For the past year, Drudge has provided the Washington Times with, on average, 46 percent of its monthly traffic. In November of 2011, the Drudge Report sent 4.7 million visitors to the Washington Times website, or 57 percent of all the Times’ traffic that month. By comparison, just 820,000 visitors actually accessed the Times through its homepage that November. (These numbers come from the Times’ internal Google Analytics statistics, which Salon obtained.)

Continue Reading...

He intuitively understood how the media work even if he needed to invent a grand conspiracy to explain the motivations of its primary actors. He knew that if the press felt it had missed a major story from an unexpected source, it would quickly rush to be the first to publicize further material from that source in the future. He learned this from Matt Drudge, who really did become the de facto "assignment editor" of the political press following his publication of Michael Isikoff's axed Lewinsky story. The parallel right-wing press has been in existence for years, and the early conservative blogosphere organized itself around blogs from people like Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds, but Breitbart was an expert in forcing their obsessions into the "mainstream."

Continue Reading...

Here's Matt Drudge's headline (which was, for hours, just below the huge Murdoch story on top of the page): "Obama donor arrested as 'Pakistani agent'..."

Free Republic used the same headline, along with "Pakistani accused of masking contributions to US politicians."

Leaving aside the fact that "Pakistani agent" sounds more like "spy" than "unregistered foreign lobbyist," it's true that Syed Ghulam Fai gave $250 to Barack Obama, making him an "Obama donor." He's also given $6,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and at least $10,000 to Representative Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana.

Continue Reading...

After everyone else began calling the story dumb and pointless and inane, the Post... ran a poll. Now the people can decide if Michelle Obama is "a hypocrite" for eating a hamburger! In order to justify the newsworthiness of "Michelle Obama eating a hamburger," the Post's Tim Carman Googled "Michelle Obama" and "hamburgers," and discovered that she has eaten at least five hamburgers in the past.

Type in “Michelle Obama and salads” into Google, and you gets tons of hits about her introducing salad bars into schools. But few hits of her ordering salads in public.

Continue Reading...

ThinkProgress and the Southern Poverty Law Center report that the neo-confederate CCC recently crowed on their website that Mr. Drudge's famous report looked remarkably like their own work.

Continue Reading...

It sort of started with the tale of Ashley Todd, the 20-year-old McCain campaign volunteer who claimed she was attacked by a savage, black Obama supporter, who supposedly carved the letter "B" into her face. She made the whole thing up, but her story's many inconsistencies and unlikely elements did not stop Drudge from heavily publicizing it, until it all fell apart.

Then there was the tale of the New Black Panther Party poll-watchers who "intimidated" Fox cameras in Philadelphia. You can imagine how much Drudge enjoyed that one.

Continue Reading...

Trump's is not the first, and will not be the last political book that was rendered ridiculous or blatantly incorrect before or very shortly after its release. It's not even the only one released this year! Here are some of our favorite sad, wrong books:

"Where's the Birth Certificate?" by Jerome Corsi, 2011

Oh, there it is! Sorry, Jerome Corsi, but you couldn't have realized that your entirely pointless search for the "long-form" birth certificate would end nearly a month before your book's publication.

Continue Reading...

Corsi is best known, still, for his famous "Swift Boat" book, which was full of easily debunked lies about John Kerry, but which was not easily debunked until all the lies had been properly reported and disseminated. Since that book he's gone "full fruitcake," repeating every single right-wing conspiracy theory that comes down the pike, from the NAFTA superhighway to the truly weird "abiotic oil" theory, which says petroleum doesn't come from biological material.

Corsi already wrote his silly Obama book, in time for the 2008 elections, but he forgot to make that book about how Obama was secretly born in Kenya, because that particular conspiracy theory had just been invented at the time. So now he's giving it another go, with "Where's the Birth Certificate."

Drudge's "FLASH" is very, very funny, so I'm just going to reprint it:

Continue Reading...

The situation has deterioated considerably since then. At the moment, Israel has only three days left to strike Iran's terrifying nuclear reactor.

It's not just Matt's confusion! Here's former envoy to the U.N. and world's angriest walrus John Bolton on Monday: "So if Israel is going to do anything against Bushehr it has to move in the next eight days."

And Bolton, today:

Continue Reading...

Maureen Dowd wants to know why that terrible Michelle Obama isn't making her husband "toast" and martinis instead of jetting around the world cavorting with "a cavalcade of Secret Service agents, friends, children and staff" while he sits around miserably solving all the world's problems. Michelle is "giggling" at her hardworking husband, apparently, instead of giving him foot rubs or whatever wives are supposed to do when their husbands get home. [UPDATE: Obama is "gigging" her husband, apparently, according to Maureen Dowd. I regret, and am somewhat confused by, the error.]

Moving from bizarrely retrograde to outright batshit, we turn to former Slate blogger and current failed Senate candidate Mickey Kaus, who, considering the first lady's utterly unremarkable trip to Spain, postulates "three levels of perception." The "Real Insider," according to Mickey, knows that Michelle Obama's trip ("with her daughter and an expensive posse") means: "Jeez, they must have had some kind of fight. She's pissed! This is a big 'screw you.'" (Women, amirite?)

Continue Reading...

Real justice, as I suspect Sherrod would agree, also requires due process for Andrew Breitbart, the Internet impresario who framed her on his Big Government website. In these circumstances, that means a fair, thorough and tough examination of the media fraud that launched his operation last year: the ACORN tapes, whose misuse by Breitbart closely parallels his behavior in the Sherrod affair.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Ah, Drudge. Don't ever change!

Continue Reading...

Vadum's latest ACORN-related exposé, written for Newsreal, had to do with Patrick Corvington, who President Obama appointed (and the Senate recently confirmed) to head the Corporation for National and Community Service. Vadum dubbed Corvington a "friend of ACORN," writing:

Corvington was a senior official at the left-wing Annie E. Casey Foundation of Baltimore, Md., which granted funding to ACORN and other radical groups during his tenure. If Corvington didn’t share the views of the foundation, which promotes racial disharmony and opposes placing juveniles charged with crimes in pretrial detention, he almost certainly couldn’t have gotten a job there.

Since 2001 the Annie E. Casey Foundation has pumped at least $1,705,500 into the ACORN network, according to philanthropy databases.

Continue Reading...

For Matt Drudge, apparently, President Obama's Nobel prize is the joke that keeps on giving. Drudge's headline today, on the news that Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson had won the Nobel in economics, was: "Obama fails to win Nobel prize in economics..."

Get it? Because, you know, he won the peace prize, so obviously it's a shocking failure when he doesn't win all the other prizes this year, too... Well, yeah, we didn't either. Maybe you just had to be there.

Continue Reading...

Matt Drudge, for one, has been focusing pretty heavily on Chicago-area stories like the beating for the past couple days. That doesn't appear coincidental, as the timing lines up pretty neatly with the announcement that President Obama will travel to Denmark this week to lobby for the city's bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. Granted, Drudge tends to like this kind of story anyway, but the banner headline this one got, and the sheer length of time that it remained the top story on his site seems to hint at some additional motive.

Blogger Michelle Malkin got closer to stating that motive explicitly, writing in one post headlined "Chicago's teen violence epidemic":

Continue Reading...

As of this post, Drudge's site is currently leading with one of his occasional exclusives. This one features a banner headine screaming, "Fox-TV Chicago ordered not to run anti-Olympics story."

"A local TV station that reported on Chicagoans NOT wanting the Olympics has been told NOT to run the report again, insiders tell the DRUDGE REPORT!," Drudge says. "The Chicago Olympic Committee told FOX Chicago that its broadcast 'would harm Chicago's chances' to be awarded the games. The station's news director ordered staff to hold fire after the report aired once last Thursday morning, claims a source."

A report like this, exclusive or not, wouldn't normally merit prime placement on Drudge's site. But with Obama's involvement, it becomes a banner headline, because the newsman's implication is clear: The media's being told to back off from a story that could hurt the president, and because the press is in the White House's pocket, they're complying. Conservative bloggers are, of course, picking up the story and running with it in that direction.

Continue Reading...

The truly amazing thing? Matt Drudge's mother reportedly worked as a staff attorney for Kennedy -- specializing in health issues.

Continue Reading...

But nature abhors a vacuum, and so does Matt Drudge, the brains behind the Drudge Report. So on Tuesday, he was trying to manufacture a story of his own: President Obama, Drudge said, is giving other world leaders the "evil eye."

"As the summer begins, White House watchers have spotted a new look by President Obama: The Evil Eye!" Drudge writes. "Staffers have joked about the menacing glance, which comes when the president meets with world leaders who are not aligned with his progressive view."

The lack of identification or attribution on "staffers" is a fairly blatant way of saying the story lacks sources and substance. Are they even White House staffers? Drudge doesn't say.

But since he has a reputation to uphold, he did tack his usual "Developing..." on at the end of the story.

Continue Reading...