“ASTONISHING:” It’s Astonishing That It Took This Long for the Bill Clinton Moment of Reckoning to Arrive.
—Headline at Slate on Thursday. Slate is one of the last journalistic redoubts of the Graham family, who previously owned the Washington Post and Newsweek.
Flashback:
Newsweek’s top editors, after a day of frenetic meetings, sought yesterday to explain why they failed to publish the story that stunned the nation, an exclusive piece about allegations that President Clinton encouraged a 24-year-old former White House intern to lie about whether they had an affair.
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There are few secrets in the modern media world, however, and word of Isikoff’s suppressed scoop leaked out through an increasingly familiar route: Matt Drudge’s Internet gossip column. Reporters across Washington, some of whom were already pursuing the story, kept scrambling for confirmation.
— “Newsweek’s Melted Scoop,” Howard Kurtz on January 22, 1998, reporting about the then-Graham-owned magazine Newsweek in the then-Graham-owned Washington Post.
Drudge has been reviled by the DNC-MSM ever since for being the first to break their monopoly on news.