What’s enough to keep the Schiavo story and Jacko case off the main headline on Drudge Report? How about 2/3 of earth’s resources depleted? Drumming up a world crisis here. Nobody panic. Please remain seated for the duration of the flight.

*Update - It didn’t last long, Schiavo is back up there. Damn, this story won’t go away.

By Rego Park
Contributing Blogger

One of the most common complaints about the Drudge Report is its ever-present pop-ups and other invasive commercialism… a distant memory to me since I’ve employed Mozilla Firefox (not a plug, although Drudge did give it some free PR on his radio show a week after my tech support guy installed it on my machine) but let’s just say I found some fingerprints on the murder weapon of my virus-felled computer. There were enough spiders on that baby courtesy of Matt’s “commercial benefactors” to spin an entire cyberuniverse of sticky cobwebs and keep my AdAware humming for a good part of the afternoon.

More or less noxious to past, present or potential Drudge readers is the prevalence of right-leaning products. The blogger Thought Criminal summed it up for many of us in this February 8 essay: “Every day, his website is littered with advertisements pushing books from conservative war-mongers like Ann Coulter. Now Drudge Report is little more than a Republican watering hole : a place to click on ads for the latest Republican merchandise (Ronald Reagan ball caps, Bush Sr. coffee cups, and whatever cheap junk that Drudge sees fit to whore out).”

I took the time to respond to Thought Criminal’s essay.

As a former media intern, and as someone who has read a lot of Matt Drudge interviews, it’s highly unlikely he micromanages what goes into his ads. Media buyers make the decisions about where to place a client’s ads and in what format. He is a friend of Coulter’s, but he’s certainly not interested in having too many heavy strings attached to his enterprise….I hate his pop-ups, but it’s my choice whether or not to buy a blocker. He’s not going to change his media out of sheer altruism, and most people won’t.

But after reading his response, I realized that there was still a lack of communication about how advertising works.

…I understand that very few webmasters have the time to micromanage every ad banner that gets served to their domain. However, as an aspiring journalist, one must be aware of how the news is presented. I have NEVER seen a single ad or banner selling any “liberal” associated book or product. Without exception, his advertisers are of the Republican/Right variety. This is no coincidence. I am sure Drudge visits his own page and it’s easy to see the prominent ads that push the conservative agenda. A blind man could see it. At no point did Drudge say to himself - “Hmmm, my site might be misinterpeted by some as having a rightwing bias?…What can I do to change that misconception and make my site more balanced?”

All I ask is that Drudge take control over his domain (if in fact he has little/no say in choosing his ads) and restore a sense of balance - accept and display some advertisements from the left.
OR, if he can’t do that for whatever reason, then I think the public deserves a good explanation. Otherwise he risks being judged and labeled as something he is not.

I’ll get to other subjects in TC’s essay in later blogs. But for now, I want to address the amount of control Matt has in his website advertising. You’re all free to disagree with Matt’s choices and politics, but understand how advertising works.

In a website with the traffic level of Drudge’s, and clients large enough to afford his ads, there are five degrees of separation in this scenario:

The client (Conservative Book Club, AT&T, whomever.)
The advertising agency account executive, who plans the marketing mix
The media buyer, who makes the decisions on how to spend agency money based on meticulous demographic assessment - not whom Drudge likes.
The agency who handles Drudge’s web ads (in this case, Intermarkets, who also sells Internet ads for sites like the Village Voice and the Chicago Sun-Times). Banner ads are rotated, as understand interstitials (the trade word for “pop-ups”) are.
The webmaster (Matt Drudge. With no staff, the buck stops with him. ) I don’t know the ins and outs of Intermarkets’ policy, but most media carriers can stipulate what type of ads will not be accepted; Good Housekeeping does not accept cigarette ads, for example.

Advertising is paid for. Anyone willing to pay for ad space who is not “disqualified” by the advertising medium (i.e. cigarette ads in Good Housekeeping) is free to do it.

Public relations is free, but publicity is in the hands of a reporter and editor. You can lead a horse to your website, you can send him a press release, you can e-mail him a tip, but you can’t make him drink it…or use the information. Matt Drudge gets thousands of e-mails a day…but somehow, he recently saw fit to plug the new book of his liberal friend, Camille Paglia, in a special report, and prominently display the book’s hot-pink graphic image on the site along with its link.

Matt will take advertising from almost anyone, but he can’t control who will choose to place it. If liberal clients were convinced by competent media buyers that a sizeable number of their target audience read the Drudge Report long enough and frequently enough to catch their advertising message, they’d run ads there. A media buyer wouldn’t even waste company time suggesting a Drudge Report ad placement. The more expensive the ad, the more careful the client’s media planning.

It’s not that Matt’s not accepting and displaying advertising from the left…for business reasons, their intermediaries aren’t accepting him.

In other words, Drudge would have to seriously go out of his way to find liberal advertisers…and considering that he spends most of his time each day monitoring the news, site, and massive e-mail, with no staff or social life, do you think he’s going out of his way to find more politically balanced advertising on his site?

Let’s look at how the Drudge Report is financed. Matt at first bragged that he carried no advertising because he wasn’t beholden to the powers that were who carried them. He changed that policy during the progress of Sidney Blumenthal’s $30 million lawsuit against him. The Miami Herald reported in 2003 that the site’s revenues come solely from advertising sold by Intermarkets. Drudge’s advertisers pay $3 per thousand impressions for banner ads, or $4,400 a day (discounted to $29,000 a week). Now, Matt was able to quit his day job and work on the site full-time when AOL and Wired paid him to run a column. Whatever income he generates now — and don’t you worry, boys and girls, he’s comfortably well-off — enables him to work when he wants to, afford the privacy and convenience he needs, and shell out judgment money next time he incorrectly reports that somebody beat his wife.

Think the public “deserves a good explanation” if he can’t take control over his domain? Well, we could all chip in and buy Matt a lifetime supply of Depends…but, oh, we found out in the last paragraph that he can afford his own Depends. One thing’s for sure in my own mind…if he had any reservation about being judged and labeled as something he is not, as TC puts it, he would have quit this ten years ago. Do be fair, he did tell Camille Paglia and Maer Roshan two years ago in a Radar interiview that he avoids getting too hardcore partisan for fear that he’d alienate readers. My guess is that he could be concerned about the right-dominated ads if he is aware of them (remember, he’s got his own Mozilla pop-up blocker) but isn’t going to rock his own boat to change things. He has accepted that he’s going to get “rhymed and slimed” — and indeed, he’s been the subject of rumors he could successfully sue for but has chosen not to. In a nutshell, the ad business and the misunderstanding along with it comes with the territory.

Do we have reason to be annoyed by the proliferation of political ads? Sure, why not? Do we have the right to complain about the pop-ups? Hell, yeah! Should we be, as Thought Criminal expressed, “frustrated to see another potentially-good source of news get co-opted by the right”? Well, let’s make sure we get the whole picture before we project our justifiable antsiness in the wrong place.

Still feeling queasy about all this interstitial overload? Download Firefox and e-mail me in the morning.

RegoPark is a pseudonym for a writer with a background in marketing communications. She is currently working on a novel about PR and the alternative media.

I apologize for the unbelievable site downtime. My web host has really dropped the ball here. I’ll be taking care of it as soon as possible. Please hang in there. I’ll post updates as things change.

OK, I’m officially tired of hearing about nothing but the Terri Schiavo case. Maybe Drudge is too. This is more like it on today’s Drudge Report:

By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

If you haven’t read Drudge Manifesto, check out the excerpt here . Unfortunately, that’s the best part of the book. As many reviews point out, this is a combination of blank pages, fan mail, chapter title pages, pages containing only single words, etc. What flesh that lies between them might be charitably described as “mystery meat”. As I’ll explain, the meat isn’t even Matt’s.

“Co-written” by the late great Julia Phillips, producer of movies like The Sting and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and author of the Hollywood tell-all You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, the book nonetheless shot up into the bestseller charts and sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 million copies, even though it received only one review in a major newspaper. Brett Sokol, who interviewed Drudge for the Miami New Times, reported that Drudge’s radio room in his apartment has a blown-up poster of the bestseller list with Manifesto circled.

As much as I like Drudge and as immersed as I once was in Beat poetry, even I’ve got my limits. Sorry, Matt, this thing is pretty damned hard to read. An ex-philosophy major, I had phenomenology and semiotics texts in college that were easier to get through.

It piqued my curiosity that the very same complaints about the run-on “poetic license”, et. al. were the same complaints Amazon readers had about Julia Phillips’ last book. So I checked it out. Yep. Just as I feared…

A few Manifesto “manifestations” are definitely Drudge: The content of the stories, the facts, some opinions, and the catchy corporate combos that pepper the text (”With this latest greatest urge to merge, it was not immediately clear if either the ABCNEWSWASHINGTONPOST Polling Unit or the CBSNEWSNEWYORKTIMES Polling Unit were headed for divorce or bigamy…”) which I recognize from reading his old AOL/Wired articles.

Then there’s this:

I come from a typical American family.

Dad, a social worker, shacked up with Someone New and moved to the east coast of Maryland. I stayed with Mom, one of the first women to graduate from ___ University Law School and pass the bar in Maryland. (My deletions, not Matt’s.)

Not entirely cool, I thought when I first read it. I mean, hey, confess your OWN sins, not your family’s. Especially when Dad helped launch your career with that first computer a few paragraphs later. Especially kind of stupid when he told Playboy two years beforehand, in response to the question, “What did your parents do for a living?”

Drudge: I’m protecting my parents all the way. Since the White House has been using private investigators, I haven’t been talking about my parents. Since this lawsuit blew up, I don’t even see them when I go to Washington. It’s probably the smart thing to do.

Drudge: For my parents? no. I’m more concerned with the private investigators and the White House slime machine. What they did to Linda Tripp — going into her arrest record 30 years ago. I don’t want to bring my parents into the middle of this.

Well, at least one mystery has been solved:

The whole thing - cutesy literary schtick, difficult-to-read format, bad, bad poetry — is pretty much all Julia Phillips. If you’ve read You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, it’s a little in the same annoying vein, although she didn’t really pump up the volume until her follow-up book, Driving Under the Affluence. I just read the latter book and yep, the spittin’ image of what you see in the pages of Drudge Manifesto are here. Even certain key phrases: “Information being power and all.” Not the least of which is her Mom complex which followed her through both books. You read more about her dear dead neurotic Mom in the 615 pages of Lunch than any of the celebrities she name-drops.

So now that I feel a little bit better about the possibility that Matt respects and cares about his parents, and remembering how little time he would have to write this literary tchotchke (teach yourself a vocabulary word if you don’t know what it is), I’m confronted with the whole Platonic dilemma again: Where did Socrates end and Plato begin? How much is the teacher’s actual teaching and how much the student’s interpretation?

To answer this, I returned to the 1998 Playboy interview:

I’ve never done a term paper and wouldn’t know how. I wouldn’t know how to write anything more than two or three paragraphs, little bites. If I had to actually form a story from beginning to end I don’t think I could do it. Everything I’ve learned about reporting I’ve learned on the Internet.

But that’s not the only mystery meat in this repository.

In culling the resources on the Web, I made a point of comparing the complete online transcript of Drudge’s speech at the Washington Press Club with the excerpt of the subsequent audience Q&A printed at the back of Drudge Manifesto. Now, some editorial deletions were obviously called for: the speech itself reiterated the stories and points MattJulia made at the beginning of the beginning of the book. Details like “one year later there would be (advertising)” are included not as footnotes but inserted parenthetically in the text. The book version of the transcript has Matt saying “I forgive you” in sotto voce, perhaps echoing a previous chapter when he’s watching TV at New Year’s 2000 and symbolically “forgives” everybody who trashed him. Then, there are a few things that were deleted from the transcript. One of them was Matt’s statement that he knocked on Monica Lewinsky’s door. Two sentences completely removed from the Q&A.

What’s that all about? Any ideas?

In a nutshell, this is what happens to a book when an author is in a seller’s market. You may remember in a previous entry that New York reported Matt bulldozed the publisher into letting him do an audio recording of Drudge Manifesto with flutes and drums in the background. Drudge reported himself in another interview that Random House had approached him with a book deal, and presumably Penguin Putnam, the book’s ultimate publisher, wasn’t in a position to drive a hard bargain.

Also keep in mind that Julia Phillips was a friend of Matt’s. It’s interesting to note that her last book revolved around her huge IRS debt, and that she died of cancer in January 2002, less than two years after the book saw completion. I also recall another friend of his, Ann Coulter to be exact, telling the Washington Post that he likes to give money to friends because he doesn’t know what to do with it. So it’s arguable that he outsourced the job to someone who really needed it. Not that Drudge and Phillips are totally on separate wavelengths…my feeling is that they shared a good long laugh over this million dollar confessional Beat baby.

Don’t misunderstand me — Julia was an interesting woman, and I’m sorry that she’s gone and that Matt lost one of his few friends — but after reading the two Phillips Manifestos, I know what we really got here bears very little resemblance to the ghostwriter’s subject. Indeed, Drudge is no micromanager. He admits he’s the “worst marketer out there. I just don’t care. I put all my energy into the site…” My unsettling question is, did he look at ANY of this? Obviously the editor didn’t have or exercise a great amount of control here. (If he/she had, the style might have worked in the end.)

The bottom line is that this book was totally outsourced - and Matt’s oft-refreshing lack of perfectionism really came back to bite him in the buttocks. But not really — it did what he invariably hoped it would accomplish. It made relatively effortless money, perpetuated his visibility and validated him in the media. What the book doesn’t do, alas, is give anyone an idea to who the hell Matt Drudge really is.

RegoPark is a writer with a background in marketing communications. She is currently writing a novel on PR and the alternative media.

Looks like Drudge missed the BP refinery explosion in Texas. 100+ injured, 14+ dead, massive blast crater. I would have guessed he’d be all over that one. “Massive Blast Rocks Refinery” or the like… Unless it was briefly mentioned earlier and I couldn’t find it on the timeline in the DR Archives…

*Thursday - Update - I never saw coverage of this explosion on the Drudge Report. I find this particularly weird. If I missed it and someone else caught it, let me know.

Drudge has a couple of items that interest me this morning, items that you might not even hear about anywhere else today. He’s headlining the fact that aging, ailing Rehnquist may not support Schiavo’s right to die. And then there’s a cloning story, a favorite of Drudge. The first cloned buffalo is born over in China. It’s not surprising to me at all that the cloning story is grouped just under the Schiavo headlines. Life, death, and cloning…

The Terri Schiavo story is a hot one today, as is the teen shooting spree. As they are both “in motion,” they’ll get moving coverage all day on the Drudge Report. And right now both warrant red headlines. As I’m typing this, the Schiavo story has already moved down into the left column and the teen shooter takes up the red in the main spot. Red headlines don’t usually last too long, but following them assures that you’re in with the hot story of the day. Or just the hot one for a few moments…

Just a note on a few changes here-
I’ll be trying a different style of posts here on Drudge Blog. I intend to focus more on the day to day happenings of the Drudge Report with more frequent but more casual posts. RegoPark (contributing blogger here) is focusing on the more detailed articles about Matt Drudge and the whole Drudge world, including the radio program.

I’m also in the process of some aesthetic and layout changes. Hopfully you’ll enjoy the new changes and fresh style that are coming.

By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

I knew I was hooked on the radio show last night when it got pre-empted by a University of Tennessee basketball game. “The Lady Vols suck!” I scowled bitterly at the thought of going to bed Drudgeless at 9 p.m on Sunday. If I have to get a perfectly good night’s sleep on account of those Dixie chicks, I’m not a very pleasant person to be around Monday morning. But as with the registered heroin addicts of Great Britain, bureaucracy came through for me: the sports crap switched off at 11:13 and the talk channel resumed its regularly scheduled program, granting me just enough of a Drudge fix to get through the day without posing a menace to society.

How did all this happen? I’ve never been a fan of conservative talk radio, have voted Democrat since high school, and don’t exactly gravitate toward people who have problems with critical thinking, spelling, discretion, and matching clothes. I refuse to have anything to do with the tabloids linked on the Drudge Report. I would not let my children read a newspaper that carried Liz Smith or Rush & Malloy. In college, I once refused to do a creative writing project that required me to purchase a scandal sheet and write a poem about one of its articles. (The professor allowed me to photograph the tabloid in the store with the story headline clearly showing.)

Gossip, ladies and gentlemen of the Web, sucks. Unfiltered news, good. Gossip, bad. I just wish the line between them were more distinct.

I wasn’t even aware of Matt Drudge’s existence until a friend of mine ended up on a Drudge Report exclusive over something that I can assure you, while worthy of due media attention and scrutiny, was, in fact, only a joke mushroomed way out of proportion. I didn’t realize Matt was the smoking gun that led to Cigargate until I saw his mug in a public relations textbook. My friend, a consummate mensch in every sense of the word who never shared Matt’s penchant for attention, lost his privacy and his job in part to the Drudge Report. His name will always be floating somewhere around on the Web.

Okay, so why do I read the Drudge Report? Why do I listen to Drudge Radio, and why do I waste time debunking rumors that Matt probably deserves, anyway?

And the thing is, for a guilty pleasure, Drudge isn’t all that sybaritic. Why blow your diet on a Slim Jim at the corner market? Why max out your Visa on a trip to Chernobyl? Why have an affair if you’re just going to rendezvous in a cheap motel room?

Well, I can’t answer all those questions in one fell swoop. How much fun would that be?

But in a nutshell, doing research for a project put me up close and personal with all things Drudge. I now have Word documents of nearly every article on Matt on the Web, everything he’s said on record, I have transcripts of his Fox TV show, speeches and shows he’s appeared on, and excerpts from radio shows when prank callers targeted him. Everything that’s escaped his lips is highlighted in yellow on the computer screen I’m keying into right now.

Let’s just say that for me, Drudge is an acquired taste. The first time I tuned into the radio show last July, I fell asleep in an hour after hearing dead air and “25-year-old computer geek” repeated ad nauseam. Granted, there are more soothing ways to get to sleep than listening to an audio recording of Terry Schialvo sans feeding tube, which sounded like a cross between a creaking door and a parakeet being tortured. Nor is the theme to Cat People he played last night exactly Brahms’ “Lullaby”. As I’ve hinted before, Drudge Blog ain’t no fan site. I’m not commissioning some 600-foot Drudge statue, arms outstretched over the hills of Rio de Janeiro. Captivated as I may be by his boyish charm and sarcastic Web copy, I’m all too aware of Matt’s limitations to lean over and smooch his posterior (or to scale said replica and do the Blarney stone thing).

Like many people, I suspect, I find keeping up with the news to be an exhausting task. The older I get, the less likely I am to be the first to pipe up with my opinion on something. I find that the more I read, the less I really know about the world around me. Everything we are fed is a layer upon layer of filtering, contextual distortion, and creative writing. I know from working on a college newspaper that everything is an interpretation of an interpretation, and even the most conscientious reporters can find their original story distorted by editing…even by the most well-meaning editors. Unlike the Old Gray Lady, I’m not the first name in news. Unlike Drudge, I’m not the first. I know a little about a lot and very few things in great detail. But one thing I have absorbed through osmosis and do feel I can discuss intelligently is Drudge — who he is, what he does, how he does it, what his philosophy and politics really are, his M.O., and whatever he has willingly shared with the press. And as a student of public relations, philosophy, and human behavior, I think I can offer a better analysis of all things Drudge than anything currently available on the Web.

I do have a bit of an agenda in contributing to Drudge Blog: I want to clear up misinformation — good or bad. I want to discuss angles that haven’t been covered in the media. A lot of what people “know” about Matt or the Drudge Report is based upon misunderstanding and upon rumors that, if I can’t categorically disprove, have serious questions about. I base my commentary not on original reporting, but upon analyzing the information already out there, paying particular attention to “raw” interviews and actual Drudge quotes and correspondence.

Over the next few weeks, Drudge Blog will carry special essays that will challenge your understanding and knowledge of Matt Drudge. If you check out last week’s Drudge Quiz, you might find that he’s not so predictable and pigeonhole-able in a lineup of other media figures.

Now that we’re done with preliminaries, I’ll get started. Scrub up, strap on the rubber gloves, and let the exploratory surgery begin!

RegoPark is a pseudonym for a writer with a background in marketing communications. She is currently working on a novel about PR and the alternative media.

By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

Think you really know Drudge - his bio, philosophy, and altogether M.O.? Take our “Socratic Question” quiz and see if you can separate the wheat from the chaff.

1. Which of these items have appeared on the Drudge Report?

A. The unshielded face of Michael Jackson’s current accuser
B. The physical description of President Bill Clinton’s penis
C. Al-Jazeera’s graphic 2003 video of murdered U.S. soldiers in Iraq
D. Monica Lewinsky’s resume
E. None - he made the conscious decision to hold all of these items back even though they were in his possession.

2. What is the source of the following document, written by Matt Drudge?

“To my only true friend Ms. thing, Vicky B, I leave a night in Paris, a bottle of Chaps cologne … And to everyone else who has helped and hindred [sic] me…I leave a penny for each days I’ve been here and cried here. A penny rich in worthless memories. For worthless memories is what I have endured.”

A. High school annual
B. Junior high school suicide note
C. Note to the executive producer of FOX News
D. Note to the manager of a club he got banned from
E. None - it’s totally fabricated.

3. Which is not one of Matt Drudge’s accomplishments?

A. Graduated from high school
B. Completed the requirements for a bar mitzvah
C. Rose up to manager of the CBS gift shop
D. Published a column
E. Published a book

4. Whom is Drudge addressing in the following quote?

“Babe, your spirit is everywhere. I had a picnic the other day at the Appletree Campground which sits right on top of the great San Andreas fault line. I was starring the 600-mile trouble maker right in the gut — wondering when and if the ground would burst. I saw your face in a wild-desert flower that was growing out of the crack in a fault-line. Your face reminded me that there is more to life than worrying about death.”

A. Julia Phillips, co-author of Drudge Manifesto and author of the Hollywood tell-all You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, who died in 2002
B. Barbara Olson, conservative commentator whose plane crashed into the World Trade Center
C. Babe Ruth, legendary baseball player
D. Babe the Pig, porcine movie character
E. Babe Didrickson, legendary female athlete

5. Whom is Matt addressing in the radio show rant below?

“If I sound a little bitter, it’s because I was lied to…That is the ‘No Spin Zone,’ sir. You lied to me. You lied to this audience…I cannot believe my eyes that you are going on [TV] and saying you’re a straight shooter night after night. It’s not fair. And you don’t apologize to me. And you don’t apologize to this audience….You made me look bad and you had newspapers writing that Drudge was making stuff up again and all this other nonsense. And then, of course, months later when it happens nobody really can remember what any of the details were, and, you know - yawn, yawn, yawn….So, as you climb up that pyramid scheme which is the American business system, sir, you’re not taking me with you. And I’m not gonna be a foot - a brick on your tower, sir, as you step up and over…”

A. Michael Savage
B. David Brock
C. Bill O’Reilly
D. Rush Limbaugh
E. Art Bell

6. Who does NOT currently have a link on the Drudge Report?

A. Sidney Blumenthal
B. Maureen Dowd
C. Bill O’Reilly
D. Village Voice
E. Free Republic

7. Who has described himself/herself as “Matt Drudge’s bitch”?

A. Camille Paglia
B. Andrew Sullivan
C. Andrew Breitbart
D. Lucianne Goldberg
E. Julia Phillips

8. Who said the following?

“Matt’s mind goes a thousand beats a second and then the next second there’s something else…I’m more linear. When I’m pursuing something I really want to get to the bottom of it and get all facets of it. Matt has moved on while I’m still on the first sentence.”

A. Diane Dimond of Court TV
B. Andy Rooney of CBS’ 60 Minutes
C. Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette
D. Bob Drudge of Refdesk
E. Christiane Amanpour of CNN

9. Which of these quotes as someone else NOT made in the mainstream media about Matt Drudge?

A. “Drudge, he’s the sexiest man alive. Drudge, he’s fabulous.”
B. “Matt Drudge is smoking crack on Washington Avenue right now…and the authorities should know.”
C. “I’d like to give him a journalistic beating, a legal beating, and a physical beating.”
D. “(To see him at the computer ) is like watching Chopin at the piano.”
E. “This guy has to have the best male lips in cyberspace.”

10. Which did Matt NOT say?

A. “I’m the blog to end all blogs.'’
B. “I was a stutterer. I had a twitch inside all the time—a lot of raw energy. I was lonely…I still am.”
C. “…There’s no law against being a hypocrite a few times in your life. And this industry (the media) is built on hypocrisy!”
D. “How can I be gay when I’m dating a woman with boobs and rollers?”
E. “I don’t want the humiliation of having my words coming back to haunt me.”
F. “I wish Jimmy Carter were still president.”

Score….

1. D. Matt chose not to run the Al Jazeera videos, Clinton phallic description at all. Jackson’s accuser, at this writing, appears on today’s Drudge Report with the eyes blurred out.

2. A. The quote is from Takoma Park, Maryland’s Northwood High School mock Last Will and Testament a classmate unearthed for the benefit of the press.

3. B. Despite his frequent class-cutting, Matt did manage to get his high school sheepskin, albeit with a class ranking of 341 out of 360. Before writing Drudge Manifesto and selling a column to Wired and AOL, he worked his way up to CBS gift shop manager. However, despite several years of Hebrew school, Matt’s parents never got a return on their time and monetary investment…his grandparents never got to see the chain of tradition continue…and his classmates never got to watch a really cool nervous breakdown at the bimah.

4. D - Babe the Pig

5. C - Bill O’Reilly

6. E. Matt removed his link to the Free Republic a few years back when the wing nut factor got out of hand for awhile. But he added the Sidney Blumenthal link a year after Blumenthal dropped his $30 million lawsuit against him over an unsubstantiated spousal abuse rumor.

7. C. Andrew Breitbart, Matt’s one and only bitch/assistant, who updates the Drudge Report in his absence.

8. D. Bob Drudge of Refdesk, a.k.a. Matt’s father.

9. E. A is from Ann Coulter in the New York Observer. B is from the mouth of Bill O’Reilly. C is from Steve Dunleavy. D is from Lucianne Goldberg. E - from yours truly (i.e. not from someone in the mainstream media).

10. Come on, now, people! When would Matt EVER refer to himself as a blogger?

RegoPark is a writer who is currently working on a novel about PR and the alternative media.

Nobody covers a disaster like Matt Drudge. His coverage of the Mt. St. Helens “eruption” was classic. Simple headline “ERUPTION” and a dramatic, angular pic of the mountain. Cool sub-headline “Mt. St. Helens Blows…” and relevant pic and vid links are standard fare for his coverage. The major news network coverage was boring by comparison. But the real fun here is that this wasn’t even a major “eruption” by St. Helens. But the coverage on Drudge gave it that extra bit of drama. Disasters, whether real or pumped up by Matt, are a common theme at the Drudge Report. And for my money, the coverage doesn’t get better than Drudge.

By Rego Park
Contributing Blogger

All right, everybody, shut up. Just listen.

No, really — listen.

Matt was so pissed off last night, so bitter and rabid over Warren Buffet’s remarks on not investing in America, he reminded me of a substitute teacher who flew so far off the handle over a classroom prank that it ruined the fun of provoking him. So I’m glad he had a copy of Camille Paglia’s book on poetry to calm him down a bit.

Today’s pretty pink image on Drudge Report is courtesy of Break Blow Burn, Paglia’s new work in which she takes on the poetry establishment and the hypercyber world we live in that’s making the art obsolete.

“In our voracious 24-hour news cycles, we’re rafting down the roaring river of media. It’s exciting and exhilarating, but it’s good to remember that SOME things last–and they’re in art!” Paglia is quoted on today’s Drudge exclusive. “Poets must remember their calling and take stage again!”

My kinda gal, Camille.

My kinda guy, Matt. The resurgence of poetry beats a big old boring tsunami any day.

Oh, hush, now! I’m being serious here. (Maybe because I’m about to submit a book of poems for publication consideration myself.)

The ENTIRE poetry establishment, all the honored, famous, adulated major living poets are excluded from the book!” Drudge reports. “Poet laureates, Nobel prize winners teaching at Harvard, none of their poems made the cut; Paglia’s choices of contemporary poets are obscure or unknown.”

A sign of a slow news day? Not for Drudge, not with Rather going off the air and Buffett going off at the mouth. Camille, like Ann Coulter, is a friend whom he considers stimulating and newsworthy with whom he’s at least friendly enough to grant a special Drudge exclusive when a new book’s out. You can catch a 2003 interview between Paglia and Drudge here.

But snagging a Drudge exclusive takes a little more than cronyism. Matt actually has to find you interesting. Betcha didn’t know he was into all that artsy-fartsy stuff, didja?

If you check out Paglia’s interview with Matt, he’s a bit more of a hipster than you might think. Some of the first articles of Drudge in the early days mention his affinity for Krishnamurti. According to New York magazine in 2000, Matt asked his publisher to record the audio version of Drudge Manifesto with bongo drums and flutes playing in the background “in the style of a Beat poet.” He’s even indulged in what he gallantly refers to as “performance art” - donning a T-shirt bearing the photo of Elian at gunpoint in front of Janet Reno at a White house dinner.

Anyway, this will go down as one of my favorite Drudge exclusives ever. PAGLIA WARNS INTERNET: ONLY ART LASTS. Even Drudge’s misspelling of the plural of cosmos (”cosmosess”? Is there more than one cosmos out there? ) adds to the flavor.

As Drudge says at the conclusion of this report, “Impacting…”

RegoPark is a writer with a background in marketing communications. A published poet under her real name, she is currently working on a novel about PR and the alternative media.

It’s shaping up to be a small news day today. I say “small” instead of “slow” because on the Drudge Report, there are always constant updates. It’s just small-time stories. Gas prices are rising, Martha got out of jail, another teacher sex scandal…oh, I just fell asleep and woke up again. He did make the Martha story the big one for the better part of a day, as I would expect.

Anyone notice that news and political talk is somewhat calm right now? I’m wondering if everyone is burned out from the election, inauguration, and Iraq. Or maybe it’s the calm before the storm and something really big is about to happen…