Hillary Rodham Clinton might see the attacks on herself and her husband as part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” But true or false, conspiracy or no, the attacks are vicious and politically motivated, and there’s nothing new about that.
During Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaign, his wife died of a heart attack shortly after reading vicious attacks on her character in a partisan pamphlet called “Truth’s Advocate.” Grover Cleveland was dogged throughout his tenures in office by rumors that he’d fathered an illegitimate child and then abandoned both the mother and child (“Ma, Ma, where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha”). When President Woodrow Wilson remarried in 1915, a “suspiciously” short time after the death of his first wife, Ellen, rumors spread that Wilson had killed her. John Frimont, the 1856 Republican presidential candidate, was suspected of being a cannibal.
The public’s turning of a blind eye to presidential peccadilloes — which has certainly been the case for President Clinton — is also not without precedent. Almost every president or presidential candidate has been accused of some egregious flaw — whether it be alcoholism, philandering or murder — and in most cases the rumors have made little difference at the polls. The country paid little heed to Ulysses S. Grant’s drinking problem, for example.
In her new book, “Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics,” New York Times editorial board member Gail Collins looks at American presidential history through the gossip surrounding each administration. She also charts the shifting reaction of the media, from the enthusiastic embrace of gossip by a multitude of partisan rags to the more rigid journalistic standards that newspapers adopted when they had to answer to advertisers.
Salon spoke recently by phone with Collins from Washington, D.C.
Pundits are wringing their hands because Americans don’t seem to care much about the president’s sexual behavior. But your book says this is really nothing new.
What’s new is the technological changes in the media and the way the political system is organized. But what is not happening, as the pundits insist, is some sort of loss of our moral compass. This is not about some dramatic change in the moral fiber of the nation.
As you point out, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant and Grover Cleveland all got involved in scandals but were never punished at the polls.
And that was equally true in the 1970s, when you had all those crazy congressmen running around doing everything except sleeping with a cocker spaniel, and all got reelected; except for a couple of them whose private life was so wildly at variance with their public image, like the guy from Maryland [Robert Bauman] who was an anti-gay congressman who got caught soliciting young boys. It’s also true that once they got reelected, a lot of them quit because they just couldn’t stand it anymore; it was just too hard on them.
Based on your study of presidential gossip, is it possible, as Clinton has insisted, that the rumors about him and White House interns and volunteers like Monica Lewinsky and Kathleen Willey are simply not true?
It’s always possible, though rumors that have real legs always have some kernel of truth in them. More important than whether they are true is how the public sees the object of the rumor, or what’s going on in the country at the time. Take Woodrow Wilson. He didn’t murder his first wife, but people were upset when they realized that he wasn’t sitting in the White House mourning her, that he was courting another lady. That meant that rather than sitting around worrying about World War I, he was sleeping with his fiancie. That upset people.
You write: “The gossip of every election is very much a product of the issues and anxieties of the moment.” My reaction was, jeez, we must be really screwed up given the kind of gossip coming out of Washington right now.
A lot of it has to do with harassment of women, women in the workplace and stuff like that. That’s why there’s so much argument about how differently the accusations against Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton have been treated. It’s clear that we have not comfortably worked out these issues. It’s a real, live, churning thing.
I also think it’s a great sign that we’re
only talking about sex now. You don’t hear
rumors anymore that someone’s secretly a Catholic, secretly black or
secretly Jewish. Roosevelt was supposed to be a secret Jew.
Harding was supposed to be secretly black. Poor John Frémont, when he wasn’t being a secret cannibal, was supposed to be a secret Catholic.
But now, Hillary Clinton’s supposed to be a secret lesbian.
Powerful women always get gossiped about as lesbians. That’s part of a very cosmic tradition.
In the book, you discuss the multitude of small
presses operating in small towns across the country. At the end of the book you talk about the Internet. You write: “Gossip on the Internet really is like a transcribed version of careless back fence chatter or barroom meanderings” — but spread much faster far beyond a small town. Are we returning to this old-time, small paper rag with the Internet?
I think that’s exactly it. In the 19th century there were all these little weenie papers. In a place like Marion, Ohio, where Warren Harding came from, there would be five or 10 papers in this little bitty town. In large cities there’d be tons of newspapers. A lot of them didn’t have many staff and weren’t well financed, so they weren’t that worried about their long-term credibility with advertisers. They were just trying to get enough attention to get through the week. I think there’s
a lot of that now. Whenever you have a lot of small, competitive media out there you tend to get a very loud dialogue with people shouting and trying to get attention, which is what’s happening now.
That doesn’t say much about the journalistic possibilities of the Internet.
I do find a lot of the chat stuff, the political chat, scary. But I also remember reading that when John Calhoun was a
kid living in some plantation in the middle of nowhere he’d had one copy of one issue of a newspaper that he read over and over and over again. Whatever gossip and inaccuracies were in that one copy of the newspaper, John Calhoun took to heart and memorized. With all this different stuff coming at you on the Internet, it’s probably healthier in the long run. People are not racing out mad
as dogs because they heard one rumor that Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster, or something.
You write that before radio and film
and TV, politicians were our celebrities. Now it seems we’ve come back to that. You can’t go a week when there isn’t some movie being
released with a Bill Clinton-type president in it.
The line is certainly blurred. That’s because the political parties have fallen apart, so politicians have to sell themselves.
They need media attention and have to do whatever it takes to get media attention. And because people are not as interested in politicians as they are in singers, actors and
other entertainment celebrities, they have to put up with a lot more abuse.
Bill Clinton is a real pioneer in that. He so often resuscitates his
career by going on TV and making people feel
comfortable with him. But in the process of doing that, he also lost some of the dignity that politicians used to have when
they were more remote. If you want to be that accessible — talking about your underwear on MTV — you’re inevitably going to lose protection from the more outrageous forms of discourse.
You write about Grover Cleveland, who was wrongly
accused of fathering and abandoning a child, and cite a Rev. Ball who kept pushing the rumors. “Behind almost every gossip-driven campaign,” you write, “there lies a figure like Ball, someone who is willing to work full-time spreading and improving upon
the scandal.” Is Kenneth Starr a modern-day Rev. Ball?
[Laughs] I was in Pittsburgh on the book tour, where Richard Mellon Scaife, the
right-wing guy who funds so many of these things, lives and owns a newspaper. Everybody there wanted to talk about him as the Rev. Ball. Everyone finds their own Rev. Ball in this one. There are several candidates. [Rep.] Dick Armey [R-Texas] looks like he wants to be Rev. Ball.
There are a few presidents who seem to be made of rubber. Franklin Roosevelt, for example. The press didn’t report on his health problems; the press didn’t report that Kennedy was screwing around and had Addison’s disease.
The health thing seems to me in many
ways a whole lot more serious than the sex stuff. The idea that Kennedy was in Europe, negotiating with the
Russians, at a time when he was on all these drugs and in absolutely
unbearable pain when he wasn’t taking mood-altering painkillers, is just amazing to me. That’s the kind of gossip that people really ought to know. It’s just incredible to me that the media were willing to overlook it.
Is it because health was considered too private?
For a long time it was. Now it’s not, although it can be pretty embarrassing. I can understand why Eisenhower was taken aback when
the doctors started reporting his bowel movements to the entire nation. News: The president is regular! Now there’s a much higher expectation about what you are allowed to know about the president.
How does the press choose to protect someone in office?
You’re covering the president, you know what he’s doing –
You don’t always know what he’s doing. The reporters I
talked to all thought Kennedy was having affairs, but they didn’t
know with who; it was all very vague. They certainly didn’t think there was the mass screwing around that we hear about now. And the same thing happened in Clinton’s first term. People speculated
about whether he might be straying but you didn’t hear specific
allegations. When people hinted at it they were sort of scoffed at. It was only Ken Starr and Paula Jones’ lawyers coming forward with legally definable events that forced
this discussion out.
An old writer friend of mine called the other day to say that he had been
advised by a senior editor at the New Republic not to have anything to do
with my partner Peter Collier and me because we were “Nazis.”
The reason? We had organized a fund to defend Matt Drudge, the Internet
gadfly who told the world about Newsweek magazine’s Monica Lewinsky story
before Newsweek did and is being sued by White House aide Sidney
Blumenthal, one of the architects of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “vast right-wing
conspiracy” scenario. Every day, I get calls from the press about my
connections to two names on the White House chart of right-wing
conspirators, as reported in this week’s Newsweek: Drudge and
philanthropist Richard Scaife. In this week’s edition of the leftist the
Nation, I am also listed
on the chart (in a box with Drudge and Rush Limbaugh) for a sentence I
wrote in a Salon
article referring to President Clinton’s sojourn in Russia during the Cold
War.
So, how does it feel to be a target of this latter-day witch hunt?
Actually, it feels quite familiar. I grew up in the Cold War ’50s in a
family of American Communists. The FBI used to hang around our
neighborhood, charting people’s comings and goings. My parents lost their
jobs as high school teachers because they would not answer the question,
“Are you now, or have you ever been,” etc. Once in a junior high school
auditorium, when I was 13, a gang of toughs put a drape cord around my neck
and started shouting, “String him up, he’s a red!”
Unfair as the treatment of my family and our Communist friends was during
the McCarthy era, there was an element of truth in the conspiracy charges
then. My parents, both Communists, were willing enlistees in a highly
disciplined and secretive movement dedicated to overthrowing American
democracy, a movement that took its orders (and its money) from Moscow with
the express purpose of undermining this country’s security vis-á-vis the
Soviet Union.
Yet most people agree, and I am one of them, that McCarthy’s campaign was a
reckless witch hunt that injured people who had no connection to the actual
Communist conspiracy, and those who, while they believed in the cause, were
innocent of any criminal and/or subversive deeds. McCarthy’s true targets
were not Communists, whom the FBI already had under surveillance, but his political
opponents in the Democratic party.
Why then the seeming tolerance for the current White House witch hunt,
whose purpose is to smear and destroy its political critics? There is no
conspiracy behind the events that prompted the first lady’s accusations.
There is no subversive party of the right with secret codes and ruthless
discipline that gives orders to go out and destroy people. If Monica
Lewinsky was planted in the White House, she was planted by Democrats,
beginning with a big party donor and ending with the president himself. It
was Newsweek — hardly a conservative rag — that worked on the story for a
full year. Yes, Richard Scaife, one of the conspiracists’
villains-in-chief, bankrolled private investigations into the suicide of
Vincent Foster, in the belief that something more sinister occurred. (So
what, isn’t that what freedom of inquiry entails?) Kenneth Starr, the
billionaire’s supposed right-wing pawn, refuted the speculations that
Scaife was pushing and supported the original suicide finding. What kind
of a conspiracy is this?
As for my minuscule role in the plot, I was barely aware of Drudge’s
existence when I first heard of the Blumenthal suit. I offered to introduce
Drudge to a lawyer, Manny Klausner, a well-known civil liberties advocate
with deep (and very public) ties to the Libertarian Party. The Center for
the Study of Popular Culture has long been interested in free speech issues
and has defended feminists and Afro-centrists as well as conservatives on
First Amendment issues. We spearheaded the battle against speech codes on
college campuses some years ago. We even attained some humorous notoriety
when we forced a vice chancellor at the University of California to undergo
First Amendment “sensitivity training” when he banned a fraternity from
distributing a T-shirt the campus PC crowd didn’t like. We were even
criticized by George Will, who clearly didn’t get the joke.
We do get funds from the Scaife foundations in addition to 20 other
foundations and 15,000 individuals. So why is Scaife, whom I have
met and talked to twice in my life, being demonized as though he were the
mastermind of a coup d’état against the president? Why is the Center for
the Study of Popular Culture, which has sought only to defend a journalist
from what it perceives as a punitive and chilling legal attack, being
dragged into the “conspiracy”?
The answer is obvious from witch hunts of the past. It is to deflect
attention away from the real issues. It is to conjure fantasy demons in
order to smear and then cripple real opponents. The question that should be
asked is: Why, given what Americans know about witch hunts, are they so
tolerant of this latest outbreak?
An old writer friend of mine called the other day to say that he had been
advised by a senior editor at the New Republic not to have anything to do
with my partner Peter Collier and me because we were “Nazis.”
The reason? We had organized a fund to defend Matt Drudge, the Internet
gadfly who told the world about Newsweek magazine’s Monica Lewinsky story
before Newsweek did and is being sued by White House aide Sidney
Blumenthal, one of the architects of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “vast right-wing
conspiracy” scenario. Every day, I get calls from the press about my
connections to two names on the White House chart of right-wing
conspirators, as reported in this week’s Newsweek: Drudge and
philanthropist Richard Scaife. In this week’s edition of the leftist the
Nation, I am also listed
on the chart (in a box with Drudge and Rush Limbaugh) for a sentence I
wrote in a Salon
article referring to President Clinton’s sojourn in Russia during the Cold
War.
So, how does it feel to be a target of this latter-day witch hunt?
Actually, it feels quite familiar. I grew up in the Cold War ’50s in a
family of American Communists. The FBI used to hang around our
neighborhood, charting people’s comings and goings. My parents lost their
jobs as high school teachers because they would not answer the question,
“Are you now, or have you ever been,” etc. Once in a junior high school
auditorium, when I was 13, a gang of toughs put a drape cord around my neck
and started shouting, “String him up, he’s a red!”
Unfair as the treatment of my family and our Communist friends was during
the McCarthy era, there was an element of truth in the conspiracy charges
then. My parents, both Communists, were willing enlistees in a highly
disciplined and secretive movement dedicated to overthrowing American
democracy, a movement that took its orders (and its money) from Moscow with
the express purpose of undermining this country’s security vis-á-vis the
Soviet Union.
Yet most people agree, and I am one of them, that McCarthy’s campaign was a
reckless witch hunt that injured people who had no connection to the actual
Communist conspiracy, and those who, while they believed in the cause, were
innocent of any criminal and/or subversive deeds. McCarthy’s true targets
were not Communists, whom the FBI already had under surveillance, but his political
opponents in the Democratic party.
Why then the seeming tolerance for the current White House witch hunt,
whose purpose is to smear and destroy its political critics? There is no
conspiracy behind the events that prompted the first lady’s accusations.
There is no subversive party of the right with secret codes and ruthless
discipline that gives orders to go out and destroy people. If Monica
Lewinsky was planted in the White House, she was planted by Democrats,
beginning with a big party donor and ending with the president himself. It
was Newsweek — hardly a conservative rag — that worked on the story for a
full year. Yes, Richard Scaife, one of the conspiracists’
villains-in-chief, bankrolled private investigations into the suicide of
Vincent Foster, in the belief that something more sinister occurred. (So
what, isn’t that what freedom of inquiry entails?) Kenneth Starr, the
billionaire’s supposed right-wing pawn, refuted the speculations that
Scaife was pushing and supported the original suicide finding. What kind
of a conspiracy is this?
As for my minuscule role in the plot, I was barely aware of Drudge’s
existence when I first heard of the Blumenthal suit. I offered to introduce
Drudge to a lawyer, Manny Klausner, a well-known civil liberties advocate
with deep (and very public) ties to the Libertarian Party. The Center for
the Study of Popular Culture has long been interested in free speech issues
and has defended feminists and Afro-centrists as well as conservatives on
First Amendment issues. We spearheaded the battle against speech codes on
college campuses some years ago. We even attained some humorous notoriety
when we forced a vice chancellor at the University of California to undergo
First Amendment “sensitivity training” when he banned a fraternity from
distributing a T-shirt the campus PC crowd didn’t like. We were even
criticized by George Will, who clearly didn’t get the joke.
We do get funds from the Scaife foundations in addition to 20 other
foundations and 15,000 individuals. So why is Scaife, whom I have
met and talked to twice in my life, being demonized as though he were the
mastermind of a coup d’état against the president? Why is the Center for
the Study of Popular Culture, which has sought only to defend a journalist
from what it perceives as a punitive and chilling legal attack, being
dragged into the “conspiracy”?
The answer is obvious from witch hunts of the past. It is to deflect
attention away from the real issues. It is to conjure fantasy demons in
order to smear and then cripple real opponents. The question that should be
asked is: Why, given what Americans know about witch hunts, are they so
tolerant of this latest outbreak?
As the media furor about the president’s alleged sexual adventures rages, the scandal has created a fascinating sideshow: the rehabilitation of Internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge. In a matter of days, Drudge went from scorned purveyor of unsubstantiated rumor to honored talk-show authority.
But the shift in the mainstream press’s attitude toward Drudge — from snooty disdain to cautious respect — is unlikely to last, given that few mainstream journalists are willing to acknowledge that the nature of Drudge’s work is scarcely different from that of their own. And if “Tailgate” fizzles as a scandal, you can bet that the press, eager to find someone else to blame for the media frenzy, will seize upon Drudge as a convenient scapegoat.
A number of media pundits — notably Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post’s media critic — were all too ready last fall to proclaim Drudge’s demise as a media force after White House aide Sidney Blumenthal filed a $30 million lawsuit against Drudge and America Online, which carries his trademark mix of political and Hollywood dish. (Drudge reported correctly that Blumenthal was rumored in right-wing circles to have a history of spousal abuse, but erred in failing to determine that there was no evidence to support that charge.)
But now that Drudge has played a key role in igniting the media firestorm surrounding President Clinton and his supposed affair with a White House intern, the 30-year-old columnist is once again being treated as a serious player by leading media institutions.
The shift in Drudge’s treatment by broadcasters has been extraordinary. Shortly before the Monica Lewinsky story broke, the Blumenthal-Drudge case was the subject of an installment of Ted Koppel’s “Nightline.” Koppel’s primary guest was Kurtz, whose eagerness to slam Drudge led to his making claims about the reliability and probity of the traditional press that are demonstrably untrue. Kurtz argued that a newspaper’s editorial hierarchy is what prevents a paper from publishing defamatory material — a revelation that must be rather startling to Richard Jewell, whom the traditional press wrongly presumed to be behind the bombing at the ’96 Olympic games in Atlanta. And Kurtz asserted that a mistake like Drudge’s would get him fired from any reputable newspaper — an assertion that even Koppel felt compelled to dispute.
Following the first week of the Lewinsky story, however, it was hard to watch any TV account of the scandal without hearing a reference to Drudge’s having “broken the story.” And, in fact, Drudge did break some parts of the story, including the fact that Newsweek opted at the last minute to delay publication of its own coverage. (Spurred by Drudge’s report and the resultant frenzy, Newsweek used its America Online site to get its version into circulation, but felt constrained in the following week’s magazine edition to emphasize that its reporter, Michael Isikoff, had uncovered parts of the story that Drudge didn’t know about.) On Jan. 25, a week after publishing his major Lewinsky piece, Drudge appeared both on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” (whose very name imposes the CNN imprimatur on any guest) and on NBC’s venerable “Meet the Press.” And in the next few days he appeared on shows ranging from “Talkback Live” to “Leeza.”
But this shouldn’t be taken as proof that the journalistic establishment has embraced Matt Drudge; what it really illustrates is the profound ambivalence with which that establishment regards him. You can see this ambivalence in Michael Kinsley’s essay “In Defense of Drudge,” which was a part of Time’s package dealing with the Lewinsky affair, and in John Schwartz’s essay in the Jan. 26 Washington Post. Kinsley feels compelled to distinguish between what Drudge does and what the really good journalists — like Kinsley — do, but then proceeds to defend Drudge as meeting a sort of allowable substandard. Schwartz is more straightforward: He begins by admitting his “powerful feeling” that if he ever met Drudge he wouldn’t like the guy.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
But the strongest evidence of this ambivalence is the failure of mainstream journalists, in their coverage of the Blumenthal-Drudge suit, to report that it’s likely Blumenthal will lose the case. The professional journalistic establishment tends to assume Drudge will lose — partly because Drudge genuinely did err, but also because it believes this lawsuit illustrates that the journalism game is not one for amateurs and upstarts. The establishment couldn’t be more wrong — Drudge and AOL are likely to win (or at least not lose) because of three basic libel-law principles that almost every working journalist knows:
1. Public-figure doctrine. No one (except maybe Blumenthal’s lawyer) seriously disputes that White House aide and former journalist Blumenthal is a “public figure” as that term is used by the courts. This means that Blumenthal can’t win against Drudge unless he can show that Drudge published his story with “actual malice” — that is, he either knew for certain it was false, or simply didn’t care whether it was true or not. Unfortunately for the plaintiff, there’s no evidence that Drudge ran the piece with “actual malice,” and plenty of evidence that he did not. To be counted in the latter is Drudge’s inclusion, in the original piece, of a White House source’s assertion that the spousal-abuse claims were (in Drudge’s words) “pure fiction,” although (in the source’s words) “This story about Blumenthal has been in circulation for years.” At worst, the evidence tells us, Drudge was negligent — he tried to make his story accurate, but he didn’t try hard enough — and it’s a long-standing principle in American libel law that public-figure plaintiffs cannot recover libel damages for merely negligent reporting.
2. Vicarious liability. Blumenthal’s lawyer argued in a filing Wednesday that America Online should be held legally responsible for Drudge’s mistake, since the online service pays Drudge for the content. Sorry, Sidney, but libel law doesn’t work that way in this country, and it hasn’t since the 1960s. To hold a distributor of information liable for defamatory content, a plaintiff has to show that the service either “adopted” or reviewed the content in some way — but AOL quite deliberately acts as a channel, not as an editor, for most of the content it carries, including the Drudge Report. (AOL also pays the New York Times and Newsweek for content; does anyone think it should be held liable when these august institutions goof?) What’s worse for Blumenthal is that one of the provisions of the Communications Decency Act that was not struck down last year by the Supreme Court seems to bar anyone from recovering damages from a provider for content it did not originate.
3. Repairing reputational damage. Ask yourself this question — if you know that Drudge retracted and apologized for his report on Blumenthal, how has Blumenthal’s reputation with you been damaged by the report? The obvious answer: It hasn’t. Every working journalist knows that libel law isn’t about fixing someone’s hurt feelings; it’s about remedying damage to public reputation. In this case, the mainstream media’s eagerness to report Drudge’s goof ensured that the story of the retraction outpaced (by orders of magnitude) the scope of the original item. What’s more, while Drudge pulled the original item from his archives, his retraction has remained posted on his AOL site for about five months — meaning that, even if you exclude all the other media coverage from the equation, Drudge has made the retraction available about 150 times as much as the original item ever was. Worst-case scenario under these facts (even if you assume I’m wrong in my arguments above) — Blumenthal wins the case and is awarded damages of $1.
This is all old hat, of course, to our cadres of professional journalists; they learned this stuff in J-school or on the job. But their blind spots about Matt Drudge — a sort of “don’t try this journalism stuff at home” attitude — prevents them from seeing not only that Drudge will likely be successful in his libel lawsuit defense, but also that Drudge has spotlighted a new niche in the mass-media ecology: the one-man operation that can break a national story whenever it wants to. It’s this last factor — and not Drudge’s politics (which I find distasteful) or his journalistic acumen (uneven) — that has made him so much of a player that he had to be included on that “Meet the Press” panel.
But don’t expect Drudge’s centrality in the breaking of the Lewinsky story to insulate him from the backlash that’s already brewing — and that’s certain to intensify if the scandal fades or implodes. If “Tailgate” collapses, Drudge, and by extension the Internet, will become the “paparazzi” of the story — the guys who do the same thing we journalists do, but from whom we feel compelled to distance ourselves.
The oddest feature of the affair that pits White House flak Sidney Blumenthal against Internet gadfly Matt Drudge is probably the most revealing: the failure of the press to defend one of its own.
Last August, Blumenthal filed a $30 million libel suit against Drudge for reporting a rumor that Blumenthal was once involved in a spousal abuse court case and then (though retracting the claim) failed to reveal his unnamed sources. I should state at the outset that I am the co-chair of the Matt Drudge Defense Fund, which is raising money to support his legal defense. What follows explains why.
Matt Drudge is a self-made entrepreneur who made his Web-based Drudge Report a national media player, often quoted by the likes of Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal. While media conglomerates, in their glass-towered fortresses, deploy battalions of scribes across the globe, Drudge operates alone from his Hollywood apartment on a salary of $36,000 a year.
Such a mismatch should have made Drudge the underdog favorite in a case that would seem to pit a White House Goliath against an Internet David.
But it hasn’t. One obvious reason is that little Matt Drudge kept scooping the big guys — on stories ranging from alleged White House scandals to Republican politics and network television changes — and big guys in the media really resent that. Drudge also played right into the hands of a journalistic establishment that resents this upstart new medium, the Internet. His apparent recklessness in reporting a rumor he couldn’t back up evoked images of journalistic irresponsibility and informational chaos generated by a free medium many find threatening.
The fact that Drudge is an Internet libertarian rather than a statist liberal doesn’t help his case either. Sidney Blumenthal, on the other hand, began his career at the socialist tabloid In These Times. From there, he went to such bastions of official liberalism as the New Republic and the Washington Post. His time at the Post was an up-and-down experience; he did a brief stint reporting foreign policy before being sent (some say demoted) to the less weighty Style section. He shifted to the New Yorker where political soul mate Rick Hertzberg had become the new managing editor. Appointed the magazine’s White House reporter, the sycophancy of his stories about Bill and Hillary Clinton and his constant playing down of the mushrooming Whitewater scandal made other reporters at the New Yorker (even Tina Brown) wince.
Yanked from his beat, Blumenthal finally got what he really wanted: a job at the Clinton White House, as a senior communications advisor. There was a chorus of hoots from his “colleagues” in the press; the New Republic suggested the Clintons owed him back pay for services already rendered.
This is the man who has taken a holier-than-thou attitude to the offending Matt Drudge for reporting a “Republican rumor” he was unable to back up. No matter that Drudge immediately retracted the item when it was first challenged and apologized for it in an interview with the Post’s Howard Kurtz. Blumenthal wanted sources and when Drudge refused — as any other self-respecting journalist would have done — Blumenthal slapped him with a $30 million suit. For good measure (and for its deep pockets) Blumenthal also named America Online, which had a contract to run the Drudge Report on its network.
Blumenthal’s attorneys compiled a 137-page summary of the charges, throwing in chunks of columns from Howard Kurtz and other comments from Blumenthal friends they thought incriminating to Drudge and circulated the lawsuit to the entire media and anyone else who requested it. Since lawsuits often contain damaging but unsubstantiated charges, lawyers, as a rule, forbid their clients from distributing such filings, even to friends, to avoid the prospect of libel suits in return. The aim is clear: not merely to nail Drudge, but to warn other critics of the Clinton establishment, including those online, to beware.
Despite such attempted intimidation — not to mention the rather low esteem in which he is held by the profession — Blumenthal has, up to now, been able to rally the press to his cause. When asked about Drudge in a Christian Science Monitor survey on Internet reporters, Joan Konner, head of the Columbia Journalism School sneered: “Drudge isn’t a reporter, he’s your next-door neighbor gossiping over the electronic fence.” Forgotten in their dismissive rush to judgment about Drudge are some of the low-ball hits Blumenthal has administered against people he didn’t like — like calling former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro a “mafia princess” in a New Republic cover story, or referring to Midge Decter as a “dog” in his book-length take-down of the modern neo-conservative movement. As for accuracy, in a piece he wrote about me in the Washington Post, he managed to mangle three separate details about my life in the space of three sentences.
The press would be well advised to put aside its snobbish disdain for cyberspace journalism and consider the consequences of abandoning Drudge to the mercies of
Blumenthal and his legal juggernaut. Is there a reporter in any corner of
the media who has never made a comparable mistake? Or is Drudge being turned into a whipping boy for an ancien régime fearful of the subversive and the new?
The cry has gone out: The Internet must be brought under control. At the same time, online content providers like AOL have been warned: Don’t mess around with upstarts, while the rest of us are told to be wary of individualistic eccentrics who don’t toe the proper line. This fight isn’t just about Matt Drudge, it’s about the battle for Internet freedom. And if the Internet loses, guess who’s next?
WASHINGTON — The $30 million libel suit brought this week by White House aide Sidney Blumenthal against America Online challenges one of the most sacred tenets of the information superhighway: that an Internet service provider cannot be held responsible for content provided by third parties.
That rule would seem to be enshrined in law. Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another content information provider.” But William McDaniel, Blumenthal’s lawyer, believes that law, which was inserted into the Telecommunications Act specifically to protect Internet service providers against libelous statements that may crop up in chat rooms, does not protect AOL in this case.
The other defendant in Blumenthal’s suit is Internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge, who wrote on Aug. 10 in his widely read Drudge Report that Blumenthal, a senior advisor to President Clinton, “has a spousal abuse past that has been effectively covered up.” Drudge quoted one anonymous source as saying the story of Blumenthal’s alleged wife-beating “has been in circulation for years.” He quoted another unnamed source as saying that “there are court records of Blumenthal’s violence against his wife.”
Blumenthal, who has been married to Jacqueline Jordan Blumenthal, also a White House aide, for more than 21 years, says he has no history of wife-beating, no such story about him has ever been in circulation and that no such court records exist. He says Drudge, who has boasted publicly of his practice of posting unsubstantiated rumors, made no effort to check whether the wife-beating allegations were true. Moreover, his suit complains that Drudge is an admitted “Clinton hater,” charging the columnist wrote his allegations with the malicious intention to embarrass the administration.
While Drudge’s vulnerability to prosecution is clear, AOL’s is a bit murkier. Noting that AOL distributes the Drudge Report to its 8.6 million subscribers, McDaniel says that the contractual arrangement between AOL and Drudge makes him much more than just “another content information provider.”
“There is a strong case to be made that Drudge is, in fact, an AOL employee and that AOL is therefore liable for his torts,” McDaniel told Salon.
Exhibit A in Blumenthal’s 137-page complaint, filed Wednesday in the Washington, D.C., federal court, is a July 15 AOL press release stating: “AOL Hires Runaway Gossip Success Matt Drudge.” The press release goes on to say that Drudge and America Online have “teamed up,” adding that their arrangement “opens up the floodgates to an audience ripe for Drudge’s aggressive brand of reporting” and his “take-no-prisoners newsbreaks.”
In a telephone interview, AOL spokeswoman Wendy Goldberg rejected Blumenthal’s complaint and said AOL felt confident the court would recognize the protections provided under the Telecommunications Act. “As soon as we were alerted to the issue of Mr. Drudge’s column, we acted quickly and responsibly to remove it from our service,” she told Salon, reading from a prepared statement. “We’ve seen Mr. Blumenthal’s complaint and believe it has no merit.”
AOL hopes that its success in beating previous libel suits will provide legal precedent. Earlier this year, AOL was sued in two separate complaints by individuals who claimed they had suffered damages after Internet users maligned them in AOL chat rooms. In both cases, courts dismissed the suits, citing the protections afforded AOL under Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act.
As for the AOL press release trumpeting Drudge’s hiring, AOL is likely to argue that the communiqui was hyped for commercial purposes. The company will probably argue that Drudge is, in fact, an independent contractor and that their contractual arrangement is no different than those AOL has with other content providers, like the New York Times.
But McDaniel says he’s ready for that argument. Even if the court determines that Drudge is an independent contractor, he says AOL still may be liable for his sins. Under the law, “If you hire an independent contractor to cut down a tree in your yard and he drops the tree onto your neighbor’s house, you are not liable,” he says. “But if that independent contractor has a known reputation for dropping trees onto other people’s houses and you hire him anyway, and then he flattens your neighbor’s house, you are liable.
“When AOL hired Mr. Drudge, they knew he had a reputation for dropping trees through people’s houses, journalistically speaking,” McDaniel continued. “In fact, that’s why AOL hired him.”
Mike Godwin, an expert on telecommunications law at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, predicts that line of argument is doomed to failure. “How many libel judgments does Matt Drudge have against him? I would say the number is zero,” he said. “The fact that he is known to play fast and loose with the facts is not enough to spread liability to AOL. It might be a better world if it did, but it would also have a chilling effect on free speech. Not to mention the fact that there would be a lot fewer AOLs around.”
it wasn’t enough for new White House aide Sidney Blumenthal to be called a wife-beater by Internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge. Now the august New York Times has him labeled as a “slut.”
The “slut” reference appeared Sunday in a Times story about President Clinton’s recent hiring of Blumenthal, along with pollster Paul Begala, under the headline “Clinton Looks for Inspiration From the Left.”
White House correspondent Alison Mitchell wrote that Blumenthal, a former journalist, “has had notoriously bad relations with many of his former colleagues in the Washington press who saw him as too close to the Clintons.” Mitchell quoted the New Republic, for whom Blumenthal used to write, as commenting that perhaps now “he’ll get his back pay.”
Then, in the final paragraph (the “kicker” in newspaper parlance), Mitchell attributes another quote to the New Republic: “A beat is just an assignment but a slut is who you’ve become maybe.”
The problem is the New Republic never made such a comment. It belongs to a fictional newspaper columnist named Frank Langley, who utters the remark in the play “This Town.” The author of the play? Sidney Blumenthal. Adding absurdity to insult, the Times also garbled the quote — in the play, Langley spoke of a “slot,” not a “slut.”
It’s especially ironic that Blumenthal’s play, produced last January by L.A. Theaterworks, is a biting satire about the foibles and often ludicrous self-importance of the Washington press corps. In the scene in question, Burton Burt, an anxiety-ridden White House TV correspondent, complains to the crusty Langley that his New York network bosses don’t understand Burt and his ilk. Langley replies:
“Burt, have a stiff drink and lie down. Look, when I think of the world, I think of slots. Everybody has their slot. A slot is more than a beat. A beat is just an assignment. But a slot is who you become. Maybe after being on a beat for so long, it becomes your life. And after a while, you even forget it’s about stories. It’s about you. You are the slot. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked. The man becomes the work. Take my word for it.”
Jerry Gray, the Times weekend Washington bureau chief, told Salon the misattribution to the New Republic apparently was the result of an editing error. He said Mitchell’s original story had, in fact, included several paragraphs discussing Blumenthal’s play, including the accurately attributed but wrongly transcribed “slut” quote. But Gray said Mitchell’s Washington editor had cut all the play-related passages for space considerations before sending it on — along with the outtakes — to New York for a final edit. There, Gray said, another editor — he did not say who — apparently retrieved the “slut” quote and tacked it to the end of Mitchell’s piece, along with the erroneous attribution to the New Republic.
In its Monday editions, the Times ran an “Editor’s Note” in its corrections column that acknowledged the “editing error.” It went on to explain that “the quotation was intended to serve as an illustration of (Blumenthal’s) observations about some White House reporters.” There was no apology from the Times — nor was there an explanation for how an “editing error” transformed the word “slot” into “slut.”
“That was me, that was my doing. I feel terrible,” admitted Mitchell, reached by telephone at Martha’s Vineyard, where she is covering the Clintons during their three-week vacation. Mitchell explained that she listened to an audio tape of the play and heard “slot” as “slut.”
Then, in a comment that could have come right out of Blumenthal’s play, Mitchell added: “Actually, when you listen to the quote, either word works.” (A slut is more than a beat? What does that mean?)
Blumenthal declined comment on the Times’ “error,” except to repeat the remark he made to the newspaper’s Todd S. Purdum, who wrote about the flap over Matt Drudge’s allegations that Blumenthal had “a spousal abuse past” in the Sunday Times’ Week in Review section. “I think that there’s such a thing as integrity in journalism,” Blumenthal said.
Blumenthal’s lawyer, William McDaniel, was seeking clarification from Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld about the “slut” reference. McDaniel is set to file Blumenthal’s libel suit against Drudge later this week.
Both cases, say some critics, are inevitable consequences of a media culture in which virulent personal attacks against the president and his aides have become the norm.
“If the Washington Times had called Sidney a slut, I wouldn’t care,” said Democratic political consultant James Carville, who also writes a column for Salon. “But when the New York Times — the newspaper of record, the newspaper that’s supposed to set the standard for the rest of the media — calls him a slut, then it’s time to get really concerned about the attack culture that’s out there today.”
