One aspect of the Internet that reporters have often decried is the way gossip and rumor have come to the fore, competing with what we might professionally call the "publishable truth." The Drudge Report is the best-known purveyor of media and political gossip, but despite the many errors Matt Drudge has made over the past decade, his will always be remembered as the first website to report that President Bill Clinton had had an affair with an intern named Monica Lewinsky.
The irony that all reporters know privately is we often trade in gossip and rumor, because we are the ones on the front lines of where the documentable meets the undocumentable. I'm reminded of how every reporter I met in Washington, D.C., during the closing year of the Clinton administration (when I was bureau chief there for Salon) claimed to have known about Newt Gingrich's affair, which he conducted while he was leading the Republican attack on Clinton for his sexual misbehavior.
If they knew it, why didn't they consider it newsworthy? If the tawdry affairs of one party are fair game, what about those of the other?
Whatever. My solution to the rumor mill syndrome was to recommend that Salon hire a gossip columnist, which we subsequently did, and she was a good one. Hell, I enjoy political rumors as much as the next person, as long as it is clearly labeled as such.
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