DRUDGERY: A GOOD THING
Geoff Metcalf
January 20, 2003
NewsWithViews.com
"The reasonable man adapts
himself to the word, but the unreasonable man tries to adapt to the
world to him--therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable
man," -- George Bernard Shaw
Ambrose
Bierce once observed, “Politics is the conduct of public affairs for
private advantage.” I have at times expressed the hope and prayer that
journalism has not regressed to the point where it has been reduced to
merely reporting selective facts for private advantage.
In
January of 1998 I was working as a radio talk show host in San Francisco.
KSFO was and is owned and operated by ABC/Disney. Although some may
be reluctant to admit it today, I introduced Matt Drudge to San Francisco.
I had been using his website as a resource since he first started and
despite the cheesy hat, he was consistently a winner. I first started
using him as a resource in 1995 when he was getting about 20,000 hits a
day.
Critics
still attempt to marginalize Drudge for poaching the grunt work and
enterprising reportage of others. However,
Matt Drudge has single-handedly done more to make the elitists media
royalty do their job than anyone else.
Drudge
told me, “To report what someone else is doing is work -- especially if
it hasn't been published yet. The whole notion that I can get into the
newsrooms and cover what people are working on before it's published --
that is some of the hardest work. The hardest evidence is that no one has
even come close to anything like that.”
Call
him a gadfly, a self-promoter, or weird if you like, but the
incontrovertible reality is he HAS changed (for the good) how and what the
huddled masses read.
January
1998 I wrote a column ‘Newsweek’s spiking of Clinton Scandal’ http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/200301190959.html,
which ran online (and I discussed on KSFO) the Monday after Drudge had
broken the story two days earlier.
Immediately
I started getting ‘advise’ from friends and colleague in the building
and around the country. “Geoff, are you NUTS?” was a common opener.
“You can’t write and say stuff like that about the
President.” That was
Monday.
By
Wednesday all those same organizations that were vilifying me and
suggesting I had irreparably damaged my career were claiming ownership of
THE story.
But
it wasn’t NBC’s story, or Geoff Metcalf’s story, or even Michael
Isikoff and Newsweek’s story. It
had become (and will always be) Matt Drudge’s story.
THE
story, the Drudge story, that was overshadowed and still ignored, wasn’t
the Bill/Monica scandal. Oh that was the sizzle.
But the steak, THE story, was (and is) that Newsweek made a
management decision to spike the enterprising (and factual) Isikoff story
of the scandal to apparently protect a political and philosophical
friendly. http://www.drudgereportArchives.com/data/2003/01/16/
20030116_014732_ml.htm
The
story was solid when Isikoff filed it.
Hell, it eventually resulted in the Impeachment of a President.
However, Newsweek (and previous to Drudge, other mainstream
institutions) could and would selectively choose what ‘they’ wanted
(and didn’t want) the American people to know.
Katherine
Graham of the Washington Post said, "Truth and News are not the same
thing. ..." and please believe because THAT is true.
In 1988 she was speaking to a group of CIA recruits and is reported
to have said, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some
things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe
democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep
its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it
knows."
However,
the danger of the press deciding “whether to print what it knows” is
that the editorial decision has not been mitigated by national security
but by personal, professional, and ideological prejudice.
Maybe
it’s the inevitability of ‘The Golden Rule”…the guy with the gold
makes the rules. Reportedly, David Rockefeller told a 1991 Bilderberg meeting
in Baden Baden Germany, “We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New
York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors
have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for
almost forty years." He went on to explain: "It would have been
impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been
subjected to the lights of publicity during those years.”
Right
wing radical wackoism? Hey,
one man’s “discretion” is another man’s duplicity.
John
Ruskin said, “Without
seeking, truth cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from
pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in
packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by itself out
of it such, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern
labor of his own."
Despite
any warts and blemishes…(and the cheesy hat) the American people and the
entire fourth estate owe Matt Drudge.
We owe him for doing what others lack the courage, honesty and
stones to do. He is far from
being the conscience of journalism but he sure contributes to keeping
mainstream propagandists nervous (maybe even sometimes honest). And
that’s a good thing.
© 2003 Geoff Metcalf - All Rights Reserved
Geoff is a veteran
media performer. He has had an eclectic professional background covering
a wide spectrum of radio, television,
magazine, and newspapers. A former Green Beret and retired
Army officer he is in great demand as a speaker. Metcalf has hosted
his radio talk show on the ABC/Disney
owned and operated KSFO and in worldwide
syndication. www.geoffmetcalf.com
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