Why Can Gadflies Only Flit Left
By Jonah Goldberg

I’m thinking of a journalist who works alone, without editors, accountable to no one. Many feel he has an ax to grind, but he is read furtively by government workers and journalists. Often, he levels wild accusations against public officials of broad conspiracies he cannot prove. He lifts much of his material from other publications and adds his own interpretation. He calls the mainstream press "collaborationists" with the President.

Can you guess? Most people today would say Matt Drudge, the Internet columnist. But Drudge evokes nothing but scorn from the establishment press, while the guy I’m thinking of was called a "journalist’s journalist" by ABC’s Peter Jennings. The Los Angeles Times hailed him as "the conscience of investigative journalism." The New York Times’ Anthony Lewis praised him as "the reporter who taught us to penetrate the squid-ink of official truth."

His name was I.F. Stone (1907-1989), and he won fame editing, writing, and publishing I.F. Stone’s Weekly. Unlike Drudge, Stone was a man of the Left, labeling himself a "Jeffersonian Marxist."

Politics wasn’t the only difference between the two gadflies. Stone was a scholarly man who at the end of his life taught himself Greek. Drudge (whom I know) would be the first to admit his ambitions lie elsewhere. That said, the journalistic methods and products of the two men are in many ways strikingly similar.

So why is Stone considered a brave iconoclast by the Dan Rathers of the world, while Drudge is treated like something Rather might accidentally step in on the New York sidewalks outside CBS headquarters? The editor of the Columbia Journalism Review has sneered, "Drudge isn’t a reporter; he’s your next-door neighbor gossiping over the electronic fence." The judge in a lawsuit filed against Drudge called him "simply a purveyor of gossip," and stripped him of the normal libel protections journalists enjoy.

Drudge, who works without editors or a slate of operating rules, sometimes gets facts and stories wrong. He himself has estimated that perhaps 80 percent of the scoops he presents will eventually check out. His role is to be there first, and to break the story everyone else is afraid of. He frankly rationalizes his occasional inaccuracies as the price of that service.

What liberals who are fans of Stone and enemies of Drudge refuse to admit is that the two men operated in much the same way. Drudge, they complain does little traditional reporting, working instead largely from newspaper, magazine, and government documents collected over the Web. But Stone also did little reporting.

As Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen effuses, "he worked exclusively from the public record—newspapers, magazines and, of course, obscure government documents that only he seemed to read."

In the eyes of elite journalists this kept Stone pure. "He was never part of the political-journalistic establishment," Anthony Lewis gushed. But when it comes to Drudge—who could starve to death trying to find the Senate lunchroom—Michael Kinsley writes in Time, "Let’s not give Drudge too much credit. Though he thumbs his nose at traditional news outlets, they supply most of his information."

Stone’s staunchest defenders admit, nay, applaud that he did not believe in objectivity. Stone had a point of view—that America was evil. His Hidden History of the Korean War, for example, claimed our military industrial complex started the war and used unsavory methods to wage it. The left-leaning New Republic called the book utterly "implausible," a "phantasmagoric account."

Recently, allegations have surfaced that Stone was a Soviet agent; his soft spot for Stalin is indisputable. An opponent of secrecy and lies by the U.S. government, Stone happily imbibed Soviet propaganda. During the show trials and purges in the 1930s he wrote soothingly that "Revolutions do not take place according to Emily Post." Besides, "perhaps, as Stalin contends, a vast counterrevolutionary conspiracy has been uncovered. We don’t know." Later, Stone moved his allegiances to China, North Vietnam, and Cuba—presumably Jeffersonian republics all.

This raises the most interesting difference between Stone and Drudge. Stone got huge things wrong, while Drudge gets a lot of little things wrong. With all his fastidious scholarship, Stone often produced monstrous lies. Drudge, on the other hand, works fast and sloppy but aims for simple truths—gossipy, interesting, often prurient or trivial but sometimes deadly serious, with little ideology mixed in.

That journalist big-wigs are horrified by Drudge and in awe of Stone says something interesting about their psyches. Few people are more professionally pompous than highly paid journalists. They regularly put on make-up and read cue cards for a living, yet want to think of themselves as bold crusaders. They wish they could throw away their hairspray and join Stone in, as Jennings put it, the "fight for justice."

Matt Drudge, a former shop clerk, owes his large popularity to a more honest credo: If people want to know something, it’s news. That same rule is what keeps Jennings et al. on the air. But they’re too ashamed to admit it.

—Jonah Goldberg