Ten Years Gone

Don Surber writes that a key milestone is fast approaching: the 10th anniversary of the Monica Lewinsky story. As Don writes, how newspaper journalists choose to describe how the Lewinsky scandal was broken will say volumes about what they think about their readers:

Now here is the test for readers as they read in the next month rehashes of the Lewinsky scandal: Does the newspaper or columnist view the emergence of Drudge and the Internet as a good thing or bad?

The whiners will complain that no one controls the Internet and that a lot of the information is inaccurate.

Yes. And people soon learn which sites to trust. As bloggers point out, Jayson Blair worked for the New York Times, not Lucianne.com.

Another complaint is there is too much celebrity news now, as if no one paid attention to the trials involving Fatty Arbuckle, Gloria Vanderbilt and Lana Turner’s daughter.

The 20th century had at least a dozen trials of the century.

Then there is the complaint that Drudge is a conservative.

But he seldom writes. He links. And the things he links to appear in liberal publications as well as conservative ones as well as middle-of-the-road sites.

He did not become popular by suppressing the news. That seems to be the job of the editors at Newsweek.

Of course, how the legacy media viewed their successors is public record. In their youth, leftwing journalists might have happily sung along with John Lennon in the late 1960s and said they wanted a revolution. But thirty years later, they certainly acted like the entrenched reactionaries they had become when it dared impinge upon their own profession.