Drudgery

It’s hard to imagine news–gathering it, reading it, or reporting it–without the Internet. Even on our small rock we’re net savvy, which is no news to you if you’re reading these words on-line.

But the promise of total information egalitarianism hasn’t been realized. The big players, the media gatekeepers, will always remain in the driver’s seat. We’ve learned that one the hard way, as we’ve had to helplessly watch erroneous reports about Saipan snowball through America’s media. Information–either the truth or lies–doesn’t stand up and speak for itself. It needs to be packaged, wholesaled, and delivered. Those who control the associated machinery call the tune, and they’re some of the most powerful people in the world. Mess with the U.S. media, and you’ve picked a fight with an intertwined array of powers that reach all the way into the White House.

Still, a few small voices from the periphery are making a dent in things. Witness the rise of Matt Drudge, a self-styled web journalist who is the guy who blew the lid off of the Monica Lewinsky affair. While the mainstream media was paying mere lip service to reporting the news, Drudge thrust the issue into the limelight, and we quickly learned that the Democrat’s do, too, have a Moral Majority, but they just leave out the first “M.”

For scooping the shifty-eyed ranks of the New York media power boys, Drudge has been soundly thumped. Without the stamp of approval by the big boys, he was denounced as a charlatan, just a mouthy outsider who wasn’t a “real” journalist. The media hounds of hell were unleashed, snarling into microphones about this phoney, this imposter, who would dare to speak out without the approval of the nation’s information overlords.

Meanwhile, however, Drudge chugged along undaunted, hunkered in a small Hollywood apartment cranking out his web page. The page (www.drudgereport.com) built a following that only grew when Drudge received the notoriety of condemnation. Heck, now I read the Drudge report, and I’m not much interested in the going ons of the Washington crowd. I figure, though, that Drudge has got the guts to walk his own path, which gives him some basic type of credibility. Any real journalist must be partially a rogue at heart. Or, perhaps, entirely a rouge, which is why Hunter S. Thompson is famous and I’m not.

In the final analysis, though, Matt Drudge and the Internet news revolution he sparked is still a sideshow. Americans are a passive lot, mentally, and few have the necessary wit or inspiration to actually dig their news out of the Internet. News is a plastic face on a television screen, accompanied by mood music and graphics that combine to sell an emotion, a belief, a point of view. Pure information–and the raw reasoning needed to analyze it–isn’t the stock in trade of the American media. How could it be? Most people don’t want facts, they just want to be told what to believe. Isn’t that what pubic school is all about?

The truth is that the truth doesn’t sell, and the Internet won’t change that. Mankind wants bread and a circus, and the American ringmasters aren’t about to let anyone else wield the whip.