By David Daley
Hartford Courant Staff Writer
Thursday, February 11, 1999
When Matt Drudge ran with rumored reports of DNA testing to determine whether Bill Clinton fathered a child with a black Arkansas prostitute, Jonathan Bourne and Rogers Cadenhead could barely contain their glee. Usually they wait until a Drudge Report exclusive is debunked before poking fun at him on their "Drudge Retort" parody site. This time, they immediately posted a scoop of their own.
Bourne "found" the woman in question and printed the exact conversation she had that fateful night with the president. She said she knew her relationship with Clinton was love because she kissed him -- something she'd never done with a client before. "Kissing, now that's special," she said. Then, the Drudge Retort posted the first picture of the supposed love child -- who looked a lot like a certain child star from Diff'rent Strokes.
"And we still got e-mail from people saying, `Drudge, we can believe the story, but we think that picture looks like Gary Coleman.' Or, `Drudge, that's amazing. It sounds just like dialogue from Pretty Woman,"' said Bourne, laughing in amazement. "It's proof of how hard it is to parody Matt Drudge."
If the most gullible bite on Bourne and Cadenhead's Drudge spoofs, it's not hard to understand why. They designed their page to look almost identical to Drudge's -- the same style of type, the same rows of links to other journalists and columnists, the same screaming, sensational headlines trumpeting world exclusives. Only Bourne and Cadenhead use a yellow background -- their not-so-subtle way of tarring Drudge as a yellow journalist.
And they landed the very Web address that most people would probably first head for when looking for the Drudge Report. Drudge's real site is www.drudgereport.com. Bourne and Cadenhead scored www.drudge.com last July -- a Web address that Drudge mysteriously didn't register for himself. Bourne, a Los Angeles comedian who contributes jokes to Jay Leno's monologue, and Cadenhead, a Florida journalist and Web designer, couldn't resist parodying the fedora-capped cyber-journalist.
"We looked at his page, and it was almost a parody of itself," Bourne said. "But we love the pundits. It's fun to make fun of how wrong they are and how wrong Drudge is. He's such a goof."
Their parody stories have satirized every aspect of the Lewinsky affair, mocking pundits, media ethics and having fun with tales of cigars and stained dresses. They often like to correct wild stories they never broke, like made-up tales of a "period-authentic Roman orgy" at the home of CNN's Greta Van Susteren.
Actually, they corrected, "There is no evidence that Georgetown faculty, Wolf Blitzer or sloe-eyed sex kitten Debbie Matenopoulos have been invited to Van Susteren's home for any reason, much less granted ingress to engage in public acts of sexual debauchery involving `a punitive-minded Van Susteren and a gavel once owned by legendary jurist Learned Hand."'
Despite the links to leftish columnists and alternative-weekly writers, Bourne says the Drudge Retort's only political slant is toward what's funny. (Links to other smart, satirical sites like The Onion and McSweeney's, and on-line 'zines like Suck and Feed, are another reason to bookmark Drudge Retort.)
"The tough part is keeping up with reality. Right now, reality is so bizarre, it's getting harder and harder to parody it," he said. "When the cigar story came out, we wanted to say, `We give up. We can't compete with reality anymore."'
Drudge doesn't usually respond to their parodies, but one time when Bourne and Cadenhead were guests on a California radio talk show, he couldn't resist calling in.
"He said we're entering the most serious stage of this trial," Bourne recounted. "I said, `No we're not. It's getting funnier every day."'
They encouraged him on the air to sue them for the Web site, but Drudge demurred.
"He said our hit count isn't high enough," Bourne said. "I don't know our hit count, but Matt Drudge knows our hit count. We hope he sues us. He was nothing until Sidney Blumenthal sued him.
"That he has any credibility at all is totally amazing to me. He's said that he feels comfortable knowing that stories have gone out that are 80 percent accurate. Well, if we're 40 percent accurate, maybe we can get half as far."
Copyright 1999 Hartford Courant