He damn near took down the Clinton presidency when he exposed the Monica Lewinsky story that Newsweek tried to sit on. A top White House aide has been trying to take him down in a libel suit. Now, Internet maverick Matt Drudge was taken down for a spell - by hackers who vandalized his Web site Monday.
The Drudge Report's main page was replaced Monday with a message saying the hackers "take control of Matt (sic) Drudge's data stockyard to once again show the world that this is the realm of the hacker." A group calling itself United Loan Gunmen claimed credit for the Drudge attack.
The Associated Press says the group has also claimed responsibility for computer attacks against ABC and C-Span. Such attacks aren't exactly unusual, but the AP says it's "remarkable" for such a little-known group to claim credit for raiding three such high-profile Web sites over a short period. ABC was defaced just weeks ago, and C-Span was hit last week.
The AP says Drudge wasn't available for comment immediately. But The Drudge Report was back online as usual Tuesday morning, leading off with a full-color radar image of Hurricane Floyd.
The Drudge Report features not just Drudge's own commentaries and gossip but links to numerous news organizations' Web sites, to the top stories of the day, and many of the most widely-syndicated opinion columnists in the U.S.
Drudge became famous in January 1998 thanks to Monica Lewinsky. It was Drudge who broke the story that Newsweek was still sitting on a story about Bill Clinton's affair with the former White House intern - the story Michael Isikoff, as it turned out, had been trying and failing to get published.
Drudge's piece may well have forced Newsweek to publish - and pushed the President toward his eventual impeachment by the House of Representatives.
He's since written a book, Let the Future Begin, due for publication this fall, according to Washington Post media critic (and no fan of Drudge) Howard Kurtz, and now has talk shows on or in the works for radio (for ABC) and Fox (for television).
And he's been afforded the sincerest form of flattery - imitation, by way of two parody Web sites, The Drudge Retort and Drudge-Up Report, the latter dominated by sexual humor.
But Drudge isn't exactly the world's most beloved media maverick. Special counsel to the president (and former journalist) Sidney Blumenthal has sued Drudge for libel, over a commentary about rumors making Republican Party rounds that Blumenthal had been a wife-beater.
Drudge actually retracted it the same day, as soon as he learned the rumor was false, and with an apology in the bargain.
Ironically, the lawsuit seems to have found Drudge some grudging supporters who have gone on record as outraged over what they think is actually a White House-backed bid to silence the Internet maverick.
Two who aren't grudging are journalists and co-authors (of, among other books, Destructive Generation) Peter Collier and David Horowitz (who recently blasted fellow conservatives for joining calls for official censorship), whose Center for the Study of Popular Culture has created a defense fund for Drudge in the Blumenthal suit.
"The question that should be asked," Horowitz has written of the Blumenthal suit against Drudge, in Front Page, "is why, given the black record of witch-hunts of the past, is the country is so tolerant of this latest attack." Horowitz has also said that if he truly believed Drudge had libeled Blumenthal for political purposes, he would not have helped set up the defense fund.
