Free Republic

David Letterman, speaking to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on his show, asked about the Shirley Sherrod incident and took it upon himself to slam Andrew Breitbart. At one point during the interview he asked her “how much time, energy was wasted on this a*shole ****ing around?” Maddow described Breitbart as a “spinoff from Matt Drudge, from the Drudge Report.” Breitbart, indeed, used to serve as an editor of the Drudge Report, but her intentions in mentioning the Drudge Report probably amount to the effectiveness of the site to sway public debate– not to mention millions of viewers visiting per day....

TIME's Mark Halperin implies the Drudge Report is racist for running the headline "Obama Goes Street: Seeking 'Ass To Kick.'" "You know Matt Drudge ... Matt Drudge knew exactly what he was doing with that headline," Halperin said on FOX News' "O'Reilly Factor." "He thought it was cool and hip, but he knew full well that it was provocative and racial ... he knows how to tap into the sentiment of his readers," Halperin added. O'Reilly wasn't buying that criticism of President Obama is based on his skin color.

Journalism can reinvent itself without government 'help' The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is seeking ways to "reinvent" journalism, and that's a cause for concern. According to a May 28 draft proposal, the agency thinks government should be at the center of a media overhaul. The bureaucracy sees it as a problem that the Internet has introduced a wealth of information options to consumers, forcing media companies to adapt and experiment to meet changing market needs. FTC's policy staff fears this new reality. "There are reasons for concern that experimentation may not produce a robust and sustainable business model for commercial...

Drudge Report has a bad habit of linking to and promoting articles written and contrived by anti-Israel AP and Reuters "stringers".Unless Drudge changes it today sometime after this is posted, currently as of this writting there is not a single Israeli account of the interdiction of the so-called "peace-activist" Gaza flotila on the Drudge Report.No links to Jpost, Israel National News, or other Israeli media articles on the incident.The current [ 9:47am EST 05/31/10] page of Drudge Report lists the following headlines on this matter:Israeli commandos storm aid flotilla; 10 killed... Israelis say self-defense; were attacked with knives, sticks, gunfire...France: Profoundly shocked, Europe calls for...

Wow: David Shuster really lets it all hang out on Twitter . . . In current tweets, the MSNBCer accuses Karl Rove of "hypocrisy," calls conservatives "wingnuts," claims Baucus wasn't wasted, and denounces Drudge as "repulsive" for supposedly suggesting otherwise. Excerpts from Shuster's current Twitter feed [screencap after the jump]: * Thank you Wingnuts! By mentioning my tweets, you are bringing more attention to @karlrove hypocrisy * Wingnuts, just because you want to believe something is true does not make it so. Obama wasn't born in Kenya. Baucus wasn't inebriated. * Baucus speech was at 430pm in the afternoon. He...

~ EXCERPT ~ On Tuesday, Matt Drudge ran a headline about the weakening U.S. dollar on his website, Drudgereport.com. In and of itself, that would be unremarkable, except that it was the 18th time Drudge had posted a link to a story about the weak dollar this month. And October was only 20 days old. Clearly, Matt Drudge has developed a fascination with the declining U.S. dollar. “He’s fixated on it,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “There’s no question that Drudge can alter what people are paying attention to.” Market watchers...

... Charges that he has had extra-marital affair. So what? Who cares? I know I'm a little bit late on posting this vanity and I know that some people may read into this thread more than I intended but here goes. I just wish that all the Freepers posting negative remarks about Bill Clinton's sexual escapades would just shut up. The next time I see some Freeper post yet another news story regarding the rumors of Clinton's infidelity, I'm gonna go find and post a picture of the "Aw Jeez" guy. Don't you know that any and all of the...

At the beginning of the summer, the press considered the Drudge Report so influential that its proprietor, Matt Drudge, was thought to be in position to determine the fall election's results. Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith of Politico wrote that he had "an uncanny ability to drive the national conversation" and quoted Mitt Romney's press secretary saying that Drudge "serves as an assignment editor for the national press corps." In a piece titled "How Matt Drudge Rules the (Political) World," Washingtonpost.com reporter Chris Cillizza wrote that Drudge and his site "sit at the junction of politics and journalism in the...

CONGRATULATIONS MATT FROM YOUR FANS ON FR!!!

In 2006, Mark Halperin, then with ABC News, and John Harris, then with the Washington Post, wrote an astute book on U.S. politics titled "The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008." In one of their more provocative -- and widely noted -- assertions, they wrote, "Matt Drudge rules our world." They elaborated over many pages, but their point came down to this: "With the exception of the Associated Press, there is no outlet other than the Drudge Report whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts." In the...

<p>The difference between going through a Sunday as a married woman versus as a single gal is striking. First of all, in my single hood days in D.C., I’d be arriving back at my condo in the wee hours of the morning and would sleep and nurse a hangover for the rest of the day. As a married woman and mom in suburban Maryland, my Sundays are quiet and mainly consist of doing things with my family or around the house. However, during football season my husband and son normally get involved with sports and “NFL Sunday” for the whole day, giving me precious time to myself. During this “precious time”, I read the newspapers, watch news programs on T.V. and other media, and listen to talk radio for the entire afternoon and evening. Until recently.</p>

There's little debate that Matt Drudge and his eponymous website sit at the junction of politics and journalism in the modern media age. SNIP And yet, for anyone who follows the day in, day out nitty-gritty of campaign politics (as we do) it is well worth reminding yourself of how much power Drudge has to push a particular storyline or a broader narrative in the race. SNIP "Drudge has become center court at Wimbledon," said Alex Castellanos, a Republican media consultant and adviser to former governor Mitt Romney's presidential bid. "If it doesn't happen there, it doesn't happen." What explains...

It’s been 10 years since the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. But the way it broke changed the way the news cycle functioned and has had a profound impact on the business of media. In 1998, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff leaked the Lewinsky story to Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report. The story took off from there, and the rest is history. But a decade later, Isikoff said he doesn’t think Drudge is the player he once was. “I’d say he is much less of a factor than he was five years ago,” Isikoff said. “I think he has lost a little bit of...

One current permathread on Big Orange is that Krugman and Obama are feuding or having a vendetta. Which, when you take a step back, is bizarre. That movement conservatives and Villagers like stone Bush enabler William Kristol, like David Brooks, Broderella, and Andrew Sullivan are all good with Obama isn’t even mentioned in passing by Obama’s fan base. And yet those same enthusiasts spend inordinate amounts of time vilifying Paul Krugman, a true progressive who was there for us from the earliest dark days of the Bush regime. Curious. What’s really happening? Krugman doesn’t have a problem with Obama; Krugman...

He hides, but craves attention. He is prurient and prudish, powerful and paranoid, an icon of the right who seems obsessed with making Hillary Clinton our next president. And he has America caught in the grip of his contradictions.

WHEN Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mike Penner revealed in a recent column that he'd soon be changing his name to Christine Daniels, the piece quickly became the No. 1 draw on the newspaper's website. From across cyberspace the readers came. Overwhelmingly, they arrived after spotting this titillating link on a news site called the Drudge Report: "L.A. Times Shock: 'I am a Transsexual Sportswriter.' " Hard not to click on that one. "I knew this would play big in Los Angeles, but I was getting e-mails from Australia, Canada, Turkey, England, France, all across Europe," the veteran sportswriter says. By...

John McCain's "Bomb Iran" scandal almost never happened.  The reporters covering the Murrells Inlet, S.C., rally last month, where McCain jokingly parodied the old Beach Boys song "Barbara Ann" with the words "Bomb Iran," didn't think the joke was news. Only one writer, Scott Harper, from the local Georgetown Times, mentioned it in his story, and he relegated it to the 17th paragraph. "I didn't think Jay Leno would be talking about it," he said.  The Associated Press reporter on-site ignored the joke altogether, and focused his story on McCain's pledge to brief the public about Iraq on a biweekly...

Barack Obama commands respect while Hillary Clinton overacts. Plus: John Edwards' disappearing act, Mary Shelley debunked, and Ann Coulter's gender weirdness. Nerves, nerves, nerves: The contenders in both parties for the 2008 presidential nomination have been acting like skittish race-track thoroughbreds rearing and shying as their handlers try to shove them into the gates. Each campaign is super-concerned about its candidate getting distracted, winded or making a crippling misstep. What in tarnation was the Hillary Clinton camp thinking when it threw a tantrum about Hollywood producer David Geffen making a few critical remarks about her to a fagged-out media scold?...

The video sharing site YouTube, just recently purchased by Google, has once again allowed a band of determined users to censor something they don't like.The latest casualty is a a controversial spoof political ad by a Republican filmmaker David Zucker (producer of such films as "Scary Movie 4," "Airplane," among others) which depicts former secretary of state Madeline Albright, a Democrat who served in the Clinton administration, acting as a maid, servant and cheerleader for Islamic terrorists and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. After the Republican party declined to run with it, the ad was sent to Matt Drudge...

It's far too early to write any obituaries for Universal Pictures' "King Kong." As of Tuesday, the end of its first two weeks in release, Peter Jackson's remake had amassed $128 million domestically and $153.6 million abroad, for a combined worldwide haul of $282.1 million. With those numbers, it's just about halfway home to recouping its $207 million production costs, give or take the added millions spent on marketing as well as the participations earmarked for Jackson. Still, the fact that "Kong" didn't automatically prevail as king of the jungle -- but instead has found itself in a day-to-day battle...