The Drudge Speech at 25

A quarter century since Matt Drudge announced the dawn of a new age live at the National Press Club in Washington

Few speeches throughout history are so perceptive, so insightful, and so ahead of their time that they end up defining a radical societal change before it has really started.  Perhaps William Wilberforce’s May 1789 Abolition speech, John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Moonshot address, or Martin Luther King Jr’s 1963 I Have A Dream oration might fit this bill.

This week marks 25 years since Matt Drudge’s speech to the National Press Club, delivered in the wake of his groundbreaking digital journalism on the Drudge Report that exposed Newsweek’s decision to spike the Monica Lewinsky story on January 17, 1998.

The significance of the June 2, 1998, invitation of an online maverick by an august Washington institution has only been surpassed by the degree to which Drudge perfectly identified the coming revolution of the citizen journalist.  Half-jokingly, he opened with an acknowledgement of the old guard’s surprising willingness to have him speak at a luncheon: “‘Applause for Matt Drudge in Washington at the Press Club’: Now there's a scandal. It's the kind of thing I'd have a headline for.”

Over the next 15 minutes, Drudge provided a characteristically fast-paced crash course on how media was changing, emphasizing that, “Now with a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world -- no middle man, no Big Brother. And I guess this changes everything.”  Addressing a legion of editors and newsroom traditionalists, it would be understandable that his comments would be met with skepticism by the DC crowd.

Notably, Drudge met this incredulity with the confidence and clairvoyance of someone who had seen the future and knew exactly how radically it would change political and social discourse, quoting Joseph Pulitzer and asking the assembled, “if technology has finally caught up with individual liberty, why would anyone who loves freedom want to rethink that?”

Certainly there were others who had begun to see fissures in the long-standing establishment media structures, but no contemporary address so succinctly outlined “a future where there'll be 300 million reporters, where anyone from anywhere can report for any reason,” nor centered around the magnitude of the coming information revolution.

Drudge’s prominence and influence would only continue to rise in the years that followed, and the phenomenon that he identified only grew exponentially with the rise of social media and smartphones.  Blogs and tweets allowed citizens to highlight corruption in the federal government like IRS political profiling of conservative non-profit organizations and frustrations with school boards like in Loudoun County, Virginia.  Phone cameras have captured compromised politicians and helped stop bad cops.  Our modern media ecosystem is Drudge Report-style citizen journalism to the “nth” degree.

Of course, every action has an equal but opposite reaction, so we now live in an era with a saturation of citizen journalism.  Those editors and newsroom traditionalists have significantly less input in what makes it to an individual viewer, listener, or reader, for better or for worse.  Perhaps the old guard often had a flawed sense of truth, but is a flawed sense of truth better than no sense of it at all?

For his part, Matt Drudge has continued to play his role of cultural maverick, implicitly supporting Donald Trump’s outsider bid for the Presidency in 2016 – only to turn against him part-way through the first administration.  Did Trump, like the movement Drudge so aptly identified in 1998, just go too far for the Internet’s most notable newsman?

The story of the Internet age is just beginning.  A quarter century after Matt Drudge’s speech to the National Press Club, however, no single work so concisely and accurately predicted the direction and magnitude of the impact that this global network would have on our culture, our society, and our politics.

The only part that Drudge did not fully identify is what happens next.  His closing a quarter century ago at the National Press Club seems as appropriate today as it did then: “Let the future begin.”

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