Foundation, had never met Matt, either, but after being contacted by Ledeen, Horowitz believed it was a noble cause. Horowitz agreed to allow his foundation, which mainly fought speech codes on college campuses, to represent Matt’s defense.

Horowitz remembered, “Matt and I had breakfast. At the time I don’t think he realized or appreciated the real danger he was in with this lawsuit. The goal was to destroy Drudge, and even if Blumenthal knew he couldn’t win the case, he could easily drain Drudge dry.”

“He grudgingly accepted our help,” added Horowitz.

With Matt’s permission, Horowitz went to work creating a defense fund, which raised money through direct mail and internet appeals to pay the lawyers’ fees. He then set up a meeting with Matt and Individual Rights Foundation lawyers Manny Klausner and Patrick Manshardt. Manshardt was excited to take the case, seeing Matt Drudge, and all the Drudge Report represented, as important for the future of internet freedom.

* On October 8, 1997, [George] Conway reportedly emailed Matt again, introducing himself as “a friend of Laura” with an “exclusive” about Paula Jones’s claim (which was later dropped) that the “distinguishing characteristic” of the president’s anatomy was a curvature caused by a malady known as Peyronie’s disease.

* Lucianne Goldberg advised Linda Tripp to reach out to Michael Isikoff in late September, asking him if he would be willing to meet at the walk-up condo of Goldberg’s son, Jonah. Isikoff showed up at the Manhattan apartment on October 6, where he found Goldberg and Tripp waiting with a tape player in hand. Goldberg told him they had the Lewinsky tapes and suggested that Isikoff listen.

Isikoff politely declined, answering, “As a journalist, it would put me in a bad position to do that.”

In point of fact, the seasoned reporter was worried that by listening to part of the tapes he would be inserting himself into the story. Isikoff remembers, “There were pretty strong guidelines that you don’t get involved. That is a violation. There were strict guidelines handed down. That was the culture I was raised in. It was a sort of seat of the pants split second. It was pretty clear this was an ongoing process—they were trying to get me to coach them. It appeared to be an effort to make me a part of something that I was ethically obligated to stay out of.”

They spent the next hour talking and then gave Isikoff the name of the other woman: Monica Lewinsky. Again, Goldberg insisted he listen to the tapes. Tripp reached for the recorder and pushed the play button.

“Wait,” said Isikoff. “I’m not sure I should be doing his. It probably isn’t a good idea for me to listen.”

Tripp hit stop on the tape player. Whatever was on the tapes, Isikoff told them, he would need more corroboratory documentation if he was going to write an article alleging that the president of the United States was having an affair with an intern. He assured them he would keep working, and then left the apartment.

“He ran out of there,” recalls Goldberg. “I think he had a car waiting for him outside to take him to appear on Hardball.”

Over the next several weeks, Tripp and Goldberg continued to stay in touch with Isikoff, feeding him information and waiting for the story to break. But as the days went by, Goldberg’s crew was growing impatient.

Since the first day of his presidency, conservatives had been trying to prove Clinton was corrupt and unfit for office, but every time they thought they had him, the football would be yanked back and they would be left tumbling through the air catching nothing but wind. But this time, they believed it would be different.

The day before Clinton was to give a sworn deposition, Paula Jones’s legal team was notified of the tapes and their content. On January 17, 1998, Clinton gave a sworn deposition denying having a “sexual relationship,” “sexual affair,” or “sexual relations” with Lewinsky.

The president’s sworn testimony directly contradicted the information on the tapes. They finally had him, they thought. Now they needed to get the information out. And fast.

On the evening of January 17, Isikoff called Moody and Goldberg to let them know the story wouldn’t be running. The editors at Newsweek made the decision that the taped conversations amounted to hearsay and were not enough to publish a story that could lead to the impeachment of the president.

“Isikoff was very excited,” recalls Goldberg.

For Goldberg, it was more evidence of the leftist media protecting their own. She was determined to make sure the story wouldn’t get squashed. A friend suggested she call Matt Drudge.

Matt had been following the Clinton case closely with a member of Goldberg’s inner circle having already leaked bits and pieces of the story, but now, for the first time, he was hearing the entire story—along with Newsweek’s role.

“I did know Matt Drudge, but I hadn’t met him. And I was with friends who trusted him. And there was no other place to go. Isikoff had been fiddling for months. My friends told me, ‘Hey, you should call Drudge.’ So that is what I did. I picked up the phone, called Matt Drudge, and gave him the story,” says Goldberg.

It was shortly before 10:00 p.m., eastern time, when Goldberg picked up the phone to dial Matt in Los Angeles.

In Goldberg’s words, “I began to tell Matt the story and he was like a kid in a candy store. Drudge loved it. He was like, ‘Oh, boy this is great.’”

Less than an hour later, Goldberg got a call that the story had been posted on the Drudge Report. “I couldn’t believe how quickly it went up. I said, ‘You watch, this will change journalism forever.’”

* Having published [the Clinton-Lewinsky story], Matt Drudge sat alone in his Hollywood apartment. He began sobbing. He realized that from that moment forward his life was never going to be the same.

* In the months that followed, the historic weight of what he had done set in on Matt. He began to believe that he was in danger and that something nefarious could happen to him. If ever the Clinton deep state, which he had spent years obsessing over, had a reason to spring to life—this was it.

Was he being followed? At times he believed he was.

Had his computer been hacked? He didn’t think so—but he told friends that he was sure someone had tried.

Maybe, he thought, the police would come barging into his Hollywood apartment with a warrant for his arrest for some trumped-up charges? He told friends he worried that one day he would arrive at his car to find it surrounded by police after someone had planted a bag of cocaine in the trunk.

His attorney Patrick Manshardt remembers, “Drudge seemed more worried that the powers that be would do something terrible to him—arrest him, eliminate him, frame him. That seemed to be his concern. He was concerned there was some sort of deep state action that would be used against him. He was serious.”

* After the speech and Q&A had concluded, [Doug] Harbrecht [of the Washington Press Club] retreated to his upstairs office where he quickly discovered how the public had felt about his job performance.

“It immediately began,” recalls Harbrecht, who for the first time had found himself being labeled unfair and biased for his treatment of Matt. “We started getting emails from all over the country. That was when I found out what the meaning of the word ‘troll’ was. I got slammed, right down to my aunt and uncle. Rush Limbaugh spent time on his radio show laying into me. I would prove a perfect elitist foil.”

“Matt Drudge’s speech became the most commented event that the Press Club had ever had, but it wasn’t until five years later that I read that speech and realized how brilliant it was,” Harbrecht adds.

As members of the news media slowly filtered out of the room, they were accompanied by a cascade of murmurs and sly grins. These were men and women with journalism degrees from some of the most prestigious schools in the country and working for some of the most hallowed media institutions in the world. For generations, they had built their reputation as guardians of information who sought accountability from the powerful, and in their eyes, had more than proved their worth several times over. From Watergate, to the Pentagon Papers, to the Iran–Contra affair, they took their oath to uphold the public trust as sacrosanct.

Now, in a single speech, this Matt Drudge, an uneducated interloper, had looked them in the eye and rendered their entire world irrelevant. To those assembled, the speech and Matt’s vision of the future was as arrogant as it was obnoxious. And most important, it was wrong. As far as they were concerned, the newspapers and network news were at the top of their game, and they weren’t about to go anywhere. If anything, they were growing. However, this new fad of internet news was nothing but a flash in the pan, most believed.

“Enjoy your fifteen minutes,” a Washington Post reporter was heard laughing before walking out the door.

* New opportunities begat more new opportunities. In one example, a New York brokerage firm offered to put up millions of dollars to finance an online venture with Matt and former Clinton pollster Dick Morris. Matt refused, telling friends he was already financially comfortable. He had moved on from his old Packard Bell to a new black Fujitsu laptop, traded his beat-up Geo Metro for a Corvette, and upgraded his cramped ninth-floor Hollywood apartment for a luxury apartment on Whitley Avenue between Highland and Vine.

Heading for dinner one night, Matt handed Ann Coulter two hundred-dollar bills to pay the taxi driver and told her to keep the change.

“He’s constantly giving money away,” the conservative columnist said in an interview with the Washington Post. “He doesn’t know what to do now that he’s making money. It’s hilarious . . . He’s simultaneously larger than life and sort of childlike,” said Coulter. “When you ride in the Drudgemobile, he’ll play tapes of himself on the radio, and he’ll laugh uproariously at his answers. You end up laughing at him laughing at himself.”

* More bad news came after Matt learned that MSNBC reporter Jeannette Walls had begun research for an upcoming book that promised “a comprehensive, serious exploration of gossip and its social, historical, and political significance,” and a look into the major players, including Matt Drudge.

For years, Matt’s private life had become the subject of online “rumor campaigns” in internet chat rooms. “They’re spreading that I’m a child molester, I’m gay, I’ve been mentally institutionalized . . . even rumors of drug use and pornography,” he told the Washington Post. “All the charges and counter charges on me at some point become just a blur.”

A source had informed Matt that Walls’s book planned to out him to the public and his conservative audience. Matt fired off a preemptive attack on March 3, 2000, posting an all-caps headline: “MSNBC REPORTER: DRUDGE HAD SEX WITH EGGS.”

The article continued, “MSNBC reporter Jeannette Walls is telling associates that she has obtained information linking Matt Drudge with a sexual preference for eggs. ‘He likes to have sex with eggs,’ Walls told an insider. ‘He likes them smeared all over naked male bodies.’ Yet another MSNBC exclusive, Walls is also reporting to MSNBC associates that Drudge likes to ‘have sex, with his clothes on, in the shower.’ Do you have any other Drudge sex stories?”

On March 7, 2000, Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip was released with the opening chapter, “Citizen Reporter,” divulging modest details of Matt’s homosexual lifestyle, albeit without any mention of eggs.

New York Daily News gossip columnist George Rush called Matt for comment. “You are in this book and the author suggested that you are gay,” Rush told Matt.

“He was quite defensive and denied it,” said Rush, who had first met Matt in March 1997 at a party at the Chateau Marmont.

Rush called Walls to let her know that Matt denied the claims made in Dish. In response, the author forwarded Rush an email thread she had obtained between Matt and one of his alleged lovers that showed proof of a physical relationship. Rush reached back out to Matt with the evidence, but when confronted with the email, Matt went into overdrive to discredit the reporter.

“Oh, that’s fake,” said Matt. “Anyone can fake an email by copy and pasting.”

He then changed the heading on Rush’s email and sent it back to him.

“See,” he said. “Easy.”

Matt went on to claim Walls’s entire account was fabricated. “Jeannette, dear, slow down and come up for some air,” he wrote on his site. “You are becoming a laughingstock. Even by MSNBC standards.”

Replied Walls, “I’m not passing judgment. But I think his duplicity is relevant to his character as someone who has built his career on exposing others’ private lives.”

“I go to bars,” he later told the Miami New Times. “I go to straight bars, I go to gay bars. [Walls] never said there was sex; she said there was dating. She never had enough to go that far.”

Asked if it bothered him to be portrayed as gay, Matt answered, “No, because I’m not . . . It’s not an issue with me . . . I think I told the Daily News something like, “My youth is a blur. That’s a good out.”

Matt again found himself on the defensive after an avalanche of negative reviews greeted the October 2000 publication of his book, Drudge Manifesto. It had been hyped as “the most sensational, the most outspoken, behind-the-scenes story of the year,” but critics gleefully slammed the 247-page book, which included forty blank pages, thirty-one pages of fan mail, and nine pages of poetry.

A particularly brutal Wired reviewer wrote, “Drudge spends so much time assuring us that he deserves to be taken seriously, it’s only natural to come to the opposite conclusion. He deserves to be taken as seriously as the crud on the bottom of your shoe.”

Jack Shafer wrote for the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Drudge attempts to chronicle his pioneering internet life and times in Drudge Manifesto. But I can’t really recommend. His collection. Of sentence fragments. To anybody seeking an intelligible account of. How Drudge. Gave American journalism. A much-needed kick in the tuchas. Besides Mr. Drudge’s sentence-fragment tic, he RunsWordsTogetherForDramaticEffect as if under the spell of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, making readers struggle to follow his tale.”

* But Matt’s friends began to wonder [by 2001] if something was wrong. They worried that what used to be small glimpses of paranoia were taking a greater hold of Matt’s psyche. It didn’t help that the Drudge Report tip box had become riddled with hate. He claimed some people wanted him dead. Other messages referenced his sexuality.

After an eavesdropper spotted him in a Los Angeles coffee shop and fed an item on his private conversation to the New York Post, Matt began to think there were spies everywhere.

In another example, a camera crew took to the roof of an adjacent building to shoot into Matt’s apartment. Matt vented to friends that the Clinton people would never let it go.

* After spending the two years following his Lewinsky scoop frequenting the interview circuit, friends at the time recall a difference in Matt. His need to be reclusive intensified. He had cut down on his public appearances. He was slower to respond to longtime friends on AOL Instant Messenger. On the increasingly rare occasions Matt did talk to the public, he refused to divulge any details about his life. What started off as a quirk in his personality was now becoming his personality.

Picking up on the changes, Paglia asked, “You’ve been guarded about your personal life, and rarely make the usual media rounds. Why do you stay so mysterious?” Matt deflected from the question. “My private life would make my public persona a lot less interesting . . . Once you take the mask off Batman he seems a bit diminished.”

Andrew Breitbart was also starting to ask questions. He was helping to run one of the most influential websites in the world, still helming the nine-to-three shift like clockwork, but months would pass without any communication from his boss.

Breitbart’s friend, conservative talk show host John Ziegler, recalls the confusion. “Andrew was both mystified and amazed. Here he was, one of two people running one of the most incredibly powerful enterprises in the world, and they never spoke,” says Ziegler. “It was very, very rare for Drudge to communicate.”

Sometimes Breitbart would get an out-of-the-blue message from Matt that he would be gone for several days. When he asked where Matt was traveling to, he would be met with radio silence. “At one point Andrew thought he was in Europe. But he was always guessing,” adds Ziegler.

The one surefire way to get Matt’s attention was to miss a big breaking news story. Ziegler reflects, “If Andrew ever fell asleep at the wheel, Drudge would get really pissed at him and fire off a curt message.”

Despite the lack of communication, Breitbart continued working his morning shift with a religious fervor, waking up most days at 6:00 a.m., and then furiously alternating his attention between television news and the wire services, bouncing between different websites, all the while staying on top of emails and the Drudge Report tip box.

Breitbart once explained to Roger Simon, the author and creator of PJ Media, the conservative opinion and commentary blog, that he always needed to be plugged in because the secret to the Drudge Report’s success was speed. Even seconds mattered.

“Andrew had figured out how to get the early line for AP,” said Simon. “When AP was breaking, Andrew and Matt were jumping on AP faster than other people. That was part of their original plan. Speed was very important to them.”

However, the tension from always having to be plugged in was taking its toll on Breitbart, recalls Ziegler: “It was incredibly stressful. He felt like a goalkeeper. Just making sure nothing got past him. Andrew had to be wired in all the time. If he was going into his sports bar, he would be watching the Dodgers game while monitoring news.”

Stress over finances was also beginning to take its toll on Breitbart. He had long recognized the mistake he had made in turning down Matt’s offer to be a partner in the Drudge Report. It cost him millions of dollars, but the monthly personal checks from Matt were barely enough to cover Andrew’s expenses.

A friend of Breitbart’s remembers, “Andrew couldn’t figure it out. There was no reason for it. Sometimes he’d be killing it with traffic and the site would be making millions and millions of dollars and a check for just a few thousand dollars would show up in the mail.”

His friends encouraged him to confront Matt to demand an increase in pay and a contract, but Breitbart was reluctant. Matt’s increasingly reclusive behavior had made him nearly unapproachable. According to Ziegler, “In Andrew’s mind, it was as if Drudge had become this Howard Hughes kind of character.”

* By the mid-2000s, South Florida had become a small enclave for conservative leaders. In 2003 Matt’s circle of friends had continued to dwindle, but one relationship he kept was with conservative commentator Ann Coulter, who became his neighbor, moving into a penthouse in the same building.

Matt and Coulter would sometimes visit Rush Limbaugh’s gated oceanfront compound in Palm Beach, staying in one of his five guest-houses. Limbaugh’s brother, David, would occasionally help Matt with legal work.

Chris Ruddy, who had become inspired by Matt during their dinner together in the mid-1990s, had also planted his growing conservative media empire in Florida. After hearing Matt describe the scope of the Drudge Report’s readership during their dinner together in 1994, Ruddy went to his boss, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, and proposed starting an internet newspaper.

“I saw the power and influence that he [Matt] had developed on the internet. He was a genius. I thought I could turn it into a business model,” says Ruddy. Scaife declined. Ruddy left the Tribune-Review and took stories that were not published online, printed them out, and began setting up an email list for distribution. Before long, he had ten thousand subscribers paying thirty dollars a year. That success led him to begin the conservative website Newsmax in 1998. Five years later, Newsmax was flourishing. Ruddy set up headquarters in West Palm Beach with a massive $8.55 million, 61,900-square-foot office building.

Ruddy was joined in South Florida by conservative headliners such as former secretary of education Bill Bennett, former Reagan adviser Larry Kudlow, and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Gay Gaines, a longtime GOP political operative, would host fundraisers where Limbaugh, Bennett, Kudlow, Gingrich, and other GOP bold names would stay up until two in the morning partying. Matt was always invited, but never came.

* In August 2002, actor Alec Baldwin told the Howard Stern Show that Matt had hit on him in a “creepy” way after a chance meeting in a hallway at ABC Studios.

“He came right up to me and he looked like he had a fork and knife in each of his hands. He said, ‘Do you have any Tabasco sauce? I want to drizzle it all over you,’” said Baldwin.

* A revealing New York magazine piece written by Philip Weiss, published on August 24, 2007, further stoked Matt’s paranoia. In the article, Weiss used quotes from Matt’s radio show, giving the story the feel of an interview. Twenty-four hours after the story hit the web, Matt removed the link to his radio show entirely from the Drudge Report. Ten days later, it was announced that a new anchor had been hired for the 325 stations that broadcast his Sunday night show and that Matt would soon be quitting.

A few days after the story was published Matt met up for drinks with a work-related acquaintance and confided that he was ready to go completely off the grid. “I’m thinking of just going dark. So there is no longer a face to the Drudge Report,” he said. “This page would do better if I disappear. If I don’t exist. If there is no target.”

* After arriving at the building, Matt first stopped at his mailbox in the lobby and pulled out a thick pile of mail. He told [Tracy] Sefl it was all lawsuits. He couldn’t care less. It was such a constant for him. “That was his life: come home, open the mail, chuck the lawsuits over on the counter,” said Sefl.

The apartment was sparse, sleek, and modern, with a refrigerator filled with cases of Diet Pepsi.

“I was very flattered that he invited me into his home. That spoke volumes. He once told me I was only the third woman, the first being his mother, the second being Ann Coulter, who had ever been inside,” says Sefl. “That’s not a list I ever thought I’d be on.”

* Breitbart’s morning shift for the Drudge Report was all consuming. Even while on the road for the book tour, Breitbart had to stay plugged in to the website. Matt was even more obsessive than he was, according to Breitbart, but shared that he did have at least one vice.

“Matt was a big gambler,” says Ebner. “He liked to go down to the seediest casinos, the ones that were off-strip. He would go and play the high-end slots. The hundred-dollar slots. He would sit there for hours pulling the lever.”

* Hollywood, Interrupted had further launched Breitbart’s profile into the public sector among the conservative base. But his growing name recognition and his bestselling book weren’t enough to pull him out of the financial debt he had accumulated from a series of costly home renovations and other expenses. The personal checks sent monthly from Matt’s personal checking account no longer sufficed.

After the 2004 election Breitbart was approached by Arianna Huffington to be one of four partners to help launch a new website, the Huffington Post.

* A friend of Breitbart’s recalls the conflicted feelings Breitbart had over the thought of parting ways with the Drudge Report: “Breitbart had high anxiety about going to the Huffington Post, but he needed the money.”

Breitbart rationalized that if he handled the blog side and stayed away from news aggregation then he wouldn’t be directly competing with the Drudge Report, and would, in turn, manage to avoid Matt’s wrath. Breitbart held his breath and took the plunge, telling friends, “I think it will be okay with Matt.”

On April 25, 2005, the New York Times ran a piece that stated, in part, that the Huffington Post was a direct challenge to the Drudge Report. “In fact,” the story stated, “she has hired away Mr. Drudge’s right-hand Web whiz, Andrew Breitbart, who used to be her researcher.”

The reporter reached out to Matt, who emailed back that he was “excited” for Huffington. “The internet is still in its infancy,” he said. “It’s wide open.” But privately, Matt was seething.

* Shortly after the Huffington Post launched on May 9, 2005, the website not only took a leftward tilt but also heavily relied on news aggregation, making it a clear and direct competitor to Drudge. The relationship soured. By that June, Breitbart was out. He made another disastrous business decision when he decided to take a small buyout instead of the percentage he was originally promised, which would have been worth millions if Breitbart had waited.

Breitbart went back to work for Matt, knowing that he wasn’t going to pay him more, but offering “four or five ideas on how to make money.” Idea number one was to buy a subscription to the newswire services. To Breitbart, it made perfect sense. On any given week the Drudge Report would link to hundreds of wire stories, sending traffic, along with the advertising revenue that accompanied it, to third parties. If they bought into the wires, Breitbart reasoned, that money could be kept in-house.

“The idea was to have ten wire services and have them all under Breitbart.com,” says a friend of Breitbart’s. “If you were someone who wanted to be inside the news, this would be the ultimate news junkie page.”

Matt shot the idea down, telling Breitbart, “Then the Drudge Report would become a business, and the Drudge Report will never be a business.”

But Breitbart came back with a counteroffer: What if he fronted the money himself to buy the wires under his name? Would Matt then agree to allow him to link to the wires he owned?

Matt signed off on the deal. Breitbart moved forward with purchasing a subscription to the wire services, telling friends he took out loans totaling $150,000 for the subscription. In the summer of 2005, he launched Breitbart.com, “providing up-to-the-minute wire service stories.”

Publicly, Breitbart said that he “wanted to create the single best place where I could go as an avid news reader to get headlines the second they hit the internet so I don’t have to go to forty sites.” When asked if there had been an agreement with the Drudge Report, Breitbart told reporters, “I’m grateful for the traffic that is sent my way.”

The new arrangement would dramatically change the composition of the Drudge Report. On August 17, 2005, Breitbart.com went live. On August 29, 2005, Breitbart peppered the Drudge Report with links from Breitbart.com forty-eight times, according to an analysis by Kalev Leetaru, a researcher at the University of Illinois Cline Center for Democracy. By flooding the Drudge Report with links to Breitbart’s wire page, Breitbart.com went from obscurity to boasting 2.64 million unique visitors in its first month of operation, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

Publicly, Matt said he was happy to assist his friend, telling CNET News, “For the wire stories, I’ve always looked for places with low graphics, without a lot of spinning Java tops on them . . . When I send my readers someplace, I want it to be convenient for them to get there.” He added, “I want to help him out. He has always wanted to do this. This is his idea and hopefully he can make a living from it.”

Breitbart had other revenue ideas. He entered into a pay-per-click financial arrangement with Reuters that further altered the page. From January 1, 2005, to October 14, 2005, the Drudge Report linked just twenty-nine times to Reuters. In the period following the deal, from October 15, 2005, to December 31, 2005, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 229 times.

Each Reuters link was embedded with an HTML tag that allowed the news agency to track how much revenue Breitbart had been generating by the traffic sent their way. While Matt never explicitly said that Breitbart wasn’t allowed to use the coded links, he voiced his displeasure in other ways.

“Drudge didn’t like it,” says Ziegler. “He would go on and replace the coded links with links that had no code. It made Andrew furious. Matt was so passive-aggressive. Breitbart would be like, ‘That bastard did it again! That bastard took down my links!’”

It wasn’t the only pay-for-play arrangement. On January 26, 2006, Breitbart and his wife were sued by the Minnesota-based internet advertising firm Gen Ads for $75,000 for allegedly being in violation of their own agreement to take advantage of Drudge Report traffic. The court papers outlined a process of how Breitbart was able to manipulate the Drudge Report website to line his own pockets. According to court documents, after the August 2005 launch, Breitbart.com almost immediately became one of the most trafficked sites on the internet, with 2.64 million visits in its first month of operation. Nearly all the traffic originated from his own referrals while helming the Drudge Report.

The advertising agency was happy with the traffic until it learned that Breitbart had broken the agreement by promoting a third party: “In November 2005, Gen Ads learned that BL had entered into an advertising agreement with Reuters, a third party, for the placement of multiple links on the Breitbart Site to promote the Reuters site.

“Indeed, Andrew was negotiating the agreement to place Reuters Advertising at the time he was negotiating the Advertising Agreement and LLC Agreement with Gen Ads.”

In other words, financial arrangements for posting a story on a news site raised ethical concerns.

Journalist Greg Beato describes the arrangement as a black eye for Matt. “Drudge really used to emphasize his editorial independence. So the fact that there were these seemingly paid editorial links to Reuters.com on DrudgeReport.com looked like an ethical breach to me. Basically, it was pay-to-play.”

Breitbart had expected to cash in on the deal, but instead, he told friends the legal battle put him $300,000 in debt.

* However, in a conversation with Chris Ruddy, a despondent Breitbart opened up about why he left the website he had helped build. “He said he had broken a lot of stories for Matt and never felt he got the full credit he deserved,” recalls Ruddy.

Unbeknownst to Matt, Breitbart had been privately plotting to directly compete with his mentor. He had been thinking about an idea to create a home page that could not only gather views independent of Matt but would also confront the conservative kingpin head-on. “Matt will never allow another home page to be created in a conservative space that could actually compete with Drudge,” Breitbart would tell friends. “Never.”

* In May 2011, Matt brought veteran journalist and Washington Times reporter Charles Hurt into the fold. The trio had the website humming like never before. During his five- to six-hour shifts, Curl would replace 50 to 75 percent of everything on the page with fresher and newer stories. At noon, Hurt would come and take off the rest of the old stuff. Then at 6:00 p.m., Matt took over and worked until 11:00 p.m. or later.

By the time Curl got back behind the wheel the next morning, about 25 percent of the stories he had posted were still standing. Those would be the first he would take off. Then the cycle restarted. Over the course of twenty-four hours, there would be up to 150 links flowing on and off the page.

A few weeks before the 2012 election, and just as the news cycle was heating up, Matt announced to a small group of people that he would be leaving the country. When asked where he was going, Matt wouldn’t respond.

Matt had ended his embargo on Breitbart links, but the bad blood continued. In early 2012, after Breitbart completed the first draft of his book Righteous Indignation, which included an entire chapter about the near-decade period of his life he had spent working on the Drudge Report, he called Matt ahead of publication to give him a heads-up about the book and the passage about their time together. Breitbart explained how the chapter would be an ode to the Drudge Report, with fawning praise for Matt.

“I want you to pull the chapter,” Matt told him. “All of it.” Breitbart said, “But this is part of my life. I spent ten years with you. I can’t just pretend like it never happened.”

Matt wouldn’t budge—or read the chapter. Breitbart did as Matt asked and pulled the chapter. “Andrew was hurt,” a friend remembers.

In February 2012 at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Curl met up with Breitbart, where the two briefly discussed the unique nature of working for Matt Drudge. “It’s the weirdest job in the world,” Breitbart told him. “You’ll never talk to your boss—and no one will tell you what to do. It’s crazy.”

* In January 2016 Matt gave away the 4,600-square-foot house that he had paid $700,000 cash for in January 2013. He surrendered the property to a man with whom he had shared the same addresses since 2004 for a total of $10, according to Miami-Dade County property records. The house had been stockpiled with survivalist stuff, according to a friend.

Matt told his neighbor Kevin Tomlinson, whom he befriended in Florida, that he needed to keep moving because he “believed that he was always being watched. That people were out to get him.”

Tomlinson adds, “Matt thought there were eyes everywhere.”

In one instance, Matt told Tomlinson he had been chased by the Clintons. Another time he said, “They are stalking me, so I’m hiding out in Poland.” He would say, “They are watching me. They know where I’m at. They are going to see the cars I’m driving and get my plates.”

“I was worried about him,” added Tomlinson. “I still am.”

In March 2015 Matt had bought a home in Arizona, spending $1.9 million in cash for a 2,939-square-foot bunker-like compound in the desert outside Phoenix. A neighbor says the house has remained so quiet, he isn’t sure anyone ever moved in.

Matt would spend a month living out of a cabana at the MGM in Vegas. Next, he would travel to Tel Aviv or Helsinki for two weeks. Then he’d spend a week in Washington, DC, followed by a month in Australia.

* Matt shouldn’t expect recognition from academia. [Kevin] Wallsten believes there is a “blind spot when it comes to Drudge. No one understands how he works in the media ecosystem. We as academics are loath to describe the influence of single individuals. We study systems and how individuals fit into a greater whole. This idea of one great man who can spark a revolution is often beyond the scope of academia.”

* By April 2017 Charles Hurt had left the Drudge Report to become editor of the Washington Times and Matt had hired Daniel Halper, the former Washington bureau chief of the New York Post.

In the Age of Trump, the news cycle has never been as juiced. The Drudge Report’s page views have continued their upward trajectory. From December 2015 to December 2018 there have been a total of 55,136,650,898 page views of the Drudge Report, with 146,000,000 average monthly visits, according to SimilarWeb. From January 2018 to January 2019, over eleven billion visits were recorded to the Drudge Report, according to Quantcast.

However, a lifetime of being hunched over a computer for as many as seventeen hours a day has taken its toll on Matt’s body. He experiences pain in his back, neck, and shoulder. His spine is curved, and he has one foot “that is turned out in a way.”

“Don’t try to live my life,” Matt once told a friend. “It’s horrible.”

Drudge Report watchers say there has been a noticeable slowdown leading into 2019. The page doesn’t update quite as quickly as it once did. Many can’t remember the last time the Drudge Report broke a major story.

Longtime Republican consultant and Reagan biographer Craig Shirley believes social media is taking its toll on Matt’s ability to crash a news cycle, saying, “Twitter now moves a story much faster than Drudge does.”

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Investigating the mysterious man behind the Drudge Report

Posted on August 28, 2020 by Luke Ford

From Jewish Insider:

In his book, Lysiak notes that Drudge formed a close bond with Breitbart because of their Jewish backgrounds. “Breitbart, who had been adopted into a Jewish family, would later tell friends, ‘It is kind of weird that Drudge and I are both secular Jews who are interested in faith issues,’” Lysiak writes. “In Breitbart, Matt saw someone with boundless energy, a skeptical worldview, and who shared a passion for headlines and news.”

Drudge’s influence cuts across political divides. The CNN host and media reporter Brian Stelter “really looked up to Matt,” Lysiak noted.

But despite his reach, Lysiak believes that Drudge has been given short shrift by the majority of media professionals.

“Matt Drudge is the godfather of all these websites,” said Lysiak. “But I feel like he also doesn’t get the credit he would normally get because he isn’t highly educated, never wanted to go to the parties, didn’t do that scene, didn’t care if he was liked. For example, I worked at the New York Daily News for quite a long time. My editors were constantly refreshing the Drudge Report page, but they would never admit that.”

“It seems like people talk about him like he’s a guilty pleasure,” Lysiak added. “Like, it’s unsophisticated to say you go on the Drudge Report. You go on that site, you’re going to see things about sex robots, natural catastrophes, aliens and then some hard news. You might get the impression that we’re on the verge of an apocalypse every time you click on the site.”

Still, Drudge hasn’t done much to advocate for himself, at least publicly. According to Lysiak, Drudge basically bowed out of public view in 2007, when Philip Weiss published a lengthy New York magazine feature about him. The day after, Lysiak said, Drudge quit his radio show. Then, over lunch with a friend, Drudge decided that it would be best if his website didn’t have a face associated with it.

“He made a Batman reference,” Lysiak said. “And he’s been dark ever since.”

Drudge has been equally quiet about his faith, but Lysiak said that he has occasionally spoken about it. “Matt definitely feels closely connected to his identity as Jewish,” Lysiak said, adding that Drudge often travels to Tel Aviv. “He remarked to one of his friends that he feels a really powerful connection with the history” of Israel, Lysiak said.

In 2018, Drudge clashed with Fox News over coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.

“A segment on Fox News this morning where hosts laughed and joked their way through a discussion on political impact of terror was bizarre,” Drudge tweeted at the time. “Not even 48 hours since blood flowed at synagogue? Check your soul in the makeup chair!”

Such disputes are typical of Drudge’s independent streak. Lately, he has turned a jaundiced eye toward the president, coverage that has earned him scorn from Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who in a Friday segment characterized Drudge as “now firmly a man of the progressive left.”

Left or right, however, Lysiak explained that Drudge’s motivations for posting negative coverage of Trump aren’t simply ideological.

“People make this mistake of looking at him through a political lens, but Matt Drudge’s loyalty is to one thing, and that is his website and page clicks and anything relevant,” Lysiak mused. “If you notice, people are talking about Matt Drudge again.”

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A Place For You

Posted on August 27, 2020 by Luke Ford

I just thought of a four-word phrase that sums up my approach to politics, sociology, recovery, self-help, spirituality, God and religion: “A place for you.”

We deserve a place to feel at home. Government policies should promote that. People should have freedom of association. We need to get rid of civil rights legislation which has destroyed the ability of most Americans to feel at home.

Spirituality, recovery, and self-help boil down to adrenaline management. People who feel at home usually can manage their adrenaline surges. Feeling at home calms down your central nervous system so you are less likely to act out.

A key part of feeling at home is that you know what the rules are.

Stanford University’s Fred Luskin says most Americans spend most of their waking hours trying to feel safe. So solutions to this problem that promote a feeling of safety are approaches to life that works. One way to tackle the problem of anxiety is to shut off things that can make us feel unsafe — such as our email and our phones and TV news. Another great way to feel safer in the world is to live in reality. When we accept that we can’t change the traffic around us, we live in reality. When we accept that we can’t change other people, we live in reality. When we reflect on how our selfishness has hurt everybody in our life, we live in reality. When we have an accurate sense of our bank account, our bills, and our earning, we live in reality. When we have at least three months of prudent reserve, we live in reality. When we are aware of how we spend our time, we live in reality. When we glide through life without frequent humiliation and intense conflict, we are in reality.

Forgiveness, happiness and health are largely about relaxing one’s defenses, notes Luskin. Generosity only comes from people who feel safe. To phrase this differently, people who feel safe tend to be generous. Alternatively, people who don’t feel safe are not generous.

Which communities have the most generosity per capita? The most homogeneous ones. People prefer to help people like themselves and few people care about outsiders.

Pamela Moniz, the owner of a mattress store in #Kenosha that was burned to the ground, breaks down in tears telling @marthamaccallum about her 71-year-old employee who was seriously injured by rioters in a now viral video while defending the store.

"He did that for me." pic.twitter.com/wxCv9hDW4G

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 27, 2020

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