Mike Isikoff from Newsweak originally got the Monica story, but his bosses spiked the story, for reasons you can guess at. One of Isikoff’s angry colleagues passed it to Drudge, who by then had already had a good track record and had become known as fairly fearless as a one-man operation operating out of a tiny apartment.
A high proportion of long-time Freeps were early Drudge fans, back when FR generally featured only maybe 30 threads per day and Matt’s followeship was maybe 5% of what it is today.
Matt was small enough that he could still go ignored (though followed) by the MSM, and it was maybe 10 months before MSM pukes finally relented and took up Drudge’s lead.
During that YEAR FR was full to the brim with consummate Monica Mess experts, who digested the tiniest new developments and compared notes, vaguely akin to the much later Benghazi matter.
Meanwhile the kneepadded Media eagerly slurped and guzzled up BJ/HRC’s latest essence.
It was like two parallel universes, side-by-side but unaware of one another.
Great synopsis. My life hasn’t been the same since i clicked on Matt’s “WHITEWATER ARCHIVES” link in Feb 1998. Wish i had a screen shot of his page with that link on it back then.
Drudge featured a LINK to FR back when we were small:
More than 10 years ago periodically there would be these, “How did you discover FR..?”-threads, and very many would chime in here at FR that they came here via that one, tiny link that Drudge features towards the bottom of his page.
I really think that Drudge and maybe two other entities really drive ALL of the US media, and therefore also a good fraction of the stories about the USA in the rest of the world.
Matt is probably one of the very most influential people in the whole world, and he never went to college.
Another Army of One —he deserves ALL of his success.