The Monica Lewinsky affair has pushed the internet into a key position in the dissemination of information. It was the Drudge Report on the internet that broke the story after Newsweek pulled the details at the last minute.
Until now, Matt Druge had a fairly good record for accuracy. The mainstream media not only squirmed at his bad taste, but squirmed that he got and published the stories they did not have or did not dare publish that turned out to be true.
But now his revelation that President Bill Clinton fathered a child, now aged 13, through a black prostitute has proven to be false.
The mainstream media in the US (the morning broadsheets and the three main television networks) have always been reluctant to report on the private lives of politicians. This is now changing. Mr Drudge has no such qualms and it seems US politicians are powerless to stop him.
His reporting and a similar lack of coyness from Larry Flynt’s Hustler magazine are changing the reportange of politics in America. There has always been political gossip, but in the days before the internet it did not spread widely among the voting public. Nowadays there is no stopping it.
But internet publishing does not always come with the checks and balances of mainstream journalism. On many sites there is not editorial cotnrol that looks at matters such taste, fairness and veracity. The mainstream media have to take these matters into consideration for several reasons: readers might shun them; they might get sued for defamation or prosecuted for contempt; they might lose advertisers.
The internet publisher who is not associated with a responsible institution, on the other hand, has no such constraints. Anyone can knock up a site on the internet’s World Wide Web and publish whatever they like. Provided the publisher is penniless there is little defamed people can do. Hitherto, of course, the very wherewithal to engage in widespread publication — presses, broadcasting licences, land, offices and so on — was used by as a means of exercising some control. They were assets to be seized, if necessary, by those suing. With the internet, a single person can publish very widely with very few resources.
The upshot is that the mainstream media cannot ignore the competition on the internet. One approach in the US has been holding-your-nose publication of the type: “”Look at these irresponsible allegations being bandied about on the internet.” The other approach is to report the internet reports.
It is likely that Australia will follow US trends, though our defamation law is tougher and our courts more willing to issue restraining orders. Nonetheless, it is easy for a publisher to move to another site. Moreover, once something has been published on the internet, it does not take much to copy it dozens of times and post it elsewhere. In the internet environment, a court’s restraining order is useless in the face of a determined publisher. Hitherto a court could seize the presses, if necessary to stop repeat publications.
It means that consumers of information, especially from the internet, will have to be more discerning. They will have to realise that the internet is not a single entity but millions of different sites run by people from the sleazy to the thoroughly ethical, from the reliably knowledgable to the crackpot.
They will also have to be more sceptical before believing the worse about their politicians and, perhaps more importantly, they will have to be less vengeful and judging and accept that humans, including politicians, are not perfect.
And from the politicians’ side, people will rightly expect less hypocrisy. It is the hypocrisy, not the infidelity, that drives Drudge and Flynt.