The Dispatch Podcast - How Drudge Broke the News | Interview: Chris Moody

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Jamie is joined by Chris Moody, a journalism professor at Appalachian State University and the host of the Finding Matt Drudge podcast, to explore the career of Matt Drudge and the imprint he's left on American news media. The Agenda: —The birth of a rumor —Who runs the Drudge Report? —Drudge's betrayal of Trump —Getting that Drudge link —The vanishing Show Notes: -Watch this episode on YouTube —Finding Matt Drudge on Apple Podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. This is Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is Chris Moody, and he's on for an interesting reason. It's kind of a different type of episode. Chris is a longtime political journalist who has written and worked for Yahoo News, Vice, The Daily Caller. He is also the host of a new podcast series called Finding Matt Drudge, produced by IHeartMedia and produced by my production company, JMW Productions. We brought Chris Moody on board. when I first came up with this concept, and he is doing an incredible job. And the story of this podcast is trying literally to find Matt Drudge while also telling the story of Matt Drudge and how he changed the media for good or ill, depending on your perspective. And trying to answer some burning questions no one seems to know. One is why did he ultimately go underground? Two is why did he turn against Donald Trump in 2020 after his site voice so vociferously supporting him in 2016? And whether he still owns the at all. It is a eight-part narrative podcast series trying to figure out those questions while telling the story, and Chris does it in an incredible job. And we get into those questions,

what Chris has learned about Matt Drudge, and why Matt Drudge matters in this episode of the Dispatch podcast. So I hope you enjoyed it as much as I think you will. So without further ado, I give you Mr. Chris Moody. Chris Moody, welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. Jamie, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. As I said in my introduction, this is an unusual episode of The Dispatch podcast because Chris is someone I have been talking with on a weekly basis for, I guess, over a year now, maybe two years, about a project that we're working on together. my production company came up with it and got an agreement with IHeart and brought Chris on was our first choice to host the show, finding Matt Drudge.

But let me maybe just start Chris on with this question. Why do you think we're doing this whole podcast on Matt Drudge? Why does he matter? Well, Drudge ushered the media industry, the news industry, into the internet age. And you could probably argue he did so with them kicking and screaming. Sometimes you need a jolt in the system to make big change. And Drudge provided that in the 1990s when Newsweek magazine had a series of scoops about President Bill Clinton and his possible relationship with an intern named Monica Lewinsky. There was a lot of hesitancy about how to run that story.

And Matt Drudge, who had this website, remember this is the 1990s, so having your own website was kind of a new thing. He just went ahead and published what he knew, what his sources had told them. And it kicked news weeks, I guess, their efforts into really high gear. And it made breaking news on the internet, made the news industry realize that they had to do something different or they were going to become dinosaurs really, really fast. And we're talking about something that happened in the mid-1990s. And I think you can argue that Matt Drudge has retained his relevance for now almost 30 years. by breaking lots of news, by driving tons of traffic, and just being a place that is a must read for millions of people,

but also high-profile people in media and politics. You say that he kind of forced the media into a new age. And a lot of people listening might say, well, was that a good thing? Is it good this new age of instantaneous media? They'd obviously say even at the time, you know, Matt Drudge didn't have the standards that at least the network say they do about what can be published, what level of sourcing it takes to publish something. And now, with all the networks kind of in this era,

publishing online when they have a breaking news, has it forced them to publish stories that maybe are not ready for prime time because they know that other outlets are working on them and they can't wait to the morning paper even. If they have something, they need to publish it now or, you know, be last. Well, this wave was coming whether Matt Dredge was going to be involved with it or not.

The ability of people to publish information independently was going to happen. He just happened to be the first big one through the wall. You know, when Matt Dredge, after he broke the news about Lewinsky and he made a huge name for himself, he went to visit the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and he sat in a room with hundreds of high-profile legacy political journalists who, I think, think you could argue, berated him with antagonizing questions about his process and whether he was following the protocols that they should be following. They were deeply concerned about the way he approached things, where he would just post things up, slap dash, maybe without those kind of guardrails that a lot of legacy media publications implement. We spoke with people

for this podcast who said sometimes they would leak a rumor they had heard to Matt Drudge by saying, you know, I don't know if this is true. You should check it out, but I heard this, go for it. And before they knew it, what they said was verbatim up on the site. And it turned out not to be true. You know, so that definitely happened with him. Chris, it almost reminds me a little bit of when you say that, I never connected it. You know, Donald Trump, when he's on the stump, I'm hearing things, you know, so people have told me, you know, and he's kind of projecting out what someone may or may not have told him who has no sourcing into the world.

And, you know, Drudge probably had a little bit more than that, and maybe the people he'd talking to, and sometimes he got things right. But it is a little bit of that there, unverified stuff up on the site quickly. Yeah, and, you know, there's a history of that in certain rogue journalist, Hunter S. Thompson on the campaign trail in 72 said he would start a rumor

and he would wait for that rumor to go around. And by the time a source told it to him, he could report it, even though he was the original source. But I think we would have seen this evolution in the media happening anyway. Look at what Politico did in the mid-aughts, where they were posting news so fast in the blog format, which really just hadn't been done at the level of speed at that time. I think that pushed things into a much quicker territory using anonymous sources. It used to be you really wouldn't use anonymous sources unless the bar was set very, very high for whether

that news was of national security importance or something. Now we're seeing that all of the time. So things have definitely changed. And I think you can argue that just that drudge really just made things change a lot faster. You know, our title of the show is finding that drudge. So it's not just kind of retelling some of these things, though we try to give some background to some of the biggest highlights of his career. We are attempting to understand his influence, but also literally find him and sit down for an interview with him and understand some of I think the mysteries around him speak to some of the mysteries that that I think and you know without revealing I think what some of our conclusions are as we're still reporting out some of them for the show

what are the mysteries around him what are we looking into and and you know what's intriguing about this figure who you know maybe the most powerful man in media or at least was well he When he burst onto the scene, he was very much in the public eye. He went on Meet the Press. He was on C-SPAN every day. He had his own radio show, TV show. The guy went on Letterman. I mean, he was oversaturated, getting profiled in big, glossy magazines, all kinds of things.

And at a certain point, I'd say about 15, 20 years ago, all of those high profile in-your-face kind of approaches just kind of he gave it up. gave up the radio show, TV show, stopped appearing at the White House correspondence dinner and just became a bit of a shadow. He disappeared to a lot of people. He stopped responding to people who thought he was his friends, maybe to drudge. It was just an acquaintance or a source,

just didn't respond to people. People started to wonder where he is. Gabriel Sherman in a piece in the New Republic called him the underground man. And meanwhile, this site, the Drudge Report, is still gaining, millions and millions of viewers, and he still has this power, but he has fallen off the face of the earth. He hasn't given an interview publicly in broadcast since 2017 when he appeared

on Savage Nation, a right-wing AM talk show. Before that, he was on Alex Jones show, but he only appeared as a silhouette. He wouldn't even show his face. I think it's been something near a decade since anyone's taken a photograph of him. He is just a shadow of a person living on the internet. And I think that mixed with his power and his influence, especially at this moment of very strange politics and also a moment of great transition and hardship for the media, I think there's a yearning to know what someone like Matt Drudge thinks. And that's why we want to speak with him. We do think he is important. And I'd like to know his views on the media in this current year and his views on politics.

so that we can get just from links on the site. Yeah. And, you know, we discuss, I think in the first episode you discussed three primary questions that we seek to answer, what is finding him? And what is interesting to me, the second question is the number of high profile people who don't even believe he runs the site anymore or, you know, either sold it or, or, you know, maybe has it, but is not involved. We hear that time and again. And, you know, that's one of the questions that he still own it. And kind of related to that, I think, is the question you're trying to answer is, why did he go from, you know, super pro-Trump supporter, his site, into an anti-Trump site and speak a little bit to those questions. And, you know, I don't want to get too far ahead of where the

episodes are released, but, you know, what we have kind of dealt to try to find, or gone through to try to find out the answers to those questions. Well, from my conversations with people who have spoken directly, this is not secondhand sources, primary source stuff. There's so many stories where Drudge, he was talking with a guy named Larry O'Connor, who at the time was working for Brightbart.com. This was at Andrew Brightbart's funeral in 2012. And obviously, Andrew Breitbart had just passed away. And Matt Drudge asked Larry O'Connor. So

what are you going to do with Brightbart.com? And Larry said, well, we're going to keep going and we're going to call it Breitbart in his legacy, in his name. And Drudge was shocked. And he said, oh my goodness, I would never let my sight. live on beyond me. When I'm gone, the Drudge Report is gone. And we also have other conversations with people who speak to us in future episodes that our audience will see about him saying that very kind of thing that this is my project and I'm not going to give it up to anyone like at least it as a brand or anything. They fully expect one day the Drudge Report to just simply

go dark without notice, just be gone. Obviously, that's not from Drudge himself, but people he has told that to. And so that's why I am very hesitant to ever posit that he doesn't own it or control it. I think he cares very deeply about his contribution to the media ecosystem through that site. And he, I believe, is still very much a part of it. Now to your other question regarding Donald Trump. Drudge is very drawn to independent people that break things. He likes voices that don't go with the slipstream of media that doesn't just follow what everybody else is doing.

And so when Donald Trump came on board, it really appealed to Drudge, who just kind of loved his brash style and the way he did things. Now, the question of why then he turned on Trump is something we'll address in future episodes. I don't want to get too deep into that. right now, Jamie. But he certainly did do that. And that has broken him off from a number of his original conservative fans and readership in a way that I wonder if Drudge even cares. But it has caused

a rift. But then again, from the very beginning, Drudge never said that he was an ideologue. He never said he was a Republican Party marcher. He marches to the beat of his own drum. He said, I am a partisan for news. And so just because he broke big story, about the Clintons and because his site did have a bit of a right-leaning bent on certain issues. I think people felt that he owed Republicans something, and that's the last thing Drudge will ever give in to. He doesn't owe you anything. He can be whoever he wants to be.

And so he's going to continually surprise people. Yeah, I mean, even if he might have some conservative leaning, he's not a party man. He's not a Republican Party apparatus. His allegiance is not to you. And if you think it is, it will be gone. immediately. He's just been so known to like develop, I think we could call them friendships with people and then disappear. It's just his nature. And that's also a part of the mystery. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how

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But I just want to say for the Donald Trump drudge turning on Trump, I do think we break some new ground. And I appreciate not wanting to get quite there yet. But I do think some of your reporting does break some new ground on that. But yeah, so we've released three episodes at this point. The fourth episode comes out next Wednesday. They're all released every Wednesday. And the first episode is really a little bit of a retelling and setting the groundwork here.

But I think a lot of people might not know where Drudge came from. You know, this guy who was not super successful, I guess, right out of the start, not a college graduate, maybe to speak a little bit to that end. With this question, would Drudge have been a success if he would. was in a different era. If there was no internet or the internet was already established, if he didn't have this chance to be a pioneering kind of internet entrepreneur, would he have been a success? Well, Drudge is from a bit of a different era. He kind of, in his style and his approach, is very mid-century hardscrabble newsman, you know, with the fedora and everything, but also just

the way he loves those kind of punchy New York Post style headlines. And he knows where to turn the screws and to make you say, oh, I got to read this story. Click, click, click. That is his power. Or in a different era, you know, buy this newspaper, extra, extra read all about it. He can sell that stuff all day. But as for his upbringing, he's raised near Washington, D.C. in the orbit of power of the Washington Post. And I think he grows up really loving the Washington Post, loving the news and wanting deeply to be a part of it. But he lacks the academic pedigree. And I think, not to psychoanalyse, please forgive me, but, you know, feeling a bit shut out from all of that and saying, you know, like, okay, they don't accept me. They don't see me as one of them.

And so he goes and does his own thing. When he scooped the big legacy outlets, I think that, And he did that victory lap at the National Press Club. I think that was his opportunity to say, you wouldn't accept me. And boy, did I show you? But Chris, don't skip over what I think is a crucial aspect here. I mean, he was working in like a knick-knack store on a CBS, a Paramount lot when his dad got on a computer. I mean, you know, he was not, you know, aspiring journalists. No one would have said, you know, he's on the top 25 under 25 list to be the next anything to be

He goes outside of the mainstream institutions. And you're right, he would even admit he's a late bloomer, right? He doesn't get that college education. He's not doing much as mid to late 20s. But then he starts this site. And he not only starts a site, but he posts, he has a, you know, a newsletter, but he starts breaking that news. He does the shoe leather reporting.

He dumpster dives in the garbage, you know, for scoops. And he finds them. He is somebody who thinks differently. And I think that attributes to his success. Now, to your original question, would he be successful maybe if he was like part of the mainstream institutions? Yeah, I think he would have made a great New York Post editor and had been forgotten. You know, okay, wow, do you remember, you know, he gets an obituary someday and he wrote

some great headlines. And a lot of young journalists, like, that was my mentor and gosh, you know, he really taught me everything. But by doing his own thing, in a way by being rejected and cast out in a way, he does something even greater and and his legacy will be remembered far more than just you know somebody who had a wonderful career in media and retired with the gold watch and went off into the sunset and I think to be honest depending on what side of the political spectrum or what side of journalism you come from he'll be remembered sometimes for good and sometimes for ill yeah Jamie the worst thing in

life is not to be hated it is to be ignored ignored right and and so somebody who is as polarizing as he is, uh, still matters. And I think that's why this show should interest, could interest people who will love him and loathe him, um, because either way, you still acknowledge. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, episode two, which came out last week. We, you mentioned it earlier, the theme of that episode is, and you travel to DC for it, his ephemeral nature, but even people that know him or interacted with him can barely tell you much about him personally, because he was, as, as we have a you know, many, many people saying he was there and then he was gone almost. He was there. You know, even when he was not underground, he was kind of a, this hard to understand or meet

with figure figure. He'd go to dinner parties and not reveal so much about, you know, speak about that. Man, so many people we've talked to for this podcast have just such a similar story. It's just like, yeah, you know, I had a conversation with him in 2002, right? Or something like that and he said the most fascinating thing. And then I turned around and he was gone. I mean, it's just like a shadow of a person who just pops into people's lives, makes an impact, an impact that you remember when a journalist like me says, tell me about a conversation you had with one person 25 years ago and all these people say, oh my gosh, let me tell you, here's what happened. most people don't have that kind of impact when they meet people.

You often forget the people that you shared an elevator with one time, right? Or just had a cocktail with, you know, here and there. And even in our own reporting, when we first started working on this story, Jamie was going to the Palm Restaurant in D.C. And dang it, Drudge had been there five minutes, ten minutes earlier, and then disappeared out of the bar. And even the matri-D said he was here and then he was gone. And that really does a great job of representing,

I think, just his relationship with the real world. He might pop in, make an appearance, but you better take a good look because he'll be out of there in no time. And he likes it that way. Despite his ephemeral nature, a lot of journalists have a similar story. And I think that we get into this in episode three is because of the power of Matt Drudge,

is they're all trying to figure out a way to connect with him. and you hear AIM, instant message come up a lot when that existed, sending them articles through that way. And, you know, one of the stories that struck me and then, like, your reaction to it in episode three is kind of the rules, how you don't want to alienate them and said it too much. It almost reminded me of the soup Nazi in Seinfeld

where, you know, if you don't follow the right rules, you're, you know, maybe banned for life from the site. And that has major repercussions if you're in certain elements of the media, you know, trying to make it. Yeah, and there are publications, who's bread and butter for many, many years

was to get drudgelings. So it was incredibly serious business for them not to mess up that relationship. Some people would just, their job would be to churn out drudgelings. And when they would get one, they'd get a bottle of bourbon from their boss or something like that.

I mean, this was like a real ecosystem, like a whale with little fish on top of it kind of thing. But they would sit you down as a reporter and say, listen, don't mess up this relationship with drudge. here's exactly what you need to do.

You walk in, you know, just like the soup Nazi. You send him a link. You don't send him commentary. You don't follow up. Don't spell anything wrong. Don't be annoying or you might blow it. And people took this very seriously. You didn't want to mess that up.

And the reason is because if you get a drudge link, how many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of clicks, are you going to get on that story and get tons and tons of traffic, which is what is the bread and butter for internet journalism, in the past 15 years, 20 years. So it was incredibly important to nurture relationships and people tried to go above and beyond

and try to get to know them to various levels of failure. Only a couple people have gotten close to him in any meaningful way. It's just been an incredibly difficult thing. But even, you know, and there was a time, he used to use a program called AOL Instant Messenger,

which is just, you know, like DMing back and forth as we'd call it now. And he was prolific on that thing. And then that shut down, I think, in 2017 or 2018, right? And so that cut off a lot of people from judge that just had to send emails now. But it extends beyond journalists. We're talking about White House staff, talking about campaign staff or presidential elections, that they are trying to woo him, both Republicans and Democrats, you know, trying to do this. And so everybody's trying to get a piece of drudge if they can because of that influence.

and it didn't matter if they loved him or loathed him, they still needed to be a part of the Drudge report. And it was always funny to speak with campaign operatives. Drudge would shift a media narrative by having a big siren headline up at the top and totally blow up that campaign's plan for the day or even the week. And the press person's bosses would say,

you need to get Drudge on the phone and tell him he got the story wrong or whatever. And they're like, get him on the phone. It's like getting a vapor on the time. telephone. It's not going to happen. And so it's very frustrating for a lot of Politico type of people that are used to being able to get on the phone and yell at somebody. Can't yell at Matt Drudge. He won't be heard. Let me, let me ask you, Chris, about a tweet that I think was directed at both you and me this morning, by a listener who's listening to the series. He criticized us. He said he

likes the series, but when he heard Tucker Carlson interviewed, that was a bridge too far for him. Tucker obviously, but we both work for him at one point, you know, whether we agree with his politics now or are not. It seems, you know, not terribly important to me in telling the story of Matt Drudge, but I would love to hear what your view is about interviewing what some people consider unsavory figures on the left or the right in order to do a kind of narrative journalism story that we're doing here. Well, if that person on Twitter or X is listening now, just wait until we get to Alex Jones. No, Tucker had some meaningful interactions with the Drudge Report and with Matt Drudge himself.

And our goal with this podcast, even the title, finding Matt Drudge, in addition to finding him, is finding out more about this elusive figure. How does a reporter do that? You talk to the sources that know who the person is or have had stories. So I had no issues talking with Tucker. Now, we try to check everything out. And, you know, that person I think had said something about like Tucker exaggerating things. sometimes and, you know, maybe he uses hyperbole here and there. But I do know for a fact that he was in touch with Matt Drudge at different points. Other people have told me that. These are

facts. And we wanted, and Tucker is also very good at telling a story. And so we wanted to reach out to him and hear what his perspective was and his interactions. We're also dealing with scarcity here. Everybody has these little bitty, tiny stories all around. But Tucker had quite a few. And so we felt it was really important to include his voice just because the stories he had with Drudge, I think were not only meaningful, but they told us a lot about Drudge. And that's what we're trying to get at in part in this podcast. And just to be clear, in case people are wondering, not that we'd be opposed to it. We don't have Alex Jones doing interviews, but we do discuss his final interview. Sure. Yeah. We do have other people that they might object to on the left

and the right, really. But yeah, I think, I think that's right. To tell this story, I mean, you have to go where Drudge went in some ways. And Drudge, you know, for better or worse, was surrounded by people that a lot of people, depending on their partisan outlook, did not like. But I think in the next week's episode, you'll see, and Chris, you can speak to this, but one of the persons who was closest to Matt Trudge, at least for a season, you might say, had a campaign season, uh, was someone who was a Hillary Clinton operative.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's kind of, um, counterintuitive, but it is the Democrats who had, I guess the close, one of the closest personal relationships with Drudge. Uh, this person, her name is Tracy Cephal, um, and I could say it because it's been reported in the past, um, but, but she really got to know him. And I, I think you could argue, they developed a bit of a friendship together. She went to his house, you know, and, and hung out with him. And all the while, she's trying to promote Hillary Clinton. She'd be the person they'd go to to try to push things on the Drudge Report. But they'd also blame her if things weren't going well for the Drudge Report. And she would be the first to tell you that her control over that place

was very minimal, you know. But, you know, we speak with people on the left and the right who do, they'll say, yeah, everybody reads him. Everybody read him during that time. And so, So, you know, to think of him as just like some kind of partisan Republican hack is just such a boring way, a boring label to put on someone like him. He kind of transcends those labels. And he'll follow the path of the people that intrigue him, that excite him, that didn't make, you know, things a little bit dangerous. You also got to remember, like, his best friend in all the world is Anne Coulter, who is no shrinking violet. You know, he loves big, loud, brash people that break things. And I think to be, you know, close friends with Anne like that, you got to love a personality like hers.

Yeah, she's probably one of the few friends that we know that he kind of still is in contact with, even if she might not have been as cooperative as we would hope so far. Here's a question for you as we near the end of this. Do you think Drudge is listening to our show? I sure hope that he is. And I was getting a, you know, waiting for our phone call, you know, to get him on the show, right? I think he, he notices when people talk about him, at least in the past he has. The biographer of Matt Drudge, you know, said that through various channels he had heard, you know,

Matt Drudge said, oh, the book wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, like that kind of thing. Like, so I think like any normal human being, even if you are famous, or you are elusive, you can't help. But look on Twitter and see what the at replies are, right? You just can't help it. You want to see, you got to read the comment section. And especially a project like this that has devoted, you know, a lot of effort into trying to understand him and speak with him and everything like that.

You know, like I think he'll find as we read this, or excuse me, as we report this, that we're making an effort to get a full, complete picture. and it's not just a slapdash kind of thing. And my hope is that he will appreciate it and I want to have a say in this. And where if people listening to the Dispatch Podcast want to listen to finding Matt Drudge, where can they listen to it?

You can find it on iHeart Media, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, give us those five stars and help grow the show. And this Dispatch podcast, give this one five stars, But, no, it is important to grow the show. I, you know, I've talked with people that have appeared on our show and they said that they just suddenly got a flurry of like a dozen text messages saying, oh, my gosh, you're on

the show. So people are listening. We're just getting out. And hopefully we are hooking them and getting them engaged. Last question, Chris, you are a, I haven't asked you this. You're a journalism professor now. You teach journalism. Have any of your students commented on the show?

Are they listening? They are listening, especially because they, you know, as I teach them in the classroom, like how to speak on air, how to do interviews, you know, they want to see it done themselves. They want to see their professor doing it and not just back in the day, but currently. And so when I'm working on a project like this, I'm often thinking about them, especially because they're going to be my best critics when I see them in person in class. Chris Moody, thank you for joining the dispatch podcast. Thank you for having me, Jamie.

I'm going to be able to be.