Ex-Politico editor: Matt Drudge changed everything
The media's angst over its role in "post-truth America" is expanding as President-elect Trump takes shots at the news business and even U.S. intelligence agencies.
The latest example is a lengthy essay by the former editor of Politico for the Brookings Institution that suggests the control of news by mainstream gatekeepers ended when Matt Drudge and his "Drudge Report" broke the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky sex affair.
Susan B. Glasser, Politico's editor during the 2016 presidential election and who has worked in prominent positions for several influential publications, wrote:
The media's angst over its role in "post-truth America" is expanding as President-elect Trump takes shots at the news business and even U.S. intelligence agencies.
The latest example is a lengthy essay by the former editor of Politico for the Brookings Institution that suggests the control of news by mainstream gatekeepers ended when Matt Drudge and his "Drudge Report" broke the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky sex affair.
Susan B. Glasser, Politico's editor during the 2016 presidential election and who has worked in prominent positions for several influential publications, wrote:
"In 1998, I started work at The Washington Post as the investigative editor on the national desk. Little more than a week after my arrival, on January 17, 1998, at 9:32 on a Saturday night, Matt Drudge's website first leaked word of the blockbuster scandal that was about to engulf President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. I had expected to edit stories about Clinton's aggressive fundraising in the White House, not his dalliance with a former intern. But now it seemed that independent prosecutor Ken Starr's unprecedented probe could even force the president to quit, and I remember well the day we all stood riveted in front of the TVs in the Post's famous fifth-floor newsroom to watch Clinton's less-than-convincing denials of 'sexual relations with that woman.' Over the weeks that followed, the internet drove a Washington news story as it never had before: The Drudge Report had proved beyond a doubt that the old gatekeepers of journalism would no longer serve as the final word when it came to what the world should know."
