ABSTRACT
In mid-January 1998, Matt Drudge was sitting in his Hollywood apartment and working by his computer. On this particular evening he was finishing dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on a breaking news story he planned to post on his political news website The Drudge Report, an endeavor which he had begun only a year ago. Drudge was by no means a reporter, but he also was not endowed with any special super computer science degree that made him any sharper than the next man in trying to build a political website from the ground up. In fact, up to that point Drudge’s career had been irrefutably a farce, a makeshift resume consisting of nothing more than a handful of graveyard shifts at 7-Eleven and a position as a gift shop manager at CBS Studios. If you knew Drudge then, there was very little evidence that would have led you to believe that he was somebody who was on the verge of making history; and you most certainly would not have put your life on him being about to get rich and famous by typing up a few words on a website. But then again, none of us were Matt Drudge; and none of us were about to outfox every media organization in the country and break the news to the world that the President of the U.S. had been having an affair with a 23-year-old intern.
