Those who love to scream and yell about Matt Drudge’s utter unimportance unwittingly extend the life of his brand better than I ever could or would want to.  I’ve found that the people who want to discuss him seriously take him far less seriously than those who just want him to disappear.  Maybe because I’ve grown weary of the conspiracy theories, maybe because my research/analysis of Drudge was for a specific purpose (my book), maybe because I’ve just spent so much time observing how Drudge reads and reacts to news, I think I’ve developed a sixth sense for how seriously he really takes a story and interprets it.

Undoubtedly, someone will have a Drudgelike reaction about the “possible” story Matt D. thinks will emerge within the next few months regarding Rufus Wainwright’s release of a song about “leaving America”. 

Before we all get up in arms about Drudge going after Wainwright, I maintain the same philosophy I’ve had since my early days of studying his career.  I simply don’t think that he deliberately distorts context.  I think he doesn’t understand it in the first place and gets caught up in his own emotional theater.  Rather than an alarmist, I find him more of an occasionally annoying drama king.

But while much of his comments are throwaway, I won’t refute their impact.  An insignificant story or comment often becomes significant when it appears in the Drudge Report…and someone offers as strong, or stronger, a reaction than Matt did in the first place.  In that sense our Drudge is a bit of a bull in a china shop — and like a three hundred pound bull, he can do almost anything he wants to.  Or perhaps he’s more of a big, clunky cow mooing through the primrose patterned Royal Doulton with a cumbersome bell that makes as much noise as the earthenware crashing around him…while the people left in his wake record the damage and examine the pathogens in the cow pat materials he left behind. 

It’s the detractors who not only helped make Drudge what he is, but also keep him relevant now that citizen journalism has lost its novelty and gained a modicum of respectability.  “The more they slime me,” he told Playboy last decade, “the more they make of me.”  The man who once stated in his tell-all biography that “no serious thought seemed to have entered (Drudge’s) head” now bases a career on documenting his crimes against humanity and journalism on Media Matters.  If you want him to stop jerking your pigtails — stop reacting to him!

(P.S. Matt Drudge is more likely, by the way, to leave the U.S. than Wainwright.  He has stated on-air that he’d go elsewhere were Hillary elected President because she would “tax the hell out of (his) bracket”.)