Dredge Report: The cyberhack jumps the gun again

"[Matt] Drudge is even more unreliable and wrong than he used to be," writes Michelangelo Signorile -- host of a daily radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio -- in the New York Press:

I happen to know that several major news organizations have for some time been looking into claims about portly conservative moralizer William Bennett and a leather-bound dominatrix bodybuilder in Las Vegas, a woman who has some very interesting narratives to recount. What news organizations? The top five that come to your mind are on the list. Some reporters have even traveled far and wide on this story.

Does this mean the story is true? No. It is "developing," as our favorite cybergossip character assassin likes to say, and it may go nowhere. Every day reporters track down leads and follow up on tips. Sometimes this goes on for a while and they may never nail down the leads. And that’s certainly true if there’s no truth to them.

It’s interesting, though, that Matt Drudge, whose standards are far lower than even those of the Weekly World News, hasn’t run a blaring headline like, "Bill Bennett in Grip of Imminent Dominatrix Scandal." I say that, of course, because last week Drudge ran a breathless "world exclusive" report of his own claiming that news organizations were chasing down "recent alleged infidelity" on the part of Democratic front-runner John Kerry. ...