I don’t remember that, I’ve been here since 2003, when was that? There is an effort here to not allow any negative news. That kinda defeats the purpose of the discussion forum. These people think FReepers will get discouraged.
IIRC it was late '99 and again in very early 2000...but the latter date may be off. There were TWO episodes and both were SO bad, that Drudge removed the link to FR, then put it back, then removed it again, and did NOT return the link on his page for quite some time.
Sadly there are some "peculiar" posters here and that's all I'll say about that. ;^)