The news that President Clinton might have unzipped for Monica Lewinsky had barely surfaced when my phone started ringing - CNN, the Today show, CBS This Morning, Reuters, a dozen radio stations.
What did I have to say about Matt Drudge breaking Newsweek's story, they wanted to know. Is this a new era for news? A watershed for the World Wide Web? A new and dangerous point at which unfiltered information is passed along by gossip columnists on the Internet before responsible journalists can check it out?
In the first days of the scandal, journalists seemed almost as alarmed about the implications of Matt Drudge as they did about the constitutional crisis they and their Washington lawyer pals were whipping up. And there, god help us all, was Drudge himself, sitting on Meet the Press lecturing a puzzled Michael Isikoff of Newsweek and William Safire of The New York Times about timeliness and news.
Drudge's scoop was music to many ears. It gave mainstream journalism a fresh Internet phobia about which to sound the alarm, Drudge being (justifiably) perhaps mainstream journalism's worst nightmare. And it gave the Internet's ambitious wannabes a chance to feel significant.
"This story has done for the Internet what the Gulf War did for CNN, and what the Kennedy assassination did for television in general," trumpeted Michael ("I'm still a player") Kinsley, the editor of Slate, to the Los Angeles Times.
If this story had actually done for the Net what the Gulf War did for CNN, then Slate (and, of course, HotWired) must be highly important. That CNN has been losing money and viewers at a frightening and relentless rate, or that network TV news has lost half its viewers in recent years, didn't seem to trouble Kinsley or those pursuing the latest turn in the what-does-the-Internet-really-mean? saga.
This is bizarre stuff, though it pales in comparison to the drama unfolding in the capital. Matt Drudge broke somebody else's story. This had little to do with the nature of the World Wide Web. Drudge could as easily have been - we can hope - a talk radio host or a cable news reporter, and now that he's made it into the address books of talk show producers, he one day may be. Radio and television are as fast as the Web, when it comes to breaking stories, and have many more viewers and listeners. When big stories like this break, all media - newspapers, TV, radio - see boosts in sales, ratings, and viewers. Typically, they fade away when the story is over.
The Web played no demonstrable role in the latest Clinton sex scandal. After Drudge's initial leak, no substantial part of the story was broken on the Internet. Internet discussions on Web sites and mailing lists - despite surges in visits and vigorous discussions - played little noticeable role in shaping public opinion, the pace of the investigation, the political response.
If ever there was a classic inside-Washington story, this was it. Evolving in the offices of federal prosecutors, behind the scenes at the White House, in meetings among Washington attorneys, in whispered conferences on Capitol Hill, this was a story for Washington reporters to advance, not one for Web-site editors in San Francisco or Seattle.
That it was such an inside-the-Beltway tale - sordid, vicious, and incestuous - is, in fact, precisely why the American public quickly gagged on it. This was a story for Sam Donaldson screaming on the White House lawn, for Cokie Roberts professing disgust at the lack of public outrage, for George Will clucking on a Sunday morning high-brow gabfest about the "vulgarians" who had taken over the White House.
It sure didn't belong to the geeks, webheads, academics, quilt makers, seniors, movie lovers, horny teenagers, corporate sales teams, TV fans, and chat-room addicts who make up the heart of the World Wide Web. Aside from a round of Clinton jokes, they had little to contribute.
Sure, the Dallas Morning News, the Washington Post, CNN, and other news organizations had sites on the Web they continuously updated with information. In some cases, those sites carried new developments a few hours before the corresponding print versions hit newsstands and front porches. But the story wasn't shaped online, nor was the online culture transformed by it. The Web lends itself to the coverage of breaking news stories like stock market crashes or Mars landings. But even there, the vast majority of news consumers eventually turn to traditional media for analysis and follow-up.
When John Kennedy was shot, the overwhelming majority of Americans watched a traumatic event unfolding live on television for the first time in history. CNN covered a war live for the first time during the Gulf War.
Matt Drudge's scoop doesn't quite stand up.
The Web offers speed and timeliness; the ability of citizens to connect to one another. It's the freest environment in all media to absorb and express opinions. That doesn't make it better or worse than print or broadcast journalism, just different.
If anything, Fornigate showed the potential worth of traditional journalism, if it would only take its responsibilities seriously. Only trained reporters close to the story could help us understand it. The daily paper or nightly broadcast - assembled over hours, not minutes, by fact-gatherers held accountable for the accuracy of their work - has never seemed more essential. Imagine a paper that announced in a front-page box that it would cover the story, but only present facts it would stand behind - no leaks, no anonymous sources, no unnamed theorizers. A paper that careful and factual might be an overnight sensation, especially in an era in which so much information flies through the ether so randomly.
But an institution as morally dysfunctional and myopic as the media that brought us Clinton and Lewinsky's civic nightmare can hardly be expected to grasp even its own potential worth.
Stories like this one make professional journalists and their craft more, not less, important. If they can't see that, how can anybody else?
Related links:
Who cares about Intern-gate? The press, the pols, but not the public.
Lewinsky scandal takeaway: Five rules for sane journalism
Jon Katz loves to get email.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
