Chatter at the Salon Shop
Today’s Salon piece gets credit for everything but the paranoid subheading and citing Alexa statistics. “History belongs to the people who write it,” Drudge once said in a 2003 interview. “I would hate to read my obituary in Salon.”
But a Matt Drudge primary? Okay with me…a summit in Miami Beach sure beats New Hampshire any day!
by RegoPark - 8:35 pm
May 15th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Matt Drudge’s most glaring vulnerability is that he’s a sucker for one-source items or items sourced by one political operative he has no past history with at all — it leaves him open to being way too easily manipulated if the right operative(s) should ever choose to do that to him. To bring him down, for example. It was really apparent during that whole “CNN Reporter Heckles John McCain” episode recently. Drudge ran with that, top of the page. Whoever fed it to him knew the whole world would eventually see the actual footage and it made Drudge look like a horse’s rear end. Drudge can’t help himself. I’m almost of the mind that whoever fed that to him in fact wanted to have a Drudge hit on the CNN reporter that also backfired as a hit on Drudge himself. Drudge is so loose and reckless sometimes it’s the obvious way for a political camp to use Drudge against himself. More than any reporter out there he’s a dupe for operative manipulation. That much is evident.
May 15th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Amen to that! And the real crux of the matter is that Drudge doesn’t care that much. He’s enjoying what he’s doing and wants to do it for as long as he can, and stopping short of breaking the law or risking another serious lawsuit, there really aren’t too many checks and balances that he feels apply to him.
What really sticks in my craw is that he’s portrayed as the controller. He has influence; I’ll grant that. But I think this whole agenda paranoia is an intellectually lazy alternative to critical media analysis.
May 16th, 2007 at 4:19 am
His agenda is apparently to give good press to the Romney campaign while damaging the rest. Come to think of it, I can’t think of a single instance where he hasn’t framed a Mittens story in any light but a sympathetic one. Stay tuned I guess. I wonder what — if any — compensation might be involved?
May 16th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Think about this a little more. Bear with me here…the whole agenda hunt gives Drudge a little more credit than due and oversimplifies the situation. Basically Drudge is an 800-pound gorilla that can do what he wants. He isn’t necessarily interested in the Empire State Building or Fay Wray, or to be King Kong…he just wants to indulge himself without any obstruction to his bananas or the path in front of him. He doesn’t need compensation because he pretty much has what he wants. And I don’t think the passion is for Mitt Romney or making a public difference…it’s a little more simple and personal than that.
May 18th, 2007 at 10:07 am
drudge said something intresting on the radio show last week. When ranting about the Salon story he mentioned that Andrew basically ran the site during the afternoon every day! Is this true? Are all the updates we see from 12-6pm from Breitbart and not from Drudge??
Also i noticed that the links to Politico virtually stopped after the “John Edwards to pull out of race” story that Drudge linked to a few months ago that turned out false. Was Drudge angry at Poltitco for the bad info and stopped linking to them as much?? If anybody knows its you Rego..keep up the good work!!
May 18th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Thanks, Joe. Re: Politico, we’re going to have to wait and see, because Drudge’s links to a specific source can be sporadic. Re: Breitbart, I know that Andrew put in up to 26 hours a week around the time he briefly left Drudge in 2005. Cathy Seipp, a recently deceased reporter who’s a friend of Andrew and had blogged about him, actually posted some unsolicited information on this site around that time confirming when she knew he worked on DR. I don’t know if or how the division of labor has changed since.
I should mention that Drudge’s broadcast in my area got pre-empted last Sunday, so I’m going to be listening to the radio archives online this weekend. If I have any new insight on that, I’ll post it here.