Posted on 12/16/2021 3:43:26 AM PST by Kaslin
About a decade ago I’d heard all sorts of rumors about Matt Drudge, many from friends who were in positions to know or at least suspect, and none of them were good. I remember thinking if those rumors were true, and they were proven and exposed, that would do some serious damage to conservatism. Thankfully, it didn’t come to that. Drudge wasn’t destroyed from without, it was destroyed from within, by Matt himself. Thankfully, it happened long after he and his website mattered.
I still don’t know if those rumors are true, but Matt Drudge no longer matters. Even the concept of the Drudge Report doesn’t matter. And that’s great news for conservatives.
At its core, the Drudge Report was a cult of personality – a portal designed to elevate Matt Drudge. Why else name the site after himself? People who name their websites after themselves are, I’d say without exception, egomaniacs. Anyone think Arianna Huffington is a joy to work for or has a good, self-deprecating sense of humor? Every single person, on our side or theirs, with a “news” website with their name in it is an egomaniac who couldn’t give a damn about you. The louder they protest, they more desperately they’re trying to hide the truth.
Drudge lead that pack. Created it, as a matter of fact. Now, pretenders spend most of their time promoting their own eponymous sites on social media and various airwaves, pathetically making themselves the content, or selling out to other companies and running off with the cash as their house of cards they built collapses behind them. HuffPo is nearly worthless while Arianna isn’t missing a single meal, for one example.
Now the Drudge Report doesn’t matter. Not because one of these other horrible people, these egomaniacs, came up with an alternative shrine to themselves that replaced it, but because dozens, if not hundreds of actual news outlets replaced it.
You don’t need to go to Drudge to find out what’s happening, unless you really care about what Grace Jones or Rex Reed are up to. You can get exactly what Drudge used to give you from Townhall, the Daily Caller, the Washington Free Beacon, Washington Examiner, American Greatness, Real Clear Politics, and so many more that if I listed them all this column would be a book.
Nothings slips through the cracks anymore because there aren’t cracks anymore to slip through. Conservative media filled them all.
Moreover, the one thing that made Drudge invaluable is he used to weed through a long news story in, say, the New York Times that was as liberal as the day is long and pick out the news nugget they buried in there that either undercut their thesis or damaged the left. Matt would make that nugget his version of their headline and link to their story. Now, since the invention of Twitter, literally everyone can do that.
Tweets from people you’ve never heard of and will never meet go viral because they read some Times or Washington Post story and noticed something in paragraph 18 or so, screen captured it, sent it out and people noticed. For that story, in that instance, that random person was the Drudge Report, and in a way that was more immediate and impactful than the old one.
The Drudge Report and every aggregation website copying, or attempting to copy, what Matt did is irrelevant now. Sure, they still get traffic, habits are hard to break, but they’re irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
It used to be that getting a Drudge link was killer for web traffic, now it’s a bump compared to what it once was. And none of the other wannabe sites come close, even to that bump.
There simply is no need for Drudge or the pretenders, monuments to ego have outlived their usefulness. Sure, they promise they’re only doing it for the good of this or that, but they’re lying. If there weren’t money in it they wouldn’t have done it. It’s always the people who say they don’t care about money the loudest who do the most for any amount of it, isn’t it?
The success of conservative news outlets has made the original that inspired them, and all the wannabes after, irrelevant. None of those successful conservative sites would exist were it not for Drudge, and their success is what is ultimately ruining Drudge. Do you think that site would have changed to be a left-wing pit, which is easy and lazy, if there was still a need for what it used to do? Good riddance, I say, we’re better off without the real thing or the pretenders.
It remains one of the largest link aggregators for news around with a reach many orders of magnitude larger than tiny websites like FR.
Never was into it.
Although I listened to his radio show.
Never, ever went to the old Drudge and have no future intentions of ever going to Drudge whether in its current state or a future state, ever.
Thanks for the perspective.
I don’t tweet, and have a general feeling that FR is not only small but in some ways smaller than it once was, but it is my primary news source for better or worse.
I'm pretty sure that's how I found FR back in the late 90s when I would pop in to just look and not post anything.
In 2004 when I semi-retired I had more time and started posting.
Also, I dumped drudge when he started to get openly liberal, and have not missed the service, at all.
I use Liberty Daily but there are so many paid services attached to them that I just view with a flyover.
Many, many moons ago the Drudgereport altered its programming to ‘refresh’ every 15-30 seconds. So it ‘appears’ in the website stats that everyone is clicking and clicking and clicking, even if all you want to do is look at the homepage. Soon after, Drudge began announcing just how many people were clicking and clicking and clicking. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Fyi, I never heard of Drudge until I got on FR. Found FR through Robby Noel on 1360 KHNC out of Johnstown CO.
Any article by an author that hints and teases “rumors” but doesn’t say what they are is a sign that the author is full of sh*t.
My father(the late freeper BBPark) and I did the same. Drudge started to fade when Rush stopped plugging him about 12... 13 years ago. And personally, I totally wrote him off for being a never Trumper...
Bump!
I lurked for many years until finally I signed up to post. I attempted to sign up at FR booth at the Texas GOP convention the year that Rick Perry first ran for Governor on his own. Some how, I never got that to work.
Years ago I had Drudge as my browser’s home page. Not anymore, not for 2-3 years bow.
He gets credit for inventing a genre, but, even if he hadn’t made that hard left turn, the marketplace has passed him by.
My first stop in the AM, even before brealfast, is now FR, followed by Breitbart, Epoch Times, CTH, and a long list of others.
Thank you Algore, for giving us the Innertubes.
I would go there occasionally, along with LGF and another site I can’t think of at the moment. Just as with FR, I found it from my participation in the old NewsMax Forum.
Matt who?
You are comparing apples and oranges. Free Republic is not just a news aggregator. Posters share opinions and related news, Drudge never did. We have some very wise people on FR. And we can discuss events freely, there's no censoring here.
I would watch a 3 hour sit down between Drudge and Joe Rogan to get the “WTF happened to you?” details.
Drudge went from Alex Jones to Bill Kristol in the span of less than 1 year. What kind of cash or TBI would that take?
Drudge’s radio show was some of the most memorable momemts in Media.
Like during Katrina, he said New Orleans was screwed on Sunday Night, and it wasn’t until Tuesday afternow that the MSM said that. (Monday MSM was all “phew, New Orleans dodged a Bullet!” )
No censoring.. oy gevalt.
Each year right around Christmas Drudge would boast on his site about how many added hits he had to his website thanking all the readers.
Since it became obvious he had turned anti-Trump I suspected a lot of conservatives had dropped the site so I waited and watched closely around Christmas this past year as I suspected due to dropping popularity we would just simply see no response about traffic hits and readership.
I was right and a little side of me smirked inside about the decline of the site. 😏
Liberty Daily is funny and satirical with conservative bias.
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