Gossip wants to be free: in defense of online scandal mongering.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Columns

ON JANUARY 17, 1998, Matt Drudge posted a siren-decorated "World Exclusive" declaring that Newsweek had spiked a story regarding President Clinton and a certain 23-year-old former intern. The report and several follow-ups sat there on his site like radioactive turds, ignored by the rest of the media universe for four agonizing days.

This is how much tighter the rumor cycle is now: On February 12, 2004, Drudge set off another alarm, this one about an investigation by reporters from Time, ABC News, and The Hill of a possible fling between John Kerry and a former intern. The report was immediately picked up by talk radio, by British newspapers, by New York tabloids, and (pre-emptively, one assumes) by media ethics hand wringers such as Editor & Publisher. Within four days both Kerry and his alleged hottie had responded to press inquiries with firm public denials, which were duly noted in the serious media outlets. By day five it was all over but the shouting about What This Means for Journalism.

"There definitely is a media food chain," the oft-quoted, dour media critic Tom Rosenstiel told The Boston Globe's Mark Jurkowitz in one of the dozens of ethics postmortems. "What you get is ... the bad journalism driving out the good."

Rosenstiel has it backward. If there was indeed no affair (and Drudge continues to suggest there was, pointing out that Kerry's oral denial is much weaker than Monica Lewinsky's signed affidavit), having the story vetted and slapped down by elite news organizations before it could gain political traction should be hailed as a triumph of substance over scandal. Instead, you had reactions like this, from Greensboro, North Carolina, News and Record Editor John Robinson: "Welcome to the scary new world of stories without substantiation and media without accountability. In this land, truth is simply an afterthought."

The Kerry story shared a theme with several other mini-scandals that bubbled up in February, including President Bush's National Guard service, a doctored photograph showing Kerry with Jane Fonda, and various Web outlets' willingness to publish embargoed exit poll data during primary elections. All these stories involve media gatekeepers expressing anxiety about losing control of the gate. Amateurs have increasing access to information once kept safely within the walls of the professional media, and they are doing whatever they want with it. As Bob Steele, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute...