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| Time | Text |
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| It's been more than 16 years since Matt Drudge gave his historic speech at the National Press Club on June 2nd, 1998. | |
| At that time, he said that the mainstream media would go bankrupt, that individual bloggers and researchers on the Internet were just as important as the New York Times. | |
| The controlled state-run media had a field day making fun of Matt Drudge, but today their hubris has drained away and they're no longer as arrogant as they once were. | |
| Now we see calls for the FCC to regulate print news and online news, and we see establishment publications like Time Magazine, Newsweek, and the New York Times battling to keep from going completely bankrupt and imploding. | |
| It turns out, pretty much everything that Matt Drudge said in that 40-minute speech has now come true. | |
| Well, Matt Drudge is saying a lot of things today that the mainstream media is still laughing at. | |
| Why do they laugh at people that have been proven right over and over again? | |
| Here are some of the most important moments, in my view, from Drudge's speech. | |
| And we're also adding headlines from over the years to show just how much of what he had to say came true. | |
| This marks the first time that an individual has access to the news wires outside of a newsroom. | |
| You get to read all the news from the Associated Press, UPI, Reuters, to the Morrocan Agency French Press and the Chinois. | |
| I'm a personal fan of the Chinois Press. | |
| And time was, only newsrooms had access to the full pictures of the day's events. | |
| But now any citizen does. | |
| We get to see the kinds of cuts that are made for all kinds of reasons. | |
| Endless layers of editors with endless agendas changing bits and pieces so by the time the newspaper hits your welcome mat, it had no meaning. | |
| Now with a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world. | |
| No middleman, no big brother. | |
| And I guess this changes everything. | |
| More than 10 years after breaking the Clinton-Lewinsky story, Matt Drudge remains more powerful than ever with his website, thedrudgereport.com. | |
| Matt Drudge is a legend on the internet. | |
| Every journalist and politician in America reads his website on a daily basis. | |
| When radio lost out to television, there was anxiety. | |
| The people in the radio business were absolutely anxious and demanded government stop the upcoming television wave. | |
| Television was very nervous about other mediums coming forward. | |
| Cable. | |
| The movies didn't want sitcoms to be taped at movie studios for fear it would take away from the movies. | |
| No. | |
| Television saved the movies. | |
| The internet is going to save the news business. | |
| I envision a future where there will be 300 million reporters. | |
| Where anyone from anywhere can report for any reason. | |
| It's freedom of participation absolutely realized. | |
| First of all, you disrespected me, this badge, and my department. | |
| You understand me? | |
| When I'm talking to you, you shut your mouth and you listen. | |
| Did I not give you a warning? | |
| You gave me a warning. | |
| I have a right in the United States. | |
| I know my rights. | |
| I don't give it! | |
| I don't care. | |
| Give me the board. | |
| Obviously your parents don't put a foot in your butt quite enough. | |
| Because you don't understand the meaning of respect. | |
| You see this? | |
| Yes, you see this! | |
| I took the boy! | |
| You have a problem with it? | |
| I have a problem! | |
| Then bring your parents down! | |
| We'll discuss this! | |
| Go for it! | |
| Go for it! | |
| Have you been there for the ceremony with the cremation of Care? | |
| Frankly, I don't think that's something I need to talk to you about. | |
| Really? | |
| That's right. | |
| Well, I'm Alex Jones and I snuck in there in 2000. | |
| I'm the guy that blew it wide open and got the video. | |
| It's been on national TV. | |
| Well, I disrespect you for that. | |
| You do? | |
| I do. | |
| But it's a lot of big public officials going in there. | |
| Don't we deserve to know? | |
| I don't know anything about you, and I don't know anything about your film, but if you go in there with an understanding, you violated that understanding by releasing that film, and I don't respect you for that. | |
| Really? | |
| I'm sorry, you took an understanding when you went in there that you would not do that film. | |
| Did you have an understanding when you went in there? | |
| No. | |
| Did you crash it? | |
| Yes. | |
| Yeah, and it has no trespassing signs there too, doesn't it? | |
| No, they put them up after. | |
| I just walked in. | |
| I'm sorry sir, I've been there before. | |
| I know what the circumstances are, and I'm sorry you violated the understandings. | |
| That was not a gentlemanly thing to do. | |
| But what about the ritual? | |
| Is the ritual genuinely? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Sir, everything... I don't owe you this comment. | |
| I know, I appreciate it. | |
| This is what's called ambush journalism, and I disrespect you for that as well, so thank you and goodbye. | |
| Have you ever been in the ritual? | |
| That's none of your damn business. | |
| Oh, great. | |
| Listen, listen. | |
| You go around and make understandings with people and violate them. | |
| You ambush people on the streets, and that's an inappropriate form of journalism. | |
| If you wish to practice that, that's fine, but don't ask others to respect you for it. | |
| You can do your Free American like anything you want. | |
| If you want to be uncivil, and rude, and ungentlemanly, that's up to you. | |
| But don't expect the rest of us to say, oh well, you're... You guys are setting policy in there, Mr. Gergen. | |
| I'm sorry, nobody sets policy in there. | |
| We try to be gentlemen. | |
| And obviously, you don't belong there. | |
| Weaving spiders come not here? | |
| Yeah! | |
| That is a three-pointer! | |
| Woo! | |
| What's up, man? | |
| How you doing today, sir? | |
| Good. | |
| You a U.S. | |
| citizen? | |
| That's my business. | |
| Well, it's our business to ask. | |
| Are you a U.S. | |
| citizen or not? | |
| You can ask, that's fine. | |
| And you have to answer me, or I'll have to detain you until you can either tell me that you're a U.S. | |
| citizen or not. | |
| Well, I don't have to answer you because I have rights as an American. | |
| Sir, go ahead and pull over there, behind that other vehicle, if you'd do me a favor. | |
| No thanks. | |
| I'd like to just go on my way. | |
| You can go on your way as soon as you tell me if you're a U.S. | |
| citizen. | |
| Well, you know, I didn't know that I have to go around proving that I'm a citizen. | |
| Do I need to like show my papers like the Nazis? | |
| Am I immigrating somewhere? | |
| Is this Mexico? | |
| Well, let me ask you this. | |
| Is this Nazi Germany now? | |
| Do I have to show my papers? | |
| Well, let me ask you this, you know, is this Nazi Germany now to show my papers? | |
| Get out of the vehicle. | |
| I am in my apartment, sir. | |
| Go back inside right now! | |
| I am inside. | |
| This is my door. | |
| I'm standing right inside my apartment. | |
| Sir, I'm inside my apartment. | |
| The First Lady of the United States recently addressed concerns about Internet during a cyberspatial Millennium Project press conference just weeks after Lewinsky broke. | |
| She said, we're all going to have to rethink how we deal with the Internet. | |
| As exciting as these new developments are, there are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function. | |
| I wonder who she was referring to. | |
| Mrs. Clinton continued, anytime an individual leaps so far ahead of that balance and throws a system, whatever it might be, political, economic, technological, out of balance, you got a problem. | |
| It can lead to all kinds of bad outcomes, which we have seen historically. | |
| We are in an information war, and we are losing that war. | |
| Would she have said the same thing about Ben Franklin? | |
| Or Thomas Edison? | |
| Or Henry Ford? | |
| Or Einstein? | |
| They all leapt so far ahead out that they shook the balance? | |
| No! | |
| I say to these people, faster, not slower! | |
| Create! | |
| Let your mind flow! | |
| Let the imagination take over! | |
| And if technology has finally caught up with individual liberty, Why would anyone who loves freedom want to rethink that? | |
| If you're an undersecretary at the Energy Department and you're doing an interview and you say one thing, you know, during it, you could end up being on the front page of Drudge. | |
| Anyone saying anything can get caught up in the spin cycle in a way that is very damaging. | |
| You know, it hurts what we're trying to do on a daily basis, but also is very damaging to that individual person. | |
| And we cannot hide our bad news stories. | |
| Bad news gets out one way or the other, and we must come to terms with telling the bad stories as well as the good. | |
| When bad things happen, the American people should hear it from us, not as a scoop on the Drudge Report. | |
| The editor of Civilization Magazine, Adam Goodhart, wrote a great op-ed in the New York Times talking about, is this really something new, this type of fast reporting, this competitive, I'm very competitive, I'm part of the headline generation. | |
| He maintains it was a going back to our foundations, when the press was found in quite a different atmosphere, when the press would report that the president's mother was a common prostitute brought over by the British Army. | |
| Imagine if someone did that now. | |
| We have a great tradition of freedom of the press in this country, unpopular press. | |
| If the First Lady is concerned about this internet cycle, what would she have done during the heyday when there was 12, 13 editions of a paper in one day? | |
| What would she have done with that news cycle? | |
| That's the foundation. | |
| That's what makes this club great. | |
| Is the tradition. | |
| And I think we have a tradition of provocative press. | |
| And that I maintain that I'm the new face on that. | |
| I'll take that for a season. | |
| But a lot of the stuff I do is serious stuff. | |
| I was first to report that the encryption was missing from a Laurel satellite, for example, a couple weeks ago. | |
| I didn't see the main press reporting that one. | |
| So not everything I do is gossip or bedroom. | |
| To the contrary, I think that's just an easy Uh, label to dismiss me, and to dismiss the new medium. | |
| But, uh, I'm excited about the launch of this internet medium, and I, again, the freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns one. | |
| Tonight, the Drudge Report and InfoWars are once again in the crosshairs, as the U.S. | |
| government seeks to regulate conservative media via election laws. | |
| Jones is the wildly popular conspiracy theorist, whose stories often make their way from his website InfoWars, where on any day you can find headlines about vaccines, mass fluoridation, and the 9-11 cover-up. | |
| Into the so-called mainstream GOP establishment. | |
| Alex Jones was a champion of Clive and Bundy from the very beginning. | |
| Because he's saying he'll do whatever he has to to not be, you know, have his grazing rights stolen by these pirates. | |
| Drudge elevated the story and it made its way onto Fox News' airwaves. | |
| Next thing you know, so-called mainstream Republicans are calling people like this patriots. | |
| The conservative website that's called the Drudge Report pulled out all the stops today to promote a big new bombshell video! | |
| Today, the leading conservative website's headline was this. | |
| Civil War sent it to go for handguns. | |
| I'm an addict. | |
| I'm a drudge addict. | |
| My homepage is actually something else, National Review, but I find myself going to drudge all the time because as a communications professional, you can tell what's going to come down the pike. | |
| If there's a siren on Drudge Report, you're like, oh boy, better go knock on the Oval Office door and let them know what's going to happen. | |
| Walkergate. | |
| Yes, we're calling it that. | |
| It's the latest Hillary conspiracy theory that set the internet to blaze after the Drudge Report questioned whether Clinton was using a walker in this People Magazine cover photo. | |
| Well, internet pioneer Matt Drudge created a firestorm over the weekend tweeting, just paid the Obamacare penalty for not getting covered. | |
| I'm calling it a liberty tax. | |
| But a White House representative firing back tweeting, flat lie, no fee for previous years. | |
| Scary how much influence he once had. | |
| And then the White House shot back and said, you know, made some cheap shot about, oh, he used to be relevant. | |
| Are you kidding me? | |
| Matt Drudge used to be relevant? | |
| Let me give you the numbers. | |
| In one month, go on the website, almost 810 million unique views on the Drudge Report. | |
| I guess that's a nice Twitter fight between the White House and Matt Drudge? | |
| People had suggested I start a mailing list. | |
| So I collected the emails and set up a list called the Drudge Report. | |
| One reader turned into five. | |
| Then turned into a hundred. | |
| And faster than you could say, I never had sex with that woman, it was a thousand. | |
| Five thousand. | |
| A hundred thousand people. | |
| The ensuing website practically launched itself. | |
| Last month I had six million visitors. | |
| And I currently have a daily average Larger than the weekly newsstand sales of Time Magazine. | |
| Check out these numbers. | |
| About 33 million visits in just the last 24 hours alone. | |
| Almost 900 million in the last month. | |
| And get this, over 11 billion in the last year. | |
| Some people love him. | |
| Some people hate him. | |
| And the White House may fear him because they can't control him. | |
| Anyone, for any reason, can launch a website. | |
| Little or no money. | |
| Internet connection, local phone. | |
| The modem lets you cover the world. | |
| The modem lets you read what's happening if there's an earthquake in Alaska seconds after it happens. | |
| I think that's fun and dramatic. | |
| For free. | |
| By a medium that was built by taxpayer money. | |
| So, perfectly realized. | |
| And, again, let the future begin. | |
| Anyway you look at it, Matt Drudge is now a global icon. | |
| Not just here in the United States, but worldwide. | |
| He is an example of independent, true media challenging the Goliath state-run systems. | |
| Matt Drudge is a visionary and a futurist, and I admire him because he's a folk hero. | |
| He's a grassroots person who was able to basically leverage his instinct for the pulse of the people and change the way the world sees news and information. | |
| And he's also had the courage to not just carry InfoWars.com stories, but countless other grassroots media stories and really change the narrative towards one that is more based on reality and empowering the people and liberty. | |
| Matt Drudge is classic Americana, and he's a great example not just to our generation, but future generations to come. |
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