Matt Drudge - Classic or Dud?

supposedly he's into egg sex

http://www.kmj580.com/shows/images/drudge.jpg http://www.cnn.com/2000/SHOWBIZ/News/12/14/showbuzz/drudge.jpg

http://64.70.191.96/abouttheclub/record/1999record/DrudgeHarb373x277.jpg

don't be so sure...

Length profile of Drudge - depressing.

Sorry, "lengthy".

that's a great piece. now i hate camille paglia even more. i still see drudge as a headline-writer first but now take special note of one of his current selections: "New red-light cams to cover all angles; catch you coming and going..." (geddit?)

Fascinating article, but much of it doesn’t ring true. A lot of the “interesting quirks” or “contradictions” the author attributes to Drudge can be understood as Drudge just being a vicious right-wing hack.

• The author says Drudge currently thinks that Hilary Clinton is the only person who can lead in the White House, and his evidence for this point is his claim that Drudge helps Clinton’s campaign with headlines like “Hilary Wins Fundraising Fight.” But the GOP’s best fundraising tactic – it’s best “get out the vote” tactic – is to scare the Republican base into thinking that Hilary Clinton may become President. Drudge’s headlines feed this right-wing campaign strategy perfectly.

• The author says Drudge is obsessed with global warming in a “Blade Runner,” grim-future sort of way. But most of what I see on Drudge’s website on the subject is pretty much the right-wing party line that global warming is an alarmist fantasy. Drudge’s site constantly links to “studies” denying the effect of warming, without noting that the authors of these studies are often partisan and that they represent a tiny minority of the scientific community. (admittedly, toward the end of the article, the author mentions Drudge’s “opposition to global warming,” which I assume means Drudge’s downplaying the evidence of global warming)

• The author says that Drudge now likes to “distance himself from sexual gossip,” but then says Drudge “has trouble stepping away from his own dirty streak,” which makes Drudge’s “relapses” seem like a pretty benign, uncontrollable impulse. But Drudge’s behavior in this regard seems bluntly partisan. The proof that Drudge tries to “distance himself from sexual gossip”? He downplayed GOP leader Mark Foley’s sexual advances toward interns and he was outraged that Mike Wallace asked GOP Presidential candidate (and Drudge favorite) Mitt Romney about whether Romney and his wife had premarital sex. The proof that Drudge sometimes “has trouble stepping away from his own dirty streak”? He falsely accused John Kerry of having an affair during the 2004 presidential campaign. He sided with an African-American aide in the Clinton White House, whom Drudge says was “disgracefully” relegated to “cleaning up the sink and picking up the panties.”

The politics of Matt Drudge aren’t that complicated. Glen Greenwald’s comment in the article is right. Maybe Drudge has some libertarian leanings, but he’s mostly a right-wing partisan hack. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it’s a little disingenuous to suggest otherwise based on the evidence cited in this article. The author says “At times Drudge does sound like a conservative.” At times? Oh, come on.

Sorry for the rant.

Look at the unflattering picture Drudge posted tonight of HRC over the all-caps line "The Toll of a Campaign," and reconsider one of the key points from the New York article (linked above) that Drudge favors HRC's campaign (a claim the author argues is evidence of Drudge's supposedly contradictory political philosophy.

Drudge is a nothing more than a viciously partisan hack.

Whatsamatta, not been paying attention since 1998?

he likes to have raw eggs smeared all over him when he bumps uglies

-- cinniblount (James Blount), Thursday, January 29, 2004 6:54 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

awesome. i'm buying the book.

-- roger adultery (roger adultery), Thursday, January 29, 2004 7:05 AM

4sight

Gives new meaning to the phrase "there's nobody here but us chickens".

Whatsamatta, not been paying attention since 1998?

I have. New York Magazine apparently hasn't. See above-linked story.

I hope those Hillary advisors who felt like they were Drudge's new inside buddies aren't as naive as they seemed in that article.

Yeah. I guess the idea is that Drudge is seemingly-ubiquitous, so you'd better try and use him rather than demonize him. Fair enough, I guess. But if that's the case, where's the flattering stories from Drudge about HRC as part of her campaign's pushback effort?

To be clearer: ". . . where's the flattering stories on Drudge's site about HRC -- placed at the behest of HRC's advisors -- as part of her campaign's pushback effort?"

One of Drudge's strategies in the past has been to mock people's appearance in a way that the mere sight of them is a punchline in itself. This worked with the feminization of Kerry and Edwards, and there's been some hint that he'll do this with Obama and his ears. Today is an attempt to do the same thing with Hillary.

http://newyorkmetro.com/news/media/drudge070903_250.jpg http://images.salon.com/media/feature/1999/09/21/drudge/cover.jpg http://blogs.abcnews.com/photos/uncategorized/drudge_nr.jpg

DURR

http://www.nndb.com/people/024/000028937/stevealbini-bw.jpg

that Drudge is marginally clever and entertaining puts him virtually in a league of his own these days.

he wears the hat cuz he's bald rite?

yep. and gay

i did not know that.

he wears the hat b/c he wants to be walter winchell, too.

seriously.

no but seriously i think it was a new yorker profile that implied gayosity but i'm not positive

How does the hat hide the gay?

lady if you have to ask

Tragic Sharpie accident while roughhousing with a bro:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/WilliamCrump63/drudgehead.jpg

http://newyorkmetro.com/news/media/drudge070903_250.jpghttp://www.satyamag.com/sat.site.images/mackaye.jpg

so the current leader is a national enquirer cover story titled "John Edward's Love Child Scandal". he just took a photo of the magazine cover and wrote "DEVELOPING" underneath it. this guy is very important, and very retarded.

http://drudgereport.com/ne.jpg

you don't 'get' Matt Drudge

Yes but is she white?

yes Matt Drudge is white

he also invented the donut

and was recently shockingly outed by the new yorker

'linked'

oh i get matt drudge, i get that he is retarded. that is what reading his website every day has taught me. but i keep coming back.

your love is no longer developing. salute!

"recently"?!

Drudge unplugged: How his campaign influence has collapsed

Because it's obvious that since Wall Street's meltdown commenced five weeks ago, and since America's economic crisis became a tsunami of a news story that's not only dominated the media landscape, but also irrevocably altered the course of the campaign, the Drudge Report has become largely irrelevant in terms of the setting the news agenda for the White House run.

That's because a story like the unfolding credit crisis -- sober and complicated -- knocks Drudge completely out of his element of frivolous, partisan gotcha links.

Think about it. Since Monday, September 15, when word of emergency government intervention to save the economy began to spread, the presidential race, according to all the available data, has gone through a dramatic fourth-quarter shift, with Barack Obama opening up a comfortable lead. We haven't seen this kind of wholesale shift in voter sentiment this late in a White House campaign since 1980.

The race is unrecognizable in terms of where the players are situated now and where they were five weeks ago. (Between September 15 and October 19, there was a 12-point swing in the Gallup daily tracking poll.) Now ask yourself: What role has the Drudge Report played in that burst of campaign movement? The answer, of course, is zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. His trademark flashing red lights have gone missing.

Followup interview

GG: Okay. Let me ask you about that theory. I think it's unquestionably true that Drudge's ability to shape the media narrative has been substantially diminished this election cycle. I don't think there's any doubt about that. But I want to challenge a little bit both the reasons why in terms of what you cited, as well as the time frame.

First of all, I don't think it's entirely true, as I think you're suggesting, that ever since the economic meltdown, that our election coverage has become focused on really weighty and substantive matters at the expense of kind of horse race and gossipy items in which Drudge traffics. For a few days, when it looked like we might fall off the precipice of economic stability, that was the case, but over the last, say, 10 days, two weeks, and certainly even before that, when there's a perception that things have at least settled down, that economic doom doesn't lurk right around the corner, I think the media coverage has largely focused on the kind of horse race chatter that typically dominates - and that's certainly what Drudge has attempting to influence the most.

As you point out, his efforts have been devoted - kind of pathetically - to manufacturing this narrative that McCain is involved in a comeback, that polls are showing that the race is substantially tightening, that Obama's lead is slipping away, and that just never resonated at all. But that's not because the Mike Allens and Politicos and Mark Halperins of the world are focused on analysing debt swapping proposals, but because, for whatever reason, it's just not impacting what it is that they're doing. Why isn't he having a greater effect, even on the kind of petty chatter that our media stars love to traffic in?

EB: That's a good question, and I think you're right in that I don't think the last five weeks have been sort of the re-emergence of the golden age of campaign journalism. It's still tactics, tactics, tactics. It's still polls; we went through the debate chatter, which was sort of theater criticism. So I think you're right, campaign journalism - it's still what it always is, which is sort of entertainment and tactics. But, that said, there has been a reluctance to grab on to this bait that Drudge throws out there. He went huge into the ACORN story - just a constant barrage of headlines, about voter fraud, and things like that. And the press, in these cases, both with ACORN and with the comeback, the facts just weren't there to substantiate any larger controversy. I think the press looked at the polling, I think the press looked at ACORN - some did better jobs than others - but there just wasn't anything there to manufacture a controversy.

I just think, probably what also happened is that Obama did open such a wide lead that that probably has also helped build up his defense in terms of what the press is willing to do in terms of Drudge stuff, in terms of GOP set attacks. John Kerry never had that benefit in 2004, and I think there was still sort of the whiff of a loser around John Kerry, and I think that drives a lot of what the press does. There's certainly none of that around Obama, so there's reluctance I think to fall for this GOP attack.

But you're right, journalism itself is still quite shallow, campaign journalism, but Drudge has been unable to turn any of the narratives the way he did. Look, it's amazing - 2004, he almost single-handedly, I think, drove the Swiftboat story into the mainstream, and absolutely dominated that narrative for weeks. And if you look at 2008, he's sort of been reduced to a sideline role.

He keeps running photos of people touching Obama in large crowds, and the subtext seems to be to show how vulnerable O is to assassinatino.

dom assassinatino

"That's not true. I am a conservative. I'm very much pro-life. If you go down the list of what makes up a conservative, I'm there almost all the way. So just because I like Junior Vasquez doesn't mean I can't believe this country was built on life, not on a death culture."

Hold on. Junior Vasquez? Junior Vasquez, the reigning DJ king of gay circuit parties?

"Oh yeah, last year Vasquez did some of his best stuff ever," Drudge enthuses.

Republican bloggers are such pathetic losers, I'm going to enjoy the next four years tremendously

http://i44.tinypic.com/n7wuf.png

Is Drudge's Influence Declining?

Let's hope so.

http://i48.tinypic.com/1z1dxj7.jpg

observing ridiculous drudge ads is pretty low on the totem pole of observational humor, but still.

http://www.drudgereport.com/ow2.jpg

http://www.drudgereport.com/ow.jpghttp://www.drudgereport.com/ow2.jpg

what in all possibly fucks

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/28/drudge-siren.gifhttp://botropolis.com/wp-content/uploads/obtr.gifhttp://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/28/drudge-siren.gif

http://www.drudgereport.com/i/logo9.gif

I love the link today to Alex Jones' movie review, claiming that "Machete" is intended to incite a race war.

headlines are always biased, but i fuckin love the website. in fact its my homepage.

How Drudge Has Stayed on Top

For most big news Web sites, about 60 percent of the traffic is homegrown, people who come directly to the site by dint of a bookmark or typing in www.latimes.com or www.huffingtonpost.com. The other critical 40 percent comes by referrals, the links that are the source of drive-by traffic, new readers and heat-seekers on a particular story.

By far, most of the traffic from links comes from the sprawling hybrid of Google search and news, which provides about 30 percent of the visits to news sites, according to a report released last week by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of the Pew Research Center. And the second? Has to be Facebook, right? Nope. Then Twitter must be the next in line. Except it isn’t.

Give up? It’s The Drudge Report, a 14-year-old site — a relic by Web standards — conceived and operated by Matt Drudge. Using data from the Nielsen Company to examine the top 21 news sites on the Web, the report suggests that Mr. Drudge, once thought of as a hothouse flower of the Lewinsky scandal, is now more powerful in driving news than the half-billion folks on Facebook. (According to the study, Facebook accounted for 3.3 percent of the referrals to news sites, less than half as many as generated by The Drudge Report.)

“When you look at his influence, it cuts across all kind of sites, both traditional news outlets and online-only sites,” said Amy S. Mitchell, the deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism and one of the authors of the study. “He was an early and powerful force in setting the news agenda and has somehow maintained that even as there has been a great deal of change in the way people get their news.”

With no video, no search optimization, no slide shows, and a design that is right out of mid-’90s manual on HTML, The Drudge Report provides 7 percent of the inbound referrals to the top news sites in the country. “It’s a real achievement,” said John F. Harris, the co-founder of Politico. “I covered the Clinton White House in 1997 and 1998 and I would never have conceived that he would be an important player in the landscape 12 years later. He does one thing and he does it particularly well. The power of it comes from the community of people that read it: operatives, bookers, reporters, producers and politicians.”

I miss the days when drudgereport would launch popunders every minute or so

Let's count down to Glenn Greenwald's response!

http://adage.com/article/news/drudge-grinch-ruined-christmas-tree-farmers/230968/

Er

http://gawker.com/5936514/is-matt-drudge-stalking-an-israeli-dj-on-twitter

http://i.imgur.com/xmecy.png

Man misunderstands concept of assigning names to dancing styles...

VIDEO: Stranded New Yorkers Defecating in Apartment Buildings...

When did he become a cowboy i thought he was a private investigator

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/378800000450631697/231ec56b5832fac8fa9b4c8eb9a28845.jpeg

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/28/drudge-siren.gifhttp://kgen2001.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/man-farting.gif?w=590http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/28/drudge-siren.gif

classic, for the record

http://www.youtube.com/watch?t=2757&v=hxbvYWKhX48

This gets way into the weeds...but is strangely fascinating

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/matt-drudge-logs-off

the ellipses that occur at the end of drudgereport headlines are so judgemental and foreboding