CBS’s Face the Nation refused to sully itself by having Drudge on air. The “fraternity” was aghast at Drudge’s rise. “Matt Drudge broke the fraternity of the guardians of the culture,” Horowitz says. By exposing not just the president’s tryst with an intern, but the decision by Newsweek to hold off on the story, he planted a bomb under both the presidency and the mainstream media. The second revolution Drudge sparked was within the media. At the time Drudge was fighting a $30m lawsuit against the Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, whom he had falsely accused of abusing his wife – one of the earliest examples in the internet age of rightwing fake news. “Looking back, he was the beginning of a cultural revolution which we are still in the midst of right now,” says David Horowitz, a conservative writer who helped to bail out Drudge shortly before the Lewinsky affair broke. If that sounds familiar, given the fireworks bursting daily out of today’s White House, then that is no coincidence. Politically, his Lewinsky scoops heralded a new kind of American conservatism that was devil-may-care, iconoclastic, hyper-aggressive and populist.
Twenty years later, we can now see that Drudge, 51, sparked a revolution – a double one at that. Not long before, he had been selling T-shirts in a gift shop at CBS Studios. The storm unleashed that Saturday night was all the more potent for coming from a single individual operating out of a one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood where he lived with a cat named Cat, three TVs, three computers, a satellite dish and a police scanner. The next day the Drudge Report published her name: Monica Lewinsky. Had it been published, Drudge said, the story would have revealed that a young, still anonymous female intern had been a “frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office” where she developed a sexual relationship with the president. Two hours later, he followed up with a longer post in which he elaborated that Newsweek had spiked a story from its then investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. But then, Drudge never has run with the typographical crowd. The headline was posted in such small print that, were it not for the capital letters, a reader might have mistaken it for a dispatch on corn prices rather than an avalanche that would propel Bill Clinton all the way to impeachment.
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