The Drudge Report is a popular U.S.-based news and gossip website run by Matt Drudge. The site consists primarily of links to stories from the mainstream media about politics, entertainment, and various current events, and to many popular columnists, although Drudge occasionally authors a story of his own. The Report originated around 1994 as a weekly subscriber-based email dispatch. Today, the Drudge Report resembles a primitive weblog, though Drudge himself dislikes this classification.

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", Bill O'Reilly who called Drudge a "threat to democracy", and Keith Olbermann who referred to him as "an idiot with a modem".

Contents

1 Origins 2 Content 3 Criticism 3.1 Charges of bias 3.2 Errors at the Report 4 External links

Origins

Drudge began publishing his email-based Report on a 486 computer from an apartment in Hollywood, California. Today, Drudge maintains his website from his condominium in Miami, Florida along with his longtime friend and associate Andrew Breitbart based in Los Angeles. 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.

It is unclear exactly when Drudge began publishing his reports. On April 2, 2004, he splashed a headline on his site which read "Drudge Report Turns Nine Years Old". [1] However, in his book, Drudge Manifesto, he writes that the Drudge Report debuted in "winter 1994", and the oldest archived email reports date to March 1995. 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 with NEWS BREAKS as they occur. Already read by key players, this tip sheet will be sure to peak (sic) your interest." [2]

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. [3] After Drudge's report, Newsweek published the story. In addition, Drudge was the first to announce Connie Chung's departure from CBS News, Jerry Seinfeld's million dollar contract, and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Content

Drudge's website is fairly simple in structure, 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. The minimalist site originally featured few images, but this has increased over time. 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 (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." [4]

Drudge reportedly makes a significant income from running the website. By placing banner advertisements on the website (over which he says he has no editorial control), he has indicated that he makes over $1 million per year. His overhead is almost nonexistent compared to regular news outlets; his only significant expenses are server hosting costs. The site regularly receives 8-10 million page views per day, a number which has steadily increased in the early 2000s.

Criticism

Critics argue that Drudge's contribution to journalism is questionable, saying that the only stories he 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". (More on this case below.) Drudge's most famous achievement, the breaking of the Monica Lewinsky story, offended editors because by publishing details of the story, Drudge essentially made an editorial decision that overrode Newsweek's.

Charges of bias

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 (or of the "vast right-wing conspiracy").

To many, Drudge's politics are considered to be unabashedly 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 and of attempts to limit online file-sharing.

Though Drudge is often defended on the grounds that he writes very few articles, generally only supplying links to the work of others, his editorializing frequently occurs in the form of the juxtaposition of a headline with an unrelated image. On Wednesday, July 28, 2004, the Drudge Report featured the headline: "Edwards to Call Kerry 'Decisive, Strong.'" Above this headline was a picture of a young woman in a tight tank top, featuring the logo "John Edwards is Hot."

Notwithstanding these charges, a study 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 the most centrist news outlet in their sample. [5]

Errors at the Report

Matt Drudge has been variously (mis)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. [6] Drudge told Salon magazine that "I seemed to have about 80 percent of the facts" about the Blumenthal report. [7] 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 had actual malice in printing the false report. [8] Drudge's legal defense was largely funded by the libertarian Center for the Study of Popular Culture .

The "80 percent" meme has been fueled by further articles and rumors in the Report occasionally 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. [9] The woman, who in fact was never an intern for Kerry, denied the claim, and the rumor has now been thoroughly repudiated. The story was never carried by any mainstream media, and Drudge has not meaningfully addressed it since its publication, although the story remained available on his website (though de-linked) up to a year after its publication. However, the full text of the original reports are available at DrudgeReportArchives.com [10] [11]; DrudgeReportArchives.com is not affiliated with the Drudge Report.

A later erroneous report emerged in the 2004 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." [12] 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.

Despite instances of unreliability, the Drudge Report profits from the nature of its electronic medium. 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 a third party (the Drudge Report Archives), which has taken snapshots every two minutes since mid-November 2001.

External links

• Drudge Report
• Drudge Report Archives (since Nov. 2001)
• Archives of the Drudge Report at The Internet Archive (less comprehensive than DrudgeReportArchives.com, but dates back to Dec. 1998)
• Early Drudge Report dispatches from 1995-97 (from Google Groups)
• Matt Drudge articles at Media Matters for America
• The Secrets of Drudge, Inc., by Geoff Keighley, Business 2.0, April 2003
• Linking news sites, Matt Drudge creates an Internet success, by Richard Pachter, The Miami Herald, September 1, 2003
• Disinfopedia article on Matt Drudge
• The Drudge Retort, a parody site run by author Rogers Cadenhead .