Posted on 12/16/2021 3:43:26 AM PST by Kaslin
About a decade ago I’d heard all sorts of rumors about Matt Drudge, many from friends who were in positions to know or at least suspect, and none of them were good. I remember thinking if those rumors were true, and they were proven and exposed, that would do some serious damage to conservatism. Thankfully, it didn’t come to that. Drudge wasn’t destroyed from without, it was destroyed from within, by Matt himself. Thankfully, it happened long after he and his website mattered.
I still don’t know if those rumors are true, but Matt Drudge no longer matters. Even the concept of the Drudge Report doesn’t matter. And that’s great news for conservatives.
At its core, the Drudge Report was a cult of personality – a portal designed to elevate Matt Drudge. Why else name the site after himself? People who name their websites after themselves are, I’d say without exception, egomaniacs. Anyone think Arianna Huffington is a joy to work for or has a good, self-deprecating sense of humor? Every single person, on our side or theirs, with a “news” website with their name in it is an egomaniac who couldn’t give a damn about you. The louder they protest, they more desperately they’re trying to hide the truth.
Drudge lead that pack. Created it, as a matter of fact. Now, pretenders spend most of their time promoting their own eponymous sites on social media and various airwaves, pathetically making themselves the content, or selling out to other companies and running off with the cash as their house of cards they built collapses behind them. HuffPo is nearly worthless while Arianna isn’t missing a single meal, for one example.
Now the Drudge Report doesn’t matter. Not because one of these other horrible people, these egomaniacs, came up with an alternative shrine to themselves that replaced it, but because dozens, if not hundreds of actual news outlets replaced it.
You don’t need to go to Drudge to find out what’s happening, unless you really care about what Grace Jones or Rex Reed are up to. You can get exactly what Drudge used to give you from Townhall, the Daily Caller, the Washington Free Beacon, Washington Examiner, American Greatness, Real Clear Politics, and so many more that if I listed them all this column would be a book.
Nothings slips through the cracks anymore because there aren’t cracks anymore to slip through. Conservative media filled them all.
Moreover, the one thing that made Drudge invaluable is he used to weed through a long news story in, say, the New York Times that was as liberal as the day is long and pick out the news nugget they buried in there that either undercut their thesis or damaged the left. Matt would make that nugget his version of their headline and link to their story. Now, since the invention of Twitter, literally everyone can do that.
Tweets from people you’ve never heard of and will never meet go viral because they read some Times or Washington Post story and noticed something in paragraph 18 or so, screen captured it, sent it out and people noticed. For that story, in that instance, that random person was the Drudge Report, and in a way that was more immediate and impactful than the old one.
The Drudge Report and every aggregation website copying, or attempting to copy, what Matt did is irrelevant now. Sure, they still get traffic, habits are hard to break, but they’re irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
It used to be that getting a Drudge link was killer for web traffic, now it’s a bump compared to what it once was. And none of the other wannabe sites come close, even to that bump.
There simply is no need for Drudge or the pretenders, monuments to ego have outlived their usefulness. Sure, they promise they’re only doing it for the good of this or that, but they’re lying. If there weren’t money in it they wouldn’t have done it. It’s always the people who say they don’t care about money the loudest who do the most for any amount of it, isn’t it?
The success of conservative news outlets has made the original that inspired them, and all the wannabes after, irrelevant. None of those successful conservative sites would exist were it not for Drudge, and their success is what is ultimately ruining Drudge. Do you think that site would have changed to be a left-wing pit, which is easy and lazy, if there was still a need for what it used to do? Good riddance, I say, we’re better off without the real thing or the pretenders.
Of course I’m not a mod. But you should be saying this to the people you replied to, not me.
I hope everyone will take a look at my daily news feed with my commentary on each article (no more than 1-2 lines).
It posts about noon at www.uncoverdc.com under “Today’s News: The News of Today is the History of Tomorrow.”
And now we’ve added a video of me reading these headlines, something like the old G. Gordon Liddy show, except I only do the headlines & a quip, not the full article.
Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!
John, John, John.
I found Free Republic through Drudge too. This site and Rush Limbaugh (God rest his soul) kept me sane post 9/11. I check Drudge about 1x/year to check the condition of the site.
I just took a peek at his trashy site, and it is what I expected. Top stories all on Covid variant Omicron and every link is fear porn.
A few feel-good stories on Hillary and a DA still deciding to charge Trump (doesn’t say with what—Matt knows he’s guilty is enough.)
Also, the link to Free Republic is gone.
It’s all your fault, Jarhead
Yeah, probably is... 8~)
I found FR by listening to Hannity. He was/is apparently a a FReeper and would occasionally mention FR on his show. I quit listening to Hannity years ago but still come here for news and entertainment.
But a name like "Drudge Report" or even "The Huffington Post" is easier to remember than "Town Hall" or "Red State" or "Hot Air" or "[Something] Pundit." Putting your name in the title of the site means that you are responsible for what it says. It didn't work out that way with Drudge, who eventually turned over his site to others, but that could have been the reason for the site's name.
Doesn’t Drudge’s father start that?.
There was no problem with his first reply, and the rest of his replies were more polite than the recipient deserved (including the one to you.) I understand being skeptical of people who just signed up, because we have had plenty of disrupters, but w don't need to be jerks toward them until they actually start misbehaving.
I just love the fact that an idiot who thought he was a reincarnated Walter Winchel in a fedora also thought he was a journalist for posting links to real journaists stories. Drudge was and is the beginning of the end of responsible journalism. Cherry picked headlines for sensationalism? Drudge reports. Drudge decides.
Somewhere in the fog of my memory...I think so.
“People who name their websites after themselves are, I’d say without exception, egomaniacs.”
well, krap, now i’m gonna have to rename my website pronto ...
I found Drudge when he broke the Lewinski scandal. I found FR on Drudge. I have not been back to Drudge since he went liberal. I dropped out of FR for about 5 years when the religious wars overwhelmed the rest of the content. I guess Trump's election brought me back. The flame wars seem to have subsided for the most part.
No worries.
I hear you. I left for about a year and a half, once upon a time. And about 3 months more recently.
Uh no...it is a descriptor of someone who signed up just a little over a month ago.
Don’t believe Drudge has that much reach, or that Free Republic has that little. When Drudge was at his peak, I ran an ad on it, in font like his, so it would look like an article, with a text that any conservative would click on. I was told the ad was to be served one million times, and I figured most conservatives who saw it would click on it. The ad only got 137 click throughs from the million serves, and I would not be surprised some of those were bots crawling the web. I think they lie about Drudge’s numbers, and they do that for a lot of sites they control.
I have my own site now, and I see traffic stuff from the inside, and much of the numbers you are told are bull. I have gotten a link from National Review which sent me about 200 clicks, despite it supposedly having 10 million pageviews per month, and I have gotten a link from author/publisher/media-guy Vox Day’s blog, and had ten thousand page views, despite him only having like a few million pageviews per month back then.
I have noticed many sites, like NR, or Daily Caller, etc seem to have a lot of press, and we are told they have millions of viewers, but I will bet they have nothing like that, and FR has a lot more, because those sites are hit or miss content-wise, but FR always has stuff that brings people back.
Plus, now that I have been in politics through the site and publishing, all I am going to say is much of what you have been told - about other people’s beliefs, about how government works, and about your own life and freedom, is gaslighting, designed to control you and make you accept things you would never accept otherwise.
Really, I still periodically just shake my head. Nothing works like you are told.
“Drudge went from Alex Jones to Bill Kristol in the span of less than 1 year. What kind of cash or TBI would that take?”
You will eventually understand. Most people in politics understand because they see it firsthand, but it hasn’t drifted down to the casual observers yet. It is much, much worse than you could believe possible.
Drudge was either threatened, blackmailed, or bought off, or some combination, supposedly months before the 2020 election. I doubt he has had anything to do with the site since then. He even wrote on his twitter profile that he was the former editor of the Drudge Report, but then had to take it down. I assumed it was him trying to tell everyone he wasn’t really turned, but had no choice.
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