Drudge’s prickly denouement with Fox had been brewing for a while. Ratings for the weekly “Drudge” talk show, which looked like “Meet the Press” on the movie set of “Chinatown,” were down 33 percent this year, and one Fox executive said Drudge seemed distracted: “He found the work heavier lifting than he wanted to bother with.” He demanded that a studio be built in his apartment. (Drudge wouldn’t comment.) The flash point came early this month when Drudge said that on his next show, to demonstrate his ardent opposition to partial-birth abortion, he would display a dramatic photo of a tiny hand of a fetus reaching out of an incision in the womb. Fox executives said no. The photo actually depicted a surgical procedure to correct spina bifida, and the fetus was 21 weeks old, they argued, so it would be a “misrepresentation.” Drudge called it “censorship” and refused to go on the air. Fox swiftly declared him in breach of his contract and branded him “completely unprofessional.” By the end of last week the two sides agreed he was history.
But Drudge would never have claimed he was “professional” in the sense that TV-network news divisions use the term–even Fox. He was a different animal, the first journalistic creation of the Internet. He started a Web site in a dingy Hollywood apartment in 1995. He had recently left a job at the CBS gift shop; he had never attended college. Then he leaked the Monica story online and became the other obscure person who emerged from the affair hopelessly famous. His flair for self-promotion took him and his black fedora even further. All the while, he thumbed his nose when the journalistic mandarins criticized him for a far-from-perfect accuracy rate on his scoops. Then, at a time when traditional journalists like Lou Dobbs had defected to new media, Drudge headed the opposite way. As they say, he extended the brand–to television, radio and books.
He seemed overextended. But Drudge tells NEWSWEEK he’s only too happy to return to the Net. “It’s me and the audience,” he says. “There are none of the suits, none of the contracts, none of the pancake makeup.” And this doesn’t mean he’ll be back at the CBS gift shop, either. He says he’ll continue to make “seven figures.” His site draws ad revenue. Drudge still has his ABC radio show, where shock-jock-loving executives say they like him just fine. He also recently signed for about $500,000 to write his autobiography. His theme? “A middle finger to the establishment,” he has said. Which now, presumably, includes Fox.
