Today marks the tenth anniversary of American blogger Matt Drudge breaking the story of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Things were never the same again. The world was rocked to its foundations by the astounding news that older men like getting their knobs sucked by younger women.
There were many crimes committed by the Clinton Whitehouse. However, I don’t think there are many sane people in the world who think Bill getting a nosh from an intern was one of them. Or at least one of the major ones. How the odd happy finish from Monica impeded the Clinton presidency before right-wing prurience attempted to derail it has never been adequately explained to me.
Still, we are where we are. In his paean to Drudge, Guido Fawkes somewhat prematurely hails his hero’s coup as the end ‘once and for all [of] the gate-keeper ability, if not the mentality, of the mainstream media elite’.
Guido’s love letter to his mentor is interesting in that it fails to offer a qualitative judgement of how things have changed. How much Drudge earns and where that income allows him to live seem to be the essential yardsticks rather than any explicit estimate of whether what he produces is any good. That people in large numbers are prepared to consume a product is not always the most reliable gauge of quality. It’s a thought that’s kept the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Bernard Matthews and Noel Edmonds warm for many a year.
It’s also interesting how little change has actually been brought about despite the breathless talk of a paradigm shift. Guido talks of an ‘mainstream media elite’ without seemingly being overtly aware that he and his role model have had to largely appropriate that elite’s methods to gain what they judge and measure as success. Is there any true innovation going on?
Guido exhorts would-be one-man newsmakers to ‘go get the story’ but beyond the phone calls he makes which (unwittingly or not) come across as the transcripts of a radio show prankster, it’s difficult to see what ‘getting’ of stories he actually does. Drudge’s big moment, let us not forget, was publishing a story that a mainstream magazine had baulked at. Guido, between rare forays into editorial, presents a diet largely consisting of mainstream scraps and off-cuts. Happy (for Guido) coincidence dictated that he also made his name by publishing a story of where another prominent politician (in this case John Prescott) was putting his penis. A story, like Drudge’s breakthrough, that the mainstream media elites had deemed unpublishable.
As such, you’d be forgiven for regarding both Guido and Drudge as mere conduits; alternative venues for other people’s legwork. There’s very little ‘making’ beyond the ability to string a sentence together. It’s repetition and reaction. It’s blogging.
Guido talks of his contact with and reliance on mainstream journalists but it seems to me more of a parasitic relationship rather than a symbiotic one. Like the unfortunate Monica, it sounds like he’s had to suck a lot of cock to gain his notoriety. The loyalty of the press can be rented but not bought. And like an exploited woman who talks of empowerment when really she’s just being used, I wonder if Guido is fooling anyone else but himself. Guido’s medium is the message - journalists are happy to report on his antics and caperings rather than highlight what he’s saying. You can see why the likes of the Guardian’s Michael White might snigger at him - the lone wannabe walking the high wire without a safety net.
I’d argue that all we’re seeing is the emergence of another albeit smaller elite - not the tearing down of some great edifice. Guido is nothing if not just another monied Westminster villager only with a maverick spin. He gives off the same air of the privileged insider privy to access and esoteric knowledge forbidden to the rest of us. But this new elite lacks the inherent quality control (sub-editing for instance) that make the ‘mainstream media elite’ even vaguely tolerable. It’s just as well that Guido gives his stuff away for free because you wonder how loyal his readership would be if he was charging for it.
Of course, Guido earns his money indirectly via advertising on his blog. He doesn’t or daren’t put a price or a value (financial or qualitative) on his product. It’s a new model, if only a cheap knock-off of the old model, down-sized and the corners cut. Despite copious evidence to the contrary, I sincerely wonder if Guido is truly happy about that. Like a self-taught painter trying to copy an old master, surely it’s a melancholy matter of pale imitation and disappointment.
(Cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy.)
