By DEXTER DUGGAN
As 2020 began, Iran shot down a Ukrainian passenger jetliner. Before January had expired, basketball luminary Kobe Bryant, one of his daughters, and a few family friends died in a California helicopter crash.
As August starts, how far in the past those shocking events already seem. What was on the crest of the wave, as a poet once wrote, quickly recedes. But the news cycle rolls on, day after day, year after year.
The guy who dispenses the news always is in business. It’s like the grocer who keeps selling you food. Last week’s apples in your sack aren’t this week’s apples, so you buy some more. And the news hawker never runs out of a product.
For more than 20 years, one of the best-known news-pushing personalities, although ironically one of the most reclusive, has been Matt Drudge. You don’t see him in front of the cameras. His outreach comes through the eponymous Drudge Report, a news aggregator that soon became popular with conservatives because it had a focus missing from dominant, left-wing media.
If people wanted a biased liberal slant on the news, they knew where to get it in particular large newspapers, magazines, and other outlets including online. The Drudge Report offered an alternative instead of an echo. So it grew tremendously.
If dominant media played it straight, there’d be no need for an alternative to balance the journey through unfolding daily events. How could you drive a car safely whose steering wheel kept pulling to the left?
Pro-lifers still gratefully remember when Drudge in 1999 wanted to show the photo on his weekend concurrent Fox News program of preborn baby Samuel Armas during spina bifida surgery at 21 weeks. Samuel’s little hand curiously reached from the womb to grasp a surgeon’s finger.
Pro-abortionists were horrified at this dramatic proof that preborn babies aren’t “clumps of cells.” The abortion-lovers wanted to continue to rip off their limbs without limit — like Joe Biden and his Democrat radicals do today — rather than show any conscience – or show evidence to the public.
Although the photo evidence of pioneering surgery was powerful, angry pro-abortionists of the news culture didn’t let it become “iconic.” Matt Drudge departed his TV program over this censorship.
Giving its own pro-abortion tilt, Wikipedia recalls the incident with some doublethink. Fox News directors viewed Drudge’s foreclosed effort “to be misleading,” Wikipedia says, “because the tabloid photo dealt not with abortion, but with an emergency operation on the baby for spina bifida.”
But no one claimed this was an abortion photo. The picture, however, showed that a preborn baby is as developed at 21 weeks whether he or she is about to receive lifesaving surgery or be ripped apart by a permissive abortionist enjoying so-called constitutional protection to deal out death. That fact was as mentally painful to relentless abortion promoters as it is physically to babies.
As for why Wikipedia characterized a scientific medical photo as “tabloid” is as revealing of a mindset as of prenatal development.
Anyway, the online Drudge Report continued to disturb dominant media for how it revealed what often was lacking in their own coverage, even while they hoped that Drudge would post their stories at his aggregator and bring them lots more clicks.
Among various websites, I used to look at both the Drudge Report and The Washington Post’s at least a few times almost every day — the former for its conservative tilt and the latter to see what was up with the liberals’ prevailing agenda.
Now I hardly look at either of them. More than a year ago, I noticed that the Drudge Report was playing the news much more like a liberal site. I didn’t expect the Drudge Report, as an aggregator, to avoid unfavorable news about President Trump. But I didn’t expect to see it handled the way it was.
Any of the hoaxes and lies against Trump were boosted there as you’d expect at a liberal site. The president or an aide always seemed to be on the verge of being convicted and defenestrated as a traitorous Russian agent or Nazi-style collaborator. So I simply “walked away,” as former Democrats say of themselves these days.
The Post, meanwhile, had grown so frantically, hopelessly left-wing partisan that I pretty much gave up on it, too.
Without asking what my sister, in another state, was following in her online news, I was very interested to learn early this year that she, too, had left the Drudge Report. She told me recently:
“In my search for conservative-friendly news on the web, I used to go to the Drudge page pretty much every day. But I noticed the ‘tone’ of the page started to feel different; President Trump and conservatives in general were getting the usual network-news treatment. The ‘feel’ of giving conservatives a chance, of honestly reporting their thoughts and reasoning without the snide asides of the alphabet channels, was gone.”
Among various sites, she looks at Breitbart.
There’s a new book about Drudge just out that I haven’t read, The Drudge Revolution, by Matthew Lysiak (BenBella Books, Dallas), but it’s sure to attract attention. Anyway, opinions about Drudge’s defection can be strong.
On July 24 the Washington Examiner site posted a video from Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson’s program, with Carlson saying that “if you’ve seen the Drudge Report recently, you know that it has changed dramatically — 180 degrees. Matt Drudge is now firmly a man of the progressive left. At times, his site is indistinguishable from the Daily Beast or any other woke propaganda outlet posing as a news company.”
Noting other dissatisfaction with the Drudge Report, the Examiner mentioned some alternatives including the Bongino Report and Citizen Free Press, the latter run by a blog-master who goes by the name of “Kane.” The Examiner said Kane said his site has had “explosive growth” and quoted him about Drudge and his own Citizen Free Press:
“I think he let his audience down, certainly. As for being an alternative, I don’t think of it as being an alternative to Drudge, I think of it as an alternative to news junkies. The great majority of Drudge readers were news junkies that happened to lean conservative, and to me, that’s what was always the great value of Drudge. Providing a one-stop place where you can find 50 interesting stories. I am filling the void left by Drudge’s considerable shift to the left.”
Another alternative would be Canada Free Press, whose motto is, “Because without America, there is no free world.”
Cancel Culture
The Wanderer asked some of its sources to comment. Two declined. Here are four who replied.
Arizona conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard: “The last 12 to 18 months has seen a real shift, but I’m not sure if it is about ideology exclusively, or if Drudge is just chasing clicks. It has always largely reflected the interests and ideology of one person, so we should not be surprised that it evolves over time into different topics or directions.
“But it is good and healthy that alternatives are popping up to provide more consistent aggregation,” Querard said. “He is still different enough that he gets lots of conservative traffic still, we’re just seeing general frustration start to seep into his readers because it’s not a reliable source for the stuff they’re there for.”
Victor Joecks, an opinion columnist at Nevada’s Las Vegas Review-Journal: “I’ve personally noticed that the Drudge Report has been skewing more liberal over the last year or so. I find myself using it less and less as a result. I don’t need Matt Drudge to find a liberal take on the news.
“I’m not sure what’s happened,” Joecks said. “My two personal theories (that are pure speculation) is that Drudge has secretly sold the site or that he’s so upset about Trump’s lackluster follow-through on immigration policy that Drudge has turned his fire on Republicans.”
Northern California commentator Barbara Simpson: “As for Drudge, I have heard the complaints against the site but personally I have seen no real changes — lots of pro- and anti-Trump, which is typical of all so-called nonpartisan sites. I think because I read so many sites across the Internet, I don’t get riled up about ones I disagree with. Life is too short. It’s par for the course of politics and media today.
Virginian Mary Ann Kreitzer, who runs the Les Femmes — The Truth blog: “What can I say? I stopped using Drudge a while ago. He seems to relish publishing stories with false and misleading headlines. I checked out the site in response to your request for comment and he has a Reuters headline: ‘Republican Senator Tom Cotton calls slavery “necessary evil”.’
“Big problem. Cotton didn’t! He said the founders considered slavery a necessary evil,” Kreitzer said. “Drudge could have posted the story with a different banner, but he chose to keep the lying headline. How would Drudge like it if someone said, ‘Matt Drudge poisoned his dog’ when what he really said is that his neighbor poisoned his dog? I just don’t trust him.
“So I use other news aggregates like Dan Bongino, Epoch Times and for Catholic news, The Wanderer, Catholic Family News, LifeSiteNews, and Canon212,” she said. “Once you lose trust it’s hard to get it back, and I just don’t trust Matt Drudge. . . .
“As for why Drudge flipped? Well, cancel culture can be a big motivator. Who wants to be the target of the Marxist left? They will destroy you if they can. The bigger you are, the more you have to lose. Is that what happened to Drudge? Could be,” Kreitzer said.
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