View from a Farley The Current Events and Opinion Weblog of Chris Farley

Drudge’s Misleading Coverage

Many people are familiar with the “news” website The Drudge Report. According to Alexa, drudgereport.com is the 551st most visited website on the Internet! I’m sure Matt Drudge is very happy (with his $800,000 a year revenue as of 2003), but he’s in a unique position to influence the minds of visitors to his site. Since I started checking The Drudge Report two years ago, I’ve grown uneasy with the way Drudge manipulates the news.

The Background

Matt Drudge was working as a retail manage at a CBS gift shop in early 1994 when he launched an e-mail subscription “news” service. His contact with the news network allowed him to break stories of which more reliable sources were not yet aware, or were unwilling to report because they lacked authenticity. In 1996, The Drudge Report transitioned to the web format people see today. The website itself has a design that looks like something a beginner HTML coder would have created in the 1990s. The vast majority of the site’s content links to news stories from reliable sources, but Drudge occasionally gets an exclusive, which he investigates himself before writing a short “story.” For example, he broke the Monica Lewinsky story, a feat which helped him gain recognition. Surprisingly often, he breaks a story before anyone else, but he has been wrong in the past, including once when he publicized a claim (later discovered to be a hoax) that Bill Clinton had an illegitimate baby.

The Problem

Most of the time, it’s not his “exclusives” that are biased. Drudge appears to suffer from a selective linking and creativing link titling disorder. Over time, it’s easy to see trends. He has repeatedly linked or shown images of Hillary Clinton aging (he used this image once), while showing headlines about Barack Obama’s successes. Drudge is highly critical of global warming and regularly links to articles about global warming conferences or rallies being held in the snow, while I’ve never known him to link to anything in support of global warming.

Then there are the misleading claims. I was inspired to write this post when Drudge posted a link saying “McCain using GOOGLE to vet VP candidates.” The link is blatantly misleading, as people who read the linked article would know. McCain was asked about his search for a vice presidential candidate. McCain joking responded, “You know, basically it’s a Google.” Either Drudge can’t read, or he’s trying to mislead people. Today, he also linked to an article with the link reading “CLINTONS PUT DRUDGE ON ENEMIES LIST.” If you go read the article, a spokesman says, “There is no list.” This would not be a problem if everybody read the articles, but they don’t. Many people read headlines for a quick glance view of a situation and misleading people is just plain wrong.

Drudge completely abandoned any journalistic standards that he had when he broke the story that Prince Harry was in Afghanistan, putting Prince Harry and his entire unit in danger. While Drudge was not bound by a news blackout in place in England, it would have been appropriate to at the very least inform the British government he was going to publish the story. I personally don’t think he should have published the story in the first place, not because of a legal obligation, but because it was published almost maliciously, had no benefit, and was to the general detriment of Prince Harry and his unit.

Bottom Line

It is deplorable that Drudge has no journalistic standards while running a site that appears to be a news aggregation site. A federal judge summed it up very well (Drudge was sued for claiming Sidney Blumenthal beat his wife then covered it up), “Drudge is not a reporter, a journalist, or a newsgatherer. He is, as he himself admits, simply a purveryour of gossip” (Footnote 18).  While Drudge said that he was nothing more than a “purveyor of gossip”, he should make this clearer, given the high-profile nature of his site.

I wish Drudge could be a more reputable source.  I cannot deny that he has tons of sources and he could be much more effective if he was better at being a decent journalist.

Despite the problems with Drudge’s site, I will still check it everyday. In fact, I checked my history and I looked at The Drudge Report fifty-two times in the past twenty-four hours. I’ve learned to ignore the headlines and read the articles. It pains me to add to his statistics, but he often does have the story before anyone else, and to me, it’s worth it to stay informed.