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Will people soon be saying about ’90s-style news aggregator the Drudge Report, “Get ‘woke,’ go broke”? This is a relevant question now that Drudge has taken the establishment’s side in the latter’s effort to crush anti-establishment patriots, causing it to lose Web traffic to news-aggregator competitor Whatfinger.com, according to a report.
As CD Media writes, “If you haven’t noticed, the Drudge Report has gone off the rails politically, now firmly in the anti-Trump camp, with daily questionable headlines pushing the anti-Trump narrative of the Left.”
As a consequence, “‘Whatfinger’ has roared upon the scene, and is taking millions of readers from Drudge, due to what those Americans in ‘flyover country’ see as a political betrayal,” the site continues. “Analytics report that Whatfinger grabs about 82% of Drudge readers; when they see the alternative, they switch!”
Whatfinger, which prides itself on its “Relentless Pursuit of Creating The Greatest Aggregate Link News Site On Earth,” is an up-and-coming information source not in thrall to the political correctness that so readily infects media.
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This isn’t just a matter of anti-Trump commentary, either. Whether you love or hate the president or just don’t give a darn, Drudge has long been doing much to empower establishment sources. As Liberty Nation informed last year:
The Drudge Report is Numero Uno for referring traffic primarily to the rogue’s gallery of narrative-driven left-wing media outlets like CNN, the New York Times, and The Washington Post. As a conservative who’s now well versed in the power and money that traffic gives these outlets, one must ask[:] What’s up with that? Why is such a robust website on the right driving so much traffic to the left? Don’t these legacy properties [that] perform palace guard functions for the establishment already have enough influence and power to get there on their own? Do conservatives need to be giving them a helping hand?
A telling infographic at libertynation.com provides a snapshot of the huge volume of traffic referred by Drudge to establishment news sites — 99 million visits to dailymail.co.uk, 87 million visits to news.yahoo.com, 64 million visits to CNN.com, etc.
Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of providing eyeballs for the fake-news media, some of this traffic were directed toward honest outlets such as The New American?
Note that traffic is a website’s lifeblood, equating to influence and income. Feed the beast, and the beast grows. Wither on the vine the knights trying to slay the dragon, the knights get slain. We conservatives already have to deal with Twitter’s shadowbanning, Facebook’s censors, and Google’s blacklists. Et tu, Drudge?
As for Drudge’s anti-Trump coverage, it cannot be overemphasized that this is anti-patriot-movement coverage. Trump is currently the movement’s leader, but the treatment would be no different were his policies pursued by pugnacious pundit and ex-presidential candidate Pat Buchanan — or anyone else thus disposed.
CD Media wonders what’s happening with Matt Drudge, Drudge’s founder and head, theorizing that “maybe it’s arrogance, maybe he’s been turned.” But my sense is that he’s a “conservative” in the way former GOP congressman and now-MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is (was? Or was he ever?) a “conservative.”
Drudge has done good work; for example, rising to prominence in the 1990s by exposing then-president Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal. But breaking a big news story merely reflects, if anything, sleuthing-reporter skills; it doesn’t mean the person is grounded in proper principles. And anyone not rooted to the eternal will sway with the ephemeral.
This truth explains O’Sullivan’s First Law: “Any institution that is not explicitly right wing will become left wing over time,” which itself likely explains Drudge. Not worshipping the timeless damns you to worshipping the times (and maybe even the New York Times!).
The bottom line is that, as writer Blaine Traber put it in June in “Three reasons the Drudge Report is awful,”
1. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not conservative
2. They love mainstream media sources
3. The site is quietly becoming anti-Trump
But Drudge is not so quiet about it anymore with the impeachment con’s birth. And who knows? Maybe Drudge thinks he can buy the statist establishment’s tolerance by kissing its ring. If so, he doesn’t know the political bedfellows he’s choosing.
