Drudging Up Personal Details

Drudging Up Personal Details

By Lloyd Grove

Friday, July 18: ( Washington Post) Some folks in the White House were apparently hopping mad when ABC News correspondent Jeffrey Kofman did a story on Tuesday's "World News Tonight" about the plummeting morale of U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq.

So angry, in fact, that the next day, a White House operative alerted cyber-gossip Matt Drudge to the fact that Kofman is not only openly gay, he's Canadian.

Yesterday Drudge told us he was unaware of the ABC story until "someone from the White House communications shop tipped me to it" along with a profile of Kofman in the gay-oriented magazine the Advocate. On Wednesday, for 6 hours 38 minutes, the Drudge Report bannered Kofman's widely quoted ABC story -- in which enlisted people questioned the Army's credibility and one irked soldier went on camera to call on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign -- and linked to the Advocate piece with the understated headline "ABC NEWS REPORTER WHO FILED TROOP COMPLAINT STORY IS CANADIAN."

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan "is having a rough first week," Drudge said. "The White House press office is under new management and has become slightly more aggressive about contacting reporters. This story has certainly become talk radio fodder about the cultural wars-slash-liberal bias in the media."

A network insider was less sanguine about the White House tactic: "Playing hardball is one thing. But appealing to homophobia and jingoism is simply ugly."

Kofman said from Baghdad, where he is covering the 3rd Infantry Division: "This morning I had a meeting with one of the commanding officers and we talked about my report and the response back home. He said he'd read about it on the Drudge Report and had just one question. 'Is it true that you're Canadian?' I just smiled and said, 'My life is an open book.' "

ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider told us: "Sadly, when people feel wounded by a truthful report, they attempt to attack the messenger." A White House spokesman, meanwhile, disavowed the incident: "This is the first we've heard of it, and it would be totally inappropriate if true."

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