A Question of Ethics

Matt Drudge screwed up his face and squirmed in his chair. The attacks were coming from both sides.

To his right, Marty Kaplan, associate dean at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications, was calling him a bottom feeder in the “information ecosystem” that is the news business. To his left, Slate Editor Michael Kinsley was taking easy shots at the man he once called--with some admiration, actually--an “unreliable source of information.”

Drudge, arguably the Internet’s premier news and gossip columnist, had heard such insults before. No less a media authority than Columbia Journalism Review Publisher Joan Konner had dismissed him as “your next-door neighbor gossiping over the electronic fence.”

So Drudge struck back. He said that Konner hadn’t talked to him or even read his electronic dispatch, known as the Drudge Report, before passing judgment.

“So,” retorted Kinsley, “you were crushed that she doesn’t have higher standards than you do?”

And so it went at an Annenberg forum last week, where Drudge, Kinsley and Todd Purdum, Los Angeles bureau chief for the New York Times--representing what moderator Kaplan called a “‘spectrum” of journalistic respectability--took the stage to discuss journalism ethics in the Internet age. The event was broadcast on C-SPAN, but it yielded enough laughs for Comedy Central.

From an apartment in Hollywood, Drudge dishes dirt on politics and the entertainment industry. He rejects the label “journalist” in favor of “reporter,” and once boasted of being 80% accurate.

At Annenberg, he tried to make the case that his brand of news reporting is the wave of the future. In his view, every hack with access to the World Wide Web is a potential journalist. The established media are critical of him, he said, because they are threatened by the Internet’s ability to undermine their control.

The argument wasn’t entirely convincing, and neither were Drudge’s attempts at looking wounded by the scorn it elicited.

Drudge: “I’m not welcome at any party in this town.”

Kinsley: “You’re having your 15 minutes of fame right now, and you’re enjoying it.”

Drudge: “You said it was over last summer.”

Kinsley: “I was wrong. I was less than 80% accurate.”

Despite the laughs, it’s not all fun and games for Drudge anymore. He faces a $30-million libel suit from Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton aide who, Drudge wrote, “has a spousal abuse past that has been effectively covered up.”

The allegation was retracted almost immediately, but not before Drudge became a media establishment symbol for all that’s wrong with the freewheeling Internet. The episode prompted a story in the New York Times (in which Purdum interviewed Kinsley) and a profile of Drudge in the current Vanity Fair.

The irony, of course, is that by breaking the conventions of the media elite, Drudge has earned the high profile that gains him admission to their world. But that doesn’t mean Drudge is prepared to accept them into his.

“They just don’t know what to do with” the Drudge Report, he said. “But they’re going to have to start accepting it.”

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Karen Kaplan covers technology, telecommunications and aerospace. She can be reached at karen.kaplan@latimes.com