In the five years since his NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN post made history, MATT DRUDGE has turned his news-and-gossip website into a must-read for media junkies, politicos, and Hollywood types alike. After logging 1,412,943,653 (that’s right, 1.4 billion) hits to the Drudge Report last year alone, Drudge can make or break a candidate with a well-placed headline. What’s more, Drudge is the highest-paid journalist on the Internet—earning a reported $800,000 a year, though he coyly admits to making “quite a bit” more. But while Drudge’s fans may track his every update, critics call him a trouble-maker who’s as irresponsible as a kingmaker as he was in his initial role of scandal-monger. Recently he faced those charges—and lobbed a few of his own—in a no-holds-barred conversation with media maven Camille Paglia and Radar editor-in-chief Maer Roshan. In the interview, which took place shortly after Drudge joined Paglia for a rare in-person lecture at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, a surprisingly candid Drudge unloads on such topics as Clinton vs. Giuliani ’08, Sidney Blumenthal’s “lies” his adventures in transcendental meditation, and God’s retribution for abortion. And then there’s that “dirt file” on Condoleezza Rice…
CAMILLE PAGLIA: As a personality on the media landscape, Matt, you seem like a loner. You’ve been guarded about your personal life, and rarely make the usual media rounds. Why do you stay so mysterious?
MATT DRUDGE: Because I think my private life would make my –public persona a lot less interesting. Once you take the mask off Batman he seems a bit diminished. Not that I’m equating myself to that character. Or Spider-Man. Or the Incredible Hulk. But if you’re in the public eye to the degree that I am, you want to preserve a bit of mystery.
PAGLIA: Joan Baez once said that she felt more comfortable with 10,000 strangers in a concert hall than she did with the people closest to her. When you have this relationship with as many people as you do on your site, does it sometimes feel a little distorting? Do you think that this public persona you’ve constructed obstructs your real identity?
DRUDGE: No, absolutely not. In the end it’s just me sitting in my house with a computer and a keyboard. I don’t think about the millions of people who may be reading. It feels like a very solitary activity.
PAGLIA: Movie stars have the same problem—Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, Madonna today. There is something psychologically dislocating about the ability to reach so many people at once. When you were at the White House Correspondents Dinner, how did people treat you?
DRUDGE: Well, that’s a loaded question. I’m a complete sensation in DC. Washington is my Hollywood. And I don’t know if it’s thanks to the Washington Post, which has been very kind to me, even despite its scurrilous labeling of me through the years.