I like the Drudge Report, but when I read it I don't think I'm visiting some sort of Conservative Mecca. To me, Matt Drudge is a News Junkie who uses the internet to create a low-cost, digital newspaper. But hey, maybe I'm wrong.
So to test my hypothesis, I chose a random, easy to remember time (9:19 am on 9/19/19) and decided to find out the sourcing on all Drudge articles. I believe I will find a split of Right and Left voices. I think the reason that Drudge is called a right-winger is because he gives voices to writers on both sides of the aisle (and the left does not appreciate equal time). As a free speech site, we hope that our theory pans out.
Well, let's start at the heading.
3 stories:
Sources:
Yahoo News
Yahoo News
CNBC
Sources:
Time
Daily Mail (UK)
Global News (Canada)
AP News
That's a nice cross section of voices for the headlines. But let's get down to the nitty gritty and delve into the stories.
Column I Sources:
MSN
Politico
Deadline
Politico
The Hill
NBC News
USA Today
Observer
KTLA - Los Angeles
Bakersfield.com
Mirror (UK)
The Smoking Gun
Wall Street Journal
Observer
SF Gate (San Francisco)
Column II Sources:
AccuWeather
AccuWeather
CNN
ABC News
Daily Caller
FoxNews
Phys.org
CNN
CNN
The Sun (UK)
Reuters
The Wall Street Journal
CNET.com
Yahoo News
Yahoo News
CBS News
The Times (UK)
Column III Sources:
The Wall Street Journal
The Hollywood Reporter
The New York Post
Breitbart
The Atlantic
Miami Herald
Yahoo News
FoxBusiness
Nextgov.com
Observer.com
MSN
The Daily Star (UK)
Forbes
Yahoo News
But the Drudge Report is mostly a website of links.
I just sourced over 50 articles and what you got was a nice cross section of voices from different angles. Left, right, U.S. and foreign. Even CNN is used a number of times. Can you imagine FoxNews using CNN as a source?
Want me to continue down the page?
Center Column Sources
Washington Times
CNBC
CNBC
Politico
Axios
Yahoo Finance
Reuters
Alright, alright, that's enough. You can clearly see the breadth and depth of the sourcing. I can use the Drudge Archives to choose any time, any day, and you'll have similar across the board representations.
Critics counter that you can see the story, but not the source. That's a criticism? I hate to tell you, but that's the ultimate in Free Speech. If the link is intriguing, you may read a story from a source you may or may not have gone to on you own.
Let's use an imaginary story as an example. You see this:
You're Homophobic If You Don't Support a Pansexual James Bond and decide to click on the link.
Drudge let's you, the reader, make the decision on the merits of the story. You find out the source is The Daily Beast. Using the example above, you could have one of a number of reactions.
Hmmm, maybe I am homophobic, I need to re-think my belief system.
-or-
That writer at The Daily Beast is insane.
-or-
This is what passes for news in 2019?
-or-
Time to re-evaluate the sexuality of all of our Fictional Heroes.
Drudge is not Rush Limbaugh, mocking and poking fun at the Daily Beast. Hell, he's more principled than Fred Hunt who also likes to occasionally take a run at Daily Beast writers. Matt Drudge is a man not an algorithm. There does not seem to be a corporate philosophy at the Drudge Report
Don't get me wrong, Drudge is not above certain trends, he seems to like stories about retiring to Central America and the advances of sex robots, but he and his team seem to focus on the news of the day.
Before Beacon of Speech, I was strictly a CNN man. But the older I get, the more I notice CNN's, uh, how should we state this nicely?
Predispositions.
So now the Drudge Report is one of my first stops for the news of the day. As a business model, I have often thought of pitching myself as a minor league version of the Drudge Report using only blogs.
But I'm not a very good businessman.