Drudge Report

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Drudge Report
URL drudgereport.com
Type of site News
Available language(s) English
Owner Matt Drudge
Created by Matt Drudge
Launched 1994
Revenue $800,000[1]
Current status Active

The Drudge Report is a U.S.-based news aggregation 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 news stories himself. 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.[2]

Contents

[edit] 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 [3]. 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.[4][5] After Drudge's report, Newsweek published the story.[6]

[edit] Content

The Drudge Report site sometimes includes stories written by Drudge himself — usually two to three paragraphs in length. These stories generally first publish a rumor concerning a story that is about to be published 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.

[edit] 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 although Drudge does occasionally use some images, generally those he personally edits, that are hosted on his own server. Some Web designers have criticized Drudge Report as exemplifyling Web 1.0 aesthetics.[attribution needed] As such, it has since garnered a hipster vintage appeal.

Image:Drudge-report.png
Example screenshot of the Drudge Report front page.

[edit] 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."[7] In The Way To Win, a book written by Halperin and John Harris, Drudge is called "the Walter Cronkite of his era."[8][7] Democratic Party 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.[7] </blockquote> Matt Drudge has been criticized by other media news personalities: Bill O'Reilly who twice called Drudge a "threat to democracy",[9] and Keith Olbermann who referred to Drudge as "an idiot with a modem".[10]

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."[11] 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[3].

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%.[12]

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.[13]

[edit] 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.[14]

[edit] 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[15] which concluded—based on a comparison of articles linked to by Drudge with Congressional voting records—that the Drudge Report leans "left and sometimes right" of center, compared to the average American voter."[16] 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,[17] contends that the results were based on a flawed methodology;[18][19] according to Media Matters for America, a liberal political action group dedicated to "correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media",[20] “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.”[21]

[edit] 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.[22] 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."[23][24]

[edit] Errors

[edit] 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."[25][26][27][28] 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."[29]

[edit] 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.[30]

[edit] 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.[31]

[edit] 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.[32] Drudge reported that

Template:Cquote2

Ware 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.[33] Video hosted by Rawstory shows that Ware did not make a sound nor ask any question during the press conference.[34][33][35] 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.[36]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Keighley, Geoff (2003-04-01). The Secrets of Drudge Inc. How to set up a round-the-clock news site on a shoestring, bring in $3,500 a day, and still have time to lounge on the beach.. CNNMoney.com. Retrieved on 2006-10-01.
  2. ^ Scandalous scoop breaks online (html). BBC News (1998-01-25). Retrieved on 2007-06-23.
  3. ↑ a b Template:Cite news
  4. ^ Drudge, Matt (1998-01-17). Newsweek Kills Story On White House Intern. The Drudge Report. Retrieved on 2006-10-05.
  5. ^ Template:Cite news
  6. ^ Template:Cite news
  7. ↑ a b c Template:Cite news
  8. ^ Halpernin, Mark; John F. Harris (2006). The Way To Win. Random House. ISBN 1-4000-6447-3. 
  9. ^ Drudge, Matt (2003-12-18). Host Unhinged After Sales Figures Revealed; Calls DRUDGE 'Threat To Democracy'. Drudge Report. Retrieved on 2007-03-26.
  10. ^ Template:Cite news
  11. ^ Hirschman, David S. (2006-10-06). 'Wash Post' Editor Downie: Everyone in Our Newsroom Wants to Be a Blogger. Editor & Publisher. Retrieved on 2006-10-08. (Convenience link).
  12. ^ Alexa "The Drudge Report" Traffic Graph (html). Alexa (2007). Retrieved on 2007-07-29.
  13. ^ Philip Weiss (2007). Watching Matt Drudge (html). New York Magazine. Retrieved on 2007-08-31.
  14. ^ Drudge Report Archives. Drudgereportarchives.com. Retrieved on 2006-10-05.
  15. ^ Template:Cite paper
  16. ^ Sullivan, Meg (2005-12-14). Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist. UCLA News. Retrieved on 2006-10-04.
  17. ^ LDC staff. Linguistics Data Consortium. Retrieved on 2007-04-02
  18. ^ Liberman, Mark (2005-12-23). Multiplying ideologies considered harmful. Language Log. Retrieved on 2006-11-06.
  19. ^ Liberman, Mark (2005-12-22). Linguistics, politics, mathematics. Language Log. Retrieved on 2006-11-06.
  20. ^ Template:Cite news
  21. ^ Template:Cite news
  22. ^ Joel Connelly (2007). Deniers of global warming harm us (html). Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Retrieved on 2007-07-29.
  23. ^ [1]Oscars Podcast by Matt Drudge, includes comments on Global Warming
  24. ^ Drudge Radio Archives (html/mp3) (2007). Retrieved on 2007-02-28.
  25. ^ Template:Cite news
  26. ^ Template:Cite news
  27. ^ Drudge, Matt (2001-05-01). May Day: Lawsuit Against Drudge Dropped; Blumenthal Pays Cash To Get Out!. Drudge Report. Retrieved on 2006-12-15.
  28. ^ Tim McDonald (2001). Online Matt Drudge Libel Suit Comes to 'Wimpy Conclusion' (html). Newsfactor.com. Retrieved on 2007-07-30.
  29. ^ BLUMENTHAL vs DRUDGE (html). Tech Law Journal (1998). Retrieved on 2006-12-18.
  30. ^ Polier, Alexandra (2004-06-07). John Kerry intern scandal - Alexandra Polier's account. New York Magazine. Retrieved on 2004-06-07.
  31. ^ Special Reports Personal Collection. Drudge Report Archives. Retrieved on 2007-04-02
  32. ^ Template:Cite news
  33. ↑ a b Template:Cite news
  34. ^ Template:Cite news
  35. ^ CNN's Ware fires back at Drudge report about 'heckling', USA Today April 2, 2007
  36. ^ UPDATE: CNN's Ware flatly denies report that he "heckled" McCain, but right-wing media flog it anyway (html). Media Matters (2007-04-02). Retrieved on 2007-08-09.

[edit] External links

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