The Drudge and Switch

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has an blurb a few days ago noting something posted on the Drudge Report recall election night that I also noticed. At a bit after seven, before polls had closed, Matt Drudge posted a headline indicating that early exits confirmed a Scott Walker victory.

As he is merely a link aggregator with out any original content, and as I was interested in the early exit information, I clicked through to an AP article regarding the election. I scanned through briefly, unable to locate the polls he was referring to. I read more carefully, still unable to find them. I finally did a page search for phrases like the words "poll" and "exit," which yielded three of the former and none of the latter, with none of the appearances in any way related to exit polling information. He made it up out of thin air.

Now, it turns out that it didn't matter as Walker won comfortably anyway, the only thing that conservatives seemed to take away from Drudge's total fabrication. This isn't the point. The point is that Matt Drudge knows that more people scan his headlines than actually click through to his links, and so without even producing content, he can provoke entirely different reactions based upon a scan of his top links than would be provoked if the same person read the articles he was linked to.

This case was merely an instance where he fabricated a fact that didn't originate from the linked article, but Drudge has repeatedly distorted headlines to the point that they no longer accurately represent even the gist of the articles they link to, and has used the aggregation of unrelated stories to push media narratives that aren't backed up by any kind of fact. Half the time he might as well be linking to Justin Bieber music videos for all the more germane his links are to the point he is trying to get across.

I'll be the first to say that the Drudge Report has its uses. Matt clearly has a mole in the New York Times newsroom, and picks up their scoops before they post on their site. He also provides occasional excellent primary source journalism, albeit just a few hours before everyone else jumps on board, such as breaking the Biden VP selection back in 2008. This is why he's on my list. But by and large the man is a shameless propagandist, and anyone who believes anything his headlines say without clicking through to verify probably  shouldn't be trusted to tie their shoes.