LOS ANGELES - Call Matt Drudge what you like, just don't call him a journalist.
"I'm a reporter," Drudge said Tuesday night at a freewheeling forum about online journalism held at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication. "I'm not a journalist. When I think of journalists, I think of elites."
Sitting next to Drudge was Slate editor Michael Kinsley - who called Drudge "deplorable" - and Todd Purdum, The New York Times' LA bureau chief. The forum, "Is Online Journalism Journalism?" left more questions than answers, but made for a lively discussion about The Drudge Report and whether traditional standards of journalism can be applied to the Internet.
Panel moderator Martin Kaplan, associate dean at Annenberg and a visiting professor of political communication, said the Drudge Report has been described as a "virtual water cooler for the elite." These days, the water is hot.
In August, Drudge was sued for US$30 million by White House adviser Sidney Blumenthal after running an item suggesting that Blumenthal had beaten his wife. Drudge ran what read like a half-hearted retraction. Blumenthal is also suing America Online, which carries Drudge's work.
"Are there indeed norms in any part of the business of journalism that are being observed?" asked Kaplan. "Is the only rule 'don't get sued?'"
Purdum pointed out that journalists have resisted being licensed the way doctors or lawyers are, but newspapers like the Times do have certain standards, such as "always getting the other side" of the story.
Perhaps the best repartee of the evening followed that remark, when Drudge accused journalism's standard-bearers of not living up to their own principles.
Drudge said Joan Konner, publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review and former dean of Columbia's graduate school of journalism, described him as "your next-door neighbor gossiping over the electronic fence." But Drudge said that when he called Konner, the former dean told him she had never read the Drudge Report, only what others had written about it - much to his chagrin.
"So your objection is, she was quoting something about you without checking it out?" Kinsley asked, as laughter erupted among the roughly 100 people who attended the forum. "So you're crushed she doesn't have higher standards than you? You seem to long for the legitimacy that you claim not to want, call it journalist or reporter."
Drudge also argued that the Internet is ending traditional journalism's franchise, and that part of the reason he's reviled in traditional journalism circles is because Internet journalists, who can own their own presses, spook the big guys.
"It's a turf war," he said.
Kinsley rejoined that "If you publish something, it should be accurate and the same standards should apply" to the Internet as they do in other media. Still, Kinsley said he was sympathetic with Drudge because reporters, such as the enormous Washington, DC, press corps, frequently know things they don't publish.
"There is something elitist about that," Kinsley said.
