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Drudge Report

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A typical day at the Drudge Report.

The Drudge Report is a popular conservative oriented 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 various current events, and to many popular columnists, although occasionally Drudge authors a story of his own. The Report originated around 1994 as a weekly subscriber-based email dispatch. Today, the Drudge Report resembles a simple weblog, though Drudge himself dislikes this classification. Since there is little or no commentary to the page, a more accurate description of the Drudge Report would be "portal" rather than blog. The Drudge Report is most famous for being the first entity to break news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the public.

Drudge styles himself as a maverick newsman without corporate bosses, demanding advertisers, or editors to influence his Report. Critics regard him as either careless, reckless, or malicious with stories that are sometimes inaccurate or heavily biased. He has been criticized by various media news personalities such as Dan Rather who called the Report a "rumor mill" [1], Bill O'Reilly who twice called Drudge a "threat to democracy" [2], and Keith Olbermann who referred to him as "an idiot with a modem" [3].

Origins

Drudge began publishing his email-based Report from an apartment in Hollywood, California. Today, he maintains the popular news website from a condominium in Miami Beach, Florida. Drudge, who once managed a CBS gift shop where he was privy to some insider gossip, uses connections with industry and media insiders to break stories sometimes before they hit the mainstream media. Drudge's reports were electronically syndicated by Wired News from November 1996 to May 1997. After that, AOL carried his reports until 1998. He began his website in 1997 as a supplement to the email reports. He eventually stopped the email reports in favor of exclusively updating his website.

The Internet Archive "Wayback Machine" shows that the Drudge Report website had its debut on December 6, 1998. It is unclear exactly when Drudge began publishing non-web reports. On April 2, 2004, he splashed a headline on his site which read "Drudge Report Turns Nine Years Old". [4] In a Usenet post from that month, Drudge advertised his Report as covering

"the Entertainment industry, Poli-Video shows (political talk shows,) Talk Radio, and a cross section of things that the editor Matt Drudge is focusing in on. This weekly report arrives on Monday and is complimented (sic) with NEWS BREAKS as they occur. Already read by key players, this tip sheet will be sure to peak (sic) your interest." [5]

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. [6] After Drudge's report, Newsweek published the story. In addition, Drudge was the first to announce Connie Chung's departure from CBS News[citation needed], Jerry Seinfeld's million dollar contract[citation needed], and John McCain's notifying his staff that he had decided to run for president in 2000[citation needed].

Content

Drudge's 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 website is filled with 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 also hosted on other news agencies' servers. Drudge has argued that he is within his rights under fair use to include tags referring to these images without permission.

The Drudge Report website sometimes includes stories authored by Drudge himself, usually two to three paragraphs in length, and almost always with a strong conservative slant (a holdover from the previous email-only reports). 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.

In a 2003 interview in Radar magazine with Camille Paglia, Drudge said of his story selection:

"I just post the things I find interesting. I can't remember the last time I actually read a full-blown article, you know. Usually I just scan the first two paragraphs and the last two paragraphs... It comes down to an editorial decision that I make every second that I'm sitting in front of the monitors. If you're not careful you can fill up people's minds with stories that go nowhere." [7]

Drudge reportedly makes a significant income from running the website. In 2003, Business 2.0 estimated his income at $3,500 a day, or about 1.3 million a year.[8] His overhead is almost nonexistent compared to regular news outlets; his only significant expenses are server hosting costs. The site reportedly receives 8–10 million page views per day, seeing no growth since the early 2000s [9]. Critics have pointed out that a large percentage of these page views are due to the site reloading itself every few minutes while a reader's Web browser is pointed to the page. Currently, as of 2006, the DrudgeReport uses a meta refresh tag to reload itself every 200 seconds.

Criticism

Critics argue that the only stories Drudge actually breaks are completely conceived, researched, funded, and written by other reporters. In 1998, Federal Judge Paul Friedman noted in a judgment on a libel lawsuit, which ended in Drudge's favor, that Drudge is not a "reporter, a journalist, or a newsgatherer" (this case is covered in more detail below). Many times, Drudge Report will feature a headline with a link back to Drudge. However, most claims are eventually confirmed with an article link to the website of a traditional news outlet.

Charges of bias

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The Drudge Report has been accused of editorializing with photo selection. Above is pictured Cindy Sheehan.
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The Drudge Report has been accused of editorializing with photo selection. Above is pictured John Roberts.
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Drudge has been accused of editorializing through the juxtaposition of arguably unrelated linked stories. Above is a sequence of links from a May 27, 2006 issue. Below is a sequence of links from a May 31, 2006 issue.
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During the 1990s, the Drudge Report gained a strong conservative following for Drudge's heavy coverage of alleged scandals during President Bill Clinton's administration. He has cultivated this following by often highlighting stories that appeal to conservatives, praise prominent conservatives, or criticize prominent liberals. This has led some critics to call him a mouthpiece of the conservative establishment in the United States.

Drudge's politics are considered to be neo-conservative. Some critics argue, for example, that he has not been as aggressive in pursuing potential scandals during the George W. Bush administration as during the Clinton administration. Nevertheless, Drudge has repeatedly attempted to distance himself from establishment conservatives, arguing that his politics more accurately reflect libertarianism. For example, he is often critical of the Federal Communications Commission's regulation of indecency, the USA PATRIOT Act, the prevalence of hidden cameras in public places, of an increased and visible presence of police, and of attempts to limit online file-sharing.

Drudge's defenders often reference the fact that he writes very few articles, generally only supplying links to the work of others. However, his detractors counter that he editorializes by juxtaposing a headline with a loosely-related image. Examples suggested by some include the following: On Wednesday, July 28, 2004, the Drudge Report featured the headline: "Edwards to Call Kerry 'Decisive, Strong,'" with a picture of a young woman in a tight tank top, and the slogan "John Edwards is Hot" placed above.

Drudge has also been accused of editorializing through headlines alone. To wit: Linking to a story about a speech made in Sweden by one-time presidential nominee Al Gore, Drudge offered this headline on October 13, 2005: "Gore Unleashed In Sweden" [10]

When linking to articles in generally liberal publications – e.g. The New York Times and The Washington Post – the links go to those sites' "printer-friendly" (and ad-free) pages, increasing traffic to those sites without the benefit of potential ad revenue. However, links to conservative publications such as The Washington Times go to the full-(ad-)featured pages.

Notwithstanding these charges, a [11] 2004 study [12] on media bias (titled A Measure of Media Bias) led by Tim Groseclose, of UCLA and Stanford, and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago found the Drudge Report to be among the most centrist news outlets in their sample.

Errors at the Report

Matt Drudge has been erroneously quoted as saying the Report is 80 percent accurate. The attribution stems from Drudge's most famous incident of erroneous reporting, which occurred on August 10, 1997 when Drudge published a report saying that incoming White House assistant Sidney Blumenthal beat his wife and was covering it up. Drudge retracted the story the next day, saying he was given bad information, but Blumenthal filed a $30 million libel lawsuit against Drudge. [13] Drudge told Salon magazine that "I seemed to have about 80 percent of the facts" about the Blumenthal report. [14] [15] This quote has since been applied, fairly or not, to all of Drudge's work. The libel suit was settled in 2001 when Blumenthal agreed to drop the charges if Drudge did not file counter-charges. The case lasted for so long because the burden of proof was on Blumenthal to show that Drudge had actual malice in printing the false report. [16] Drudge's legal defense was largely funded by the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

The "80 percent" meme has been fueled by further articles and rumors in the Report that have been revealed to be completely wrong or unsubstantiated. The Report was the source of a sensational rumor (a "World Exclusive") in February 2004, about presidential candidate John Kerry, alleging that he had an affair with a young intern named Alexandra Polier. [17] The woman, who in fact was never an intern for Kerry, denied the claim. In June 2004, Drudge apologized for the story, saying "In retrospect, I should have had a sentence saying, 'There is no evidence to tie Alex to John Kerry.' I should have put that." [18]. Yet the story remained available on his website (though de-linked) up to a year after its publication. (The full text of the original reports are available at DrudgeReportArchives.com [19] [20]; DrudgeReportArchives.com is not affiliated with the Drudge Report.)

A later erroneous report emerged in the 2004 US presidential campaign, one week before Senator Kerry announced his selection of Senator John Edwards as his vice presidential running mate. The Report headlined a prediction from a "top D.C. insider" saying that Senator Kerry would be announcing Senator Hillary Clinton as his running mate, declaring it to mark the beginning of a "massive love fest." [21] The story was de-linked one day later. After Edward's selection, Drudge removed all "VP Hillary" coverage without comment; the correction or outright removal of false content published at the Report is usually handled in similar no-comment fashion.

On May 22, 2006, the Drudge Report linked to a story on a website called WTF-TV[22], which claimed that baseball player Barry Bonds had vowed to break Sadaharu Oh's world record of 868 home runs, while also making disparaging remarks about Hank Aaron.[23] The WTF-TV site's design was modeled after that of a typical TV news station, and a banner at the top claimed that WTF-TV was the "Las Vegas news leader". In fact, the site was a prank, used by its makers to test the research and ethical standards of mainstream news outlets. A page linked from the site's "About Us" page, explicitly describes the nature of the fraud, stating, "Little pranks such as these are what we call our 'carpet pulls' - they're set-ups that let us know exactly what stories are being flat-out stolen and reported as true news and where the theft is starting. And if this story doesn't break out, it means we're doing our jobs right. Journalists are getting less sloppy. Sources are starting to be checked. And that can't help but benefit us ALL."[24]

Because the Drudge Report is not part of the mainstream media and is published electronically, and not in print, such inaccuracies and errors are often forgotten. Archives of older reports are generally not easy to find, and Drudge does not systematically archive any of his reports. 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 purportedly has taken and stored snapshots of the Drudge Report homepage every two minutes since mid-November 2001.

Traffic

In the year of 2005, Drudge reported 3,641,002,163 visits to his website, however the methodology behind what is counted as a visit has not been made public.

Alexa reports that of every 1,000,000 page views online, approximately 100 are of the Drudge Report; in other words, it is 0.01% of all page views. [25] Alexa also shows that for every 1 million people online each day, between 4,000 and 6,000 visit the Drudge Report (approximately 1 in 200 web users). The Drudge Report's height of popularity (as of 2006) was during the 2004 U.S. presidential election. [26]

Parody sites

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