The '''Drudge Report''' is a U.S.-based news
website run by
Matt Drudge. The site consists primarily of links to stories from the US and international
mainstream media about politics, entertainment, and current events as well as links to many popular columnists. Occasionally Drudge authors a story of his own. The ''Report'' originated around 1994 as a weekly subscriber-based
email dispatch. It is most famous for being the first news source to break the
Monica Lewinsky scandal to the public after
Newsweek killed the story.
[1]
Origins
Drudge began publishing his email-based ''Report'' from an apartment in
Hollywood, California, using his connections with industry and media insiders to break stories sometimes before they hit the mainstream media. He now maintains the website from his home in
Miami Beach, Florida, with assistance from
Andrew Breitbart, who assists in story selection and headline writing
[ Hot links served up daily Joel Sappell ]. Drudge's reports were electronically syndicated by
Wired News from November 1996 to May 1997;
AOL carried his reports until 1998. He began his website in 1997 as a supplement to the email reports but eventually stopped the email reports in favor of exclusively updating his website.
Drudge first received national attention in 1996 when he broke the news that
Jack Kemp would be Republican
Bob Dole's running mate in the
1996 presidential election. In 1998, Drudge again made national waves when he broke the news that ''
Newsweek'' magazine had information on an inappropriate relationship between "a White House intern" and President
Bill Clinton (the ''
Monica Lewinsky scandal''), but was withholding publication.
[2][3] After Drudge's report, ''Newsweek'' published the story.
[4]
Content
The ''Drudge Report'' site sometimes includes stories authored by Drudge himself — usually two to three paragraphs in length. These stories generally break a rumor concerning a story that is about to break in a major magazine or newspaper. Drudge also occasionally publishes
Nielsen,
Arbitron, or
BookScan ratings, internal email messages, or early election
exit polls that are otherwise not made available to the public.
Design
The
website has a simple
design, consisting of a banner headline and a number of other selected headlines in three columns. These linked stories are almost always hosted on the external websites of mainstream media outlets. The rest of the site contains links to media outlets and a number of columnists. Although the site initially featured very few images, it is now usually illustrated with five or six photographs. Generally the images are similarly
hotlinked from other news agencies' servers.
Example screenshot of the ''Drudge Report'' front page.
Influence
According to
Mark Halperin, "Drudge's coverage affects the media's political coverage", effectively steering the media's political coverage towards what Halperin calls "the most salacious aspects of American politics."
In ''The Way To Win'', a book written by Halperin and
John Harris, Drudge is called "the
Walter Cronkite of his era."
[5] strategist Chris Lehane says "phones start ringing" whenever Drudge breaks a story and Mark McKinnon, a former media advisor to
George W. Bush says he checks the site 30–40 times per day.
[6] Matt Drudge has been criticized by other media news personalities:
Bill O'Reilly who twice called Drudge a "threat to democracy",
[7] and
Keith Olbermann who referred to Drudge as "an idiot with a modem".
[8]
In October, 2006,
Washington Post editor
Leonard Downie, Jr., speaking at the
Online News Association's annual convention in
Washington, D.C., stated "Our largest driver of traffic is Matt Drudge."
[9] Nielsen NetRatings reports approximately 3 million visitors per month, with visitors spending an average of 66 minutes on the site, with as many as one thousand advertisers at one time
.
Alexa Internet shows that traffic (expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site) to the ''Drudge Report'' website has diminished from a high in early 2004 of 1.3% to a low in mid-2007 of less than 0.2%.
[10]
According to the online advertising company linked to his site, the ''Drudge Report'' audience is 78 percent male, 60 percent Republican, and 8 percent Democratic.
[11]
Archives
Archives of older reports are generally not easy to find. A number of reports from 1995 to early 1997 are available in the
Usenet archive provided by
Google Groups. A more extensive archive of the website is provided by Drudge Report Archives, which has archives since mid-November 2001 and says it takes and stores snapshots of the Drudge Report homepage every two minutes.
[12]
Charges of bias
UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo, Associate Professor, Department of Economics and the
Harry S Truman School of
Public Affairs at the
University of Missouri–Columbia, published a paper on media bias in December 2004
[13] which concluded—based on a comparison of articles linked to by Drudge with Congressional voting records—that the Drudge Report leans "left" of center, compared to the average American voter."
[14] The authors ascribe this seemingly anomalous result to the study's design, based as it is on links to other news sources, rather than the handful of news stories written by Drudge himself.
Mark Liberman, Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Linguistic Data Consortium at the
University of Pennsylvania,
[15] contends that the results were based on a flawed methodology;
[16][17] according to
Media Matters for America, a media watchdog group dedicated to "correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media",
[18] “Groseclose and Milyo are former fellows of conservative organizations…†and “…the study employed a measure of ‘bias’ so problematic that its findings are next to useless.â€
[19]
Views on global warming
Drudge has faced criticism for his skeptical view of
global warming, seen in his highlighting of winter cold snaps and freak snowstorms in warm places.
[20] On February 25, 2007, he stated during his radio broadcast that
global warming is "faux science" and that "the greening of our population, the falling for the science ... is making me nervous."
[21][22]
Errors
Sidney Blumenthal lawsuit
In 1997, the Drudge Report reported that incoming White House assistant
Sidney Blumenthal beat his wife and was covering it up. Drudge retracted the story the next day and apologized, saying he was given bad information, but Blumenthal filed a $30 million libel lawsuit against Drudge. After four years, Blumenthal dropped his lawsuit. Blumenthal said the suit had cost him tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. He agreed to pay $2,500 to Drudge's Los Angeles attorney for travel costs, noting that Drudge was "backed by unlimited funds from political supporters who use a tax-exempt foundation."
[23][24][25][26] The ''Individual Rights Foundation'', led by
David Horowitz, paid Drudge's legal fees in the Blumenthal lawsuit. A federal judge noted in the judgment that Drudge "is not a reporter, a journalist, or a newsgatherer. He is, as he admits himself, simply a purveyor of gossip."
[27]
John Kerry's alleged intern scandal
Similarly, during the
2004 Presidential campaign, Drudge ran a story quoting General
Wesley Clark, where Clark claimed that the
John Kerry campaign would implode over an intern affair; and he reported that other news outlets were investigating the alleged affair; Drudge removed it from the site shortly thereafter when the other news outlets dropped the investigations.
[28]
Bill Clinton's alleged illegitimate baby
In 1999, the Drudge Report announced that it had viewed a videotape which was the basis of a
Star Magazine and
Hard Copy story. Under the headline, '"Woman Names Bill Clinton Father Of Son In Shocking Video Confession"', Drudge reported of a videotaped confession by a former prostitute who claimed that her son was fathered by
President Bill Clinton. The Report stated, "To accuse the most powerful man in the world of being the father of her son is either the hoax of a lifetime, or a personal turmoil that needs resolution. Only two people may know that answer tonight." The claim turned out to be a hoax, although Drudge's story and headline were technically accurate.
[29]
CNN reporter's alleged heckling of GOP senators
Another error occurred on
April 1 2007 when Drudge cited an unnamed "official" source saying that
CNN reporter
Michael Ware had "heckled" Republican Senators McCain and Graham during a live press conference.
[30] Drudge reported that
Ware, most known for calling the
Iraq War a "slow-motion train wreck", disputed Drudge's report on CNN
April 2 2007, saying that the story was leaked "by an unnamed official of some kind to a blog", that the story was anonymous, and that no one was willing to put their name to it; he advised people to view the tape.
[31] Video hosted by
Rawstory shows that Ware did not make a sound nor ask any question during the press conference.
[32] The Drudge Report did not retract or apologise for the story. Drudge's report was echoed in
The Washington Times, which carried opinion questioning Ware's trustworthiness, and in many conservative blogs, some of which called for Ware's resignation.
[34]
Notes
1.
2. Newsweek Kills Story On White House Intern
3. Newsweek got, held scoop on Clinton story Glen Johnson
4. Sex, Lies and the President Howard Fineman
5. The Way To Win, , Mark, Halpernin, Random House, , ISBN 1-4000-6447-3
6. Drudge Report Sets Tone for National Political Coverage
7. Host Unhinged After Sales Figures Revealed; Calls DRUDGE 'Threat To Democracy'
8. MSNBC Pundit Rises With Clinton Crises Howard Kurtz
9. 'Wash Post' Editor Downie: Everyone in Our Newsroom Wants to Be a Blogger (Convenience link).
10.
11.
12. Drudge Report Archives
13.
14. Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist
15. LDC staff. Linguistics Data Consortium. Retrieved on 2007-04-02
16. Multiplying ideologies considered harmful
17. Linguistics, politics, mathematics
18. Media Matters - Our Mission - Who We Are
19. Former fellows at conservative think tanks issued flawed UCLA-led study on media's liberal bias
20.
21. [1]Oscars Podcast by Matt Drudge, includes comments on Global Warming
22.
23. Blumenthal Pays ,500 To Settle Drudge Suit
24. Clinton Aide Settles Libel Suit Against Matt Drudge -- at a Cost Howard Kurtz
25. May Day: Lawsuit Against Drudge Dropped; Blumenthal Pays Cash To Get Out!
26.
27.
28. John Kerry intern scandal - Alexandra Polier's account
29. Special Reports Personal Collection. Drudge Report Archives. Retrieved on 2007-04-02
30. McCain heckled by CNN reporter Matt Drudge
31. CNN's Ware flatly denies report that he "heckled" McCain, but right-wing media flog it anyway
32. CNN reporter slams Drudge's charge that he 'heckled' McCain; Exclusive video confirms his claim
33. CNN's Ware fires back at Drudge report about 'heckling', ''USA Today'' April 2, 2007
34.
External links
★
Drudge Report
★
Drudge Report Archives (since Nov. 2001)
★
Drudge Radio Archives & Podcast - MP3 archive and podcast of Matt Drudge's Sunday evening radio show
★
★ class=wikiexternal target=_blank>/http://drudgereport.com Archives of the Drudge Report at The Internet Archive (less comprehensive than DrudgeReportArchives.com, but dates back to Dec. 1998)
★
Early history of the Drudge Report
★
Drudge Report RSS Feed
★
Drudge Siren - Another Drudge RSS feed
★
DrudgeReport brings PinkNews.co.uk to its knees Article explaining the impact of a link on Drudge Report
★
Matt Drudge articles at Media Matters for America
★
Linking news sites, Matt Drudge creates an Internet success, by Richard Pachter, ''The Miami Herald'', September 1, 2003
★
The Secrets of Drudge Inc By Geoff Keighley
★
''Blumenthal v. Drudge'' Opinion by Judge Paul Friedman
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