The Internet Broke the Gatekeepers, and the Right Was Quick to See It

Picture a newsroom in the early 1990s, a hypothetical one, where an editor holds a story in his hand and decides that the American people do not need to see it. He does not announce this. He does not vote on it. He does not have to explain himself to anyone, because that is the job. The job was called gatekeeping, and for most of the twentieth century it was among the most powerful jobs in American public life that nobody ever ran for.

Then a few people with modems and a lot of stubbornness showed up and informed the gatekeepers that the gate had no fence on either side. This is the story of how that happened, why conservatives were among the first to grasp it, and why the best objection to open publishing, that it spreads rumor, is weaker than it looks.

The gatekeeper's power

Let me define terms, because the argument depends on them. A gatekeeper is anybody who decides what the public gets to see. In the old system there were not many. The three broadcast networks decided what led the evening news. A few large papers decided which stories became national stories. Wire services decided which local events anyone outside the town would hear about. Book publishers, magazine editors and television producers each held a small gate of their own.

Gatekeeping is not inherently sinister. Editors cut a lot of bad stories, which is a service. The trouble is that a gatekeeper does two jobs at once: he filters for quality and he filters for taste. When all the gatekeepers share a similar background, similar friends and similar assumptions, the taste filter works as a kind of invisible hand on the national agenda. A story can be true, important and ignored simply because it does not occur to the people at the gate that it is interesting.

Here is the claim I want to make, and I'll lay it out in order so you can check each step.

1. For most of the twentieth century, a small number of editors controlled which stories reached a national audience.
2. Those editors, like any group of people, had blind spots shaped by who they were and where they worked.
3. When the cost of publishing collapsed, anyone could reach an audience without asking permission.
4. The people most frustrated with the old gate, those who believed their concerns were routinely ignored, had the strongest incentive to use the new freedom.
5. Therefore conservatives, who had long complained about the gate, were among the first to use the internet to go around it.

You can accept step 5 without agreeing with every conservative story ever published. The claim is about speed and motivation, and the record backs it up.

January 1998: the story the editors held

Start with a case that people argue about to this day. In January 1998, a Newsweek reporter named Michael Isikoff had been working on a story about a young White House intern and the President. According to the account that became public, the magazine decided to hold the story. On Saturday, January 17, 1998, a website run by one man out of an apartment, the Drudge Report, posted an item saying that Newsweek had killed the story.

That was it. A website run by a man with a computer and a taste for gossip broke the gate. Within days, the story was everywhere. The Washington Post and other major outlets reported on the matter in the following days, the President denied it publicly, and within a year the House had impeached him and the Senate had acquitted him.

Let's be careful about what this proves and what it does not. I am not claiming that the Drudge Report was a model of journalism. It was not, and neither Matt Drudge nor his critics would claim it was. I'm not claiming the story was good for the country; reasonable people disagree about that. The point is narrower and bigger at the same time. For the first time, a single person could force a story into the national conversation over the editorial judgment of a major news organization. Newsweek could decide to wait. It could not decide that nobody else would find out.

Think about that for a second. An editor's decision not to run a story had always been, in effect, a decision that the story would not exist. The internet changed that decision into a delay.

September 2004: the memos

If January 1998 showed that the gate could be broken, September 2004 showed that the crowd could do the work of an editor.

On September 8, 2004, CBS aired a segment on its newsmagazine about President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. The report relied on memos attributed to a late officer in Bush's unit, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian. Within hours of the broadcast, people on the internet began taking the documents apart. A poster on a conservative discussion forum raised questions about the typography, noting that the memos appeared to use features, such as proportional spacing and a raised superscript, that critics said were hard to reconcile with the typewriters of the early 1970s. Bloggers on several sites picked up the thread, pooled their knowledge, and by the next morning the questions were being asked in the mainstream press.

CBS defended the story at first. On September 20, it said it could no longer vouch for the documents and apologized. An outside panel, led by former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press executive Louis Boccardi, reported in January 2005. The panel faulted the network's handling of the story, found a failure to follow basic journalistic practices, and said it could not determine whether the documents were genuine or forged. The producer was dismissed, and in March 2005 Dan Rather stepped down as anchor of the evening news.

Note what that panel did not say. It did not say the documents were forged, and I will not say it either. What it said was that the network had put on air documents it could not authenticate. That is the heart of the lesson. Nobody in the crowd had a press pass. They had curiosity, expertise in odd subjects and an incentive to check. A major network had a team, a budget and a reputation, and the crowd outran it.

Look at what happened to the old model of correction. In the pre-internet world, a viewer who saw an error on the evening news could write a letter. The letter might be answered. A week later the correction might appear in small type. In September 2004 the correction came before the next morning's coffee.

Why the right moved first

Why did conservatives take to the new tools so quickly? Not because they are better with computers. It comes down to motive and habit.

A group that believes the established press is not listening has a reason to go around it. A group with a long history of building its own outlets, from the movement magazines to talk radio, already has the muscle memory of doing it. And a group whose members include a lot of small-business owners, lawyers, engineers and hobbyists with strong opinions and odd expertise has plenty of people who can take apart a typewritten memo or a government report on a weekend. In the early 2000s, blogs written by lawyers, professors and law-school types on the right gained a following by doing precisely that: reading the primary document themselves, linking to it, and letting readers see what it actually said instead of a summary of it.

That habit, link the source and let the reader check, is the quiet revolution. It is a conservative instinct as much as a technological one. Do not trust the summary. Read the text.

The sites that followed

The Drudge Report and the 2004 bloggers were the beginning. In the years after, conservative readers and writers created a whole ecosystem online. Some were individual bloggers who wrote about politics and law and built large followings. Some were group sites that aggregated and commented on the day's news. Some grew into news operations with reporters and editors of their own. Breitbart News launched in 2007, and The Daily Caller, founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel, arrived in 2010. Older conservative sites such as WorldNetDaily and Newsmax, which started in the late 1990s, grew with the web.

What did these sites have in common? They didn't need a printing press, a broadcast license or a distribution deal. They needed a domain name, a server and an audience, and the audience was there. Readers who believed they had been underserved by the establishment press found a place that spoke to them directly, and writers who could not get hired by the established outlets found a way to build a career on their own terms.

That is a very American story. It is the story of the small publisher, the pamphleteer, the person with a good idea and a cheap way to spread it. The cost of entering the market fell almost to zero, and the right moved in fast. For the earlier chapters of this tradition, see From a Small Magazine in 1955 to a Movement Press That Reshaped the Debate, which covers the print era, and The Founders' Partisan Press Was Far Nastier Than Anything on Your Feed, which shows that the pamphleteer is older than the Constitution.

The objection: open publishing also spreads rumor

Now for the best argument against everything I have just said, and it deserves a fair statement. If anyone can publish, then anyone can publish nonsense. A false story can reach millions before a correction reaches thousands. The gatekeepers at least had standards, fact-checkers and legal departments that kept some of the worst material out. The new system removed those safeguards, and, the critic says, the quality of public information suffered.

That is a real concern, and no honest person on the right should wave it away. Rumors do spread. Conservative sites have published false stories, just as the old press did. Anybody who has been on social media for an afternoon has seen how fast a false claim can travel.

Here is my answer, in three parts.

1. The old system also made mistakes, and those were harder to correct. The CBS memos were not published by a crank in a basement. They were broadcast by one of the most famous news organizations in the country. The credentialed press has no monopoly on error.
2. The crowd corrects. In the 2004 case, the same open system that could have spread a false story corrected a questionable one in a matter of hours. When you open the gate, you let in more claims, and you also let in more people who check claims. A crowd is a distributed copy desk. Not every error gets caught, but errors that matter to a lot of people tend to attract a lot of checkers.
3. The cure for a bad argument is a better argument. That is the old First Amendment principle, and it works better than any referee. The alternative is to hand a small group the authority to decide what counts as true. We tried that, and we know who gets left out.

I will add a caution for my own side. The crowd corrects best when readers are willing to be corrected. If you only read sources that tell you what you want to hear, the crowd's work never reaches you. A good conservative reader checks a claim before he shares it, and he is as hard on a story that flatters his side as on one that attacks it. The remedy for rumor begins with each reader. For practical tools, see How to Evaluate Any News Source With a Twelve-Point Checklist and How to Spot a Misleading Statistic Before It Spots You, With Worked Examples.

What the broken gate means for the next fight

There is a final question, and it is the one that matters most. The gatekeepers did not disappear. They moved. A handful of companies run the platforms where most people find news, and their rules about what to show or suppress amount to a new kind of gate. Conservatives who welcomed the end of the old gates should be consistent and ask hard questions about the new ones. That debate runs through Private Company Is Not the End of the Debate Over Platform Power and Section 230 Explained in Plain English, Down to the Twenty-Six Words.

A principle worth holding is this: the answer to concentrated power over information is not to hand that power to a government agency. We saw how that works in The Fairness Doctrine From 1949 to 1987 and Why Its Repeal Still Matters. The answer is more competition, more publishers and more readers who care. The internet has done more for that cause in twenty-five years than any regulation did in fifty.

The bottom line

• For most of the twentieth century, a few editors decided which stories the nation saw. The internet ended that arrangement by making publishing nearly free.
• The Drudge Report's January 1998 item showed that a single publisher could break a story another outlet was holding. The 2004 memo episode showed that readers could check a major network's work in hours.
• The best objection, that open publishing spreads rumor, is real. But the old system erred too, and an open crowd corrects errors faster than a letters page ever did.
• Be a reader who checks. Before you share a story, ask who published it, what the source is and whether you would believe it if it came from your opponent.
• Support competition among publishers. The cure for concentrated power over information, in the old press or the new platforms, is more voices, not a regulator with a stopwatch.