Media Channel: 26 March 2000
MEDIA: MEGAPHONE FOR THE MASSES OR MORAL SINKHOLE?
Matt Drudge is the best-known brand in the online retailing of hearsay and juicy half-truth. For many in the mainstream media, he represents the worst on online journalism. But views are polarised about cyberhype or the promise of more democratic media.
By MARK DERY, editor of Online Journalist in Darwin
MEDIA coverage of the Internet is equal parts cyberhype and
calamity-howling - "It's A Small World" - visions of an electronically
interconnected global village on one hand, and on the other, nightmares
about the Net as a hunting ground for con artists and pedophiles, an
incubator of hysterias and hoaxes.
Unsurprisingly, coverage of online
media is no less polarized, hailing the Net as a leveler of the journalistic
playing field and damning it as a launching pad for rumormongers who
play reporters on TV.
Matt Drudge is the best-known brand in the online retailing of hearsay and
juicy half-truth.
A would-be Walter Winchell with a modem who publishes
his "Drudge Report" from what he calls "a moldy apartment just off
Hollywood Boulevard," Drudge attained overnight notoriety in 1998 when
he leaked news of a Newsweek magazine investigation into allegations
that President Clinton had had an affair with a White House intern.
For many in the mainstream press, Drudge is the poster boy for all that's
wrong with Net journalism. He plays fast and loose with the facts, eschews
old-school distinctions between hard news and entertainment, makes no
apologies for his neo-conservative bias and appropriates other reporters'
stories.
To the journalistic establishment, he and the online
disinfotainment he represents are a grim premonition of the death of
journalism in the age of instant news, when there's no time to source and
ethics are roadkill on the road to the scoop.
To those who extol the Net as
a utopian remedy to the fact that freedom of the press, as A.J. Liebling
noted, "belongs solely to those that own the printing press," Drudge is the
Tom Paine of cyberspace.
Does online journalism hold forth the promise of a more democratic
media? Or is it just a bullhorn for the booboisie and the beginning of the
end of journalism as we know it?
MediaChannel affiliates and other
informed sources weigh in.