Is Matt Drudge’s influence overrated?
In the early days of the Internet, Drudge’s conservative ideology — while a factor, no doubt, in his pimping of Clinton sex scandals — was less important than his skill at doing what stuck-up traditional news sites didn’t do, which was playing up all the “Holy (Bleep)!” headlines and ignoring the boring-but-you-need-to-know-this stock-in-trade of the 1990s newspaper.
But in recent years other news aggregators have come along — the popular Huffington Post is Exhibit A — and so in order to “stay on top,” as Carr headlines it, Drudge has refined his editorial skills, and what he does best now is cleverly promote stories that dovetail with the right-wing media barricade erected by his pal Rush Limbaugh, other radio talkers, the Fox News Channel that went from 0 to 60 during the Drudge years, and nascent political groups like the Tea Party or Glenn Beck’s 9-12 Project (all of whom keep Drudge’s traffic high by talking up what they read there.)
How Drudge “stays on top”? Pandering on race, right-wing paranoia
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