FR used to be more Wild West. Lucianne and Drudge complained about antisemitism. Lucianne spun off her own forum, hoping to draw off the best FR research people to be her “pretties”. I suspect Lucy wanted this site to be less conservative and more Republican.
I might add another item that I seem to recall. The original link on Drudge that said “Whitewater” stood for a long time in the 90s. Poster “Clinton’s a Liar” (Cal) was on Rush one day and mentioned it in late 97 or early 98 and that is how I first started lurking.
At some point after Lesse Jackson was seen “counseling” Clinton for his affair after it had finally all came out, Drudge posted a teaser about a big expose of Jesse Jackson.
There was a thread on FR speculating about this teaser. Some enterprising poster took advantage of knowing (from just observing) what the url link might be on Drudge that had not yet posted the actual link. We pulled up the story and started talking about Jesse Jackson’s LOVE CHILD from the article.
A NY Post story is here:
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/jesse-jackson-love-child-pregnant-lover-meet-bill-article-1.897263
Matt got really mad and contacted Jim. Jim was embarrassed and rightly so — it was almost as if some of our posters had “hacked” Matts site. There was no actual hacking but Matt’s relationship with the journalist where he acquired the head’s up to the story was damaged because he had promised not to post his story until after the papers came out the next morning. What Matt had done was had his story ready and waiting on his server with no link posted for people to get to it.
One of our enterprising posters just guessed the wording & spelling of the link and once you entered it on a browser, voila, there it was. I know because I was on the tread. Shortly after this blow up, Matt took down the “Whitewater” link and for about four years it was gone.
In my recollection it was not the same triggering event that got Lucianne mad enough to leave.