The Day The Web Exploded

By: Hillary Profita
Topics: News History

Video:
Scandals Feed Media Frenzy

"A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!" That's what the Drudge Report exclaimed on Jan. 18, way back in 1998.

And we all know what happened after that.

What's interesting for our purposes, of course, is the media frenzy (of pretty much epic proportions) that followed. If you're not familiar with all the dirty details, take a look at a piece yesterday by David Rapp of American Heritage magazine. Rapp takes a look back on the genesis of the scoop that would take "news reporting out of the confines of the newsroom and blast it into cyberspace."

After all, this marked the first time that a major news story was breaking on the still-young Internet.

In that vein, we dug up another little piece of news history. Former CBS News correspondent Eric Engberg (who has appeared here on Public Eye before) did a story for the "Evening News" a few days after the Drudge story broke back in January 1998. He examined how the media was handling a huge story that was emerging in an entirely different fashion than they'd dealt with before.

As Engberg explains in the piece, the unfolding of this story was a case in which "technology may have overrun old-fashioned editorial caution. Newsweek magazine, which had the Lewinsky story first, decided to withhold it to do more checking. But the magazine's hand was forced when scandal monger Matt Drudge outed the story on his computer Web site."

You can click on the video player above to watch the piece, which aired on the "Evening News" Jan. 24, 1998.

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by one_american January 22, 2007 4:52 PM EST: I will correct you, Memekiller.

"The most over-played political scandal of all time" was the Foley scandal, since the MSM threw all caution to the wind, and did their dilligent duty for months on end of "scandal mongering" , not in the interest of ethics, but in their attempts to sway voters.

And if you can come up with one "reputable, non-ideological journalist" I'd like to hear who you think is a qualified candidate...; Reply to this comment


by memekiller January 19, 2007 5:46 PM EST: That was the right angle to take. The other ramification of all this is that because Drudge broke perhaps the most over-played political scandal of all time, he has been able to ride on the reputation ever since, despite the fact that about 80 percent of his "esclusives" have turned out to be total bunk, yet the media runs with it.

I remember the artful editing he did of Clark's testimony, where we quoted Clark as praising, "men like Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, *** Cheney, Condoleezza Rice... people I know very well."

Who did the ellipses omit? Paul O'Neil!

What's so great about this is you can do a search to find all the journalists that lifted this quote from the Drudge Report, despite knowing his long history of fabrication (Remember the Iraqi WMDs stashed in Syria?). The only possible reason for such an edit was pettiness, yet the quate appeared -- sans O'Neil -- in major newspapers. How can any reputable, non-ideological journalist rely on Drudge's "reporting", knowing his track record?; Reply to this comment