Drudge Report

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And you would be amazed what the ordinary guy knows...every citizen can be a reporter.
—Matt Drudge, explaining why modern journalism has gone to crap.

The Drudge Report is a tabloid website which hit the big time breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It is the work of Matt Drudge, who worked at 7-11, McDonalds, and the CBS Studios gift shop before finding his calling as an Internet gossip. He also "wrote" (not really; much of it is verbatim reprints of emails to Drudge, chat transcripts, National Press Club transcripts, pages of nothing but 0s or 1s, and quotes) a book of stream-of-consciousness drivel and assorted filler, the Drudge Manifesto, which sold a lot of copies to the same sort of smarmy people who think the Cluetrain Manifesto and The Cathedral and the Bazaar are profound and cutting edge.

The Drudge Report has not been particularly notable for anything since except as a driver of Internet traffic to other websites and having web design straight out of 1995. Drudge's usual style is to link to ordinary news items using sensationalist and often misleading headlines. A link from Drudge usually results in the article's comments section turning into a cesspool of racist dog whistles and moral panics.

Two absolutely worthy causes it has helped boost are birtherism[1][2] and global warming denial[3] (it was a big promoter of Climategate, of course).[4] How he makes any money from the site is a mystery since it carries only a few blind-banner ads, many of them from wingnut pressure groups. The website design has changed little and still looks very 1997-ish. It has inspired at least two spoof websites, the Sludge Report and the Drudge Retort.

The site's popularity has been dwindling steadily, Alexa stats show. And that's even with the artificially inflated number of viewers Drudge claims. The revisit number is "inflated"[5] by the use of an autorefresh script which refreshes the page every three minutes.[6]

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Notes

  1. Matt Drudge hypes Jerome Corsi's new birther book, Salon
  2. With Drudge Report's Help, Birthers Latch Onto Phony Forgery Theory, Talking Points Memo
  3. Drudge and the denialists, Deltoid
  4. Drudge, Washington Times falsely claim allegedly hacked e-mails show global warming is not real, Media Matters
  5. "Latest from ReTran USA » Blog Archive » Hitwise Shock: Drudge Rank Misleading". retran.com. http://retran.com/latest/2008/11/02/hitwise-shock-drudge-rank-misleading/. Retrieved 2009-04-14. "Drudge’s page instructs your browser to refresh once every three minutes, thus inflating the hit counts" 
  6. These numbers also ignore the 3-minute auto-refresh that Drudge activates on his page.. "Drudge (refresh) loads 800,000,000 pages (refresh) in October '08". www.thestandard.com. http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/11/03/drudge-refresh-loads-800-000-000-pages-refresh-october-08. Retrieved 2009-03-03. 
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