Salon.com > Lindsay Beyerstein

Matt Drudge’s rescue mission

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:30:00 +0000

D.C.’s conservative newspaper, the Washington Times, has long been mocked for its crazy owner, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. When he isn't busy performing mass weddings, the billionaire Moon has been underwriting the money-losing paper -- which, at a high point, once earned the personal praise of Ronald Reagan. Recently, however, the Times has struggled, not just because of the usual industry woes, but also because of infighting among the 92-year-old Moon’s heirs. Thankfully, the Times has had a helping hand from another famous right-wing eccentric: Matt Drudge.

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.)

The face of war

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 13:01:00 +0000

One of the most iconic images of the Iraq war was taken by Nina Berman in a commercial portrait studio in small-town Illinois. You've probably seen the photograph. A young couple stands side by side facing the camera. There are all the usual accouterments: the frosted, school-photo backdrop, the red bouquet precisely matched to the red trim on the bride's white gown. The groom wears a decorated dress uniform. It could be any couple in any town -- except that the groom's features have literally been melted off. He has no nose, no chin, no ears and no hair. His head appears to attach directly to his shoulders, and his face is so badly burned that it's a struggle to decipher his expression.

The bride's expression is equally opaque. Some people think she looks stunned. Others describe her expression as anxious, or even fearful. Her mouth turns down slightly at the edges, but her wide brown eyes gaze straight ahead and something about the set of her jaw suggests resolve. Some viewers strenuously deny that there's anything unusual about the young woman's countenance at all.

Why I refused to blog for Edwards

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 13:43:00 +0000

I am an atheist, but when Bill Donohue called the John Edwards bloggers "anti-Catholic, vulgar, trash-talking bigots," my first thought was, "There but for the grace of God go I."

I was offered a job blogging for John Edwards, but I declined.

On Jan. 12, an Edwards campaign staffer whom I'll call Bob, which isn't his real name, e-mailed me to ask if I might be interested in blogging for the campaign. I maintain a blog called Majikthise, and I'd met Bob several times at various political and social gatherings in New York City, including Drinking Liberally.

Back in October, Bob had invited me to join a few local bloggers at an off-the-record meeting with Elizabeth Edwards at the Loews Regency Hotel. Unfortunately, I couldn't go.

Mrs. Edwards is a celebrity in the netroots because she maintains an active presence in the community. Months later, bloggers who attended that meeting are still talking about it in glowing terms. Mrs. Edwards has been writing her own diaries on DailyKos for years.