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Origins Drudge began publishing his email-based Report from an apartment in Hollywood, California using his connections with industry and media insiders to break stories sometimes before they hit the mainstream media. He maintains the news website from a condominium in Miami Beach, Florida. Drudge's reports were electronically syndicated by Wired News from November 1996 to May 1997; AOL carried his reports until 1998. He began his website in 1997 as a supplement to the email reports but eventually stopped the email reports in favor of exclusively updating his website. Drudge first received national attention in 1996 when he broke the news that Jack Kemp would be Republican Bob Dole's running mate in the 1996 presidential election. In 1998, Drudge again made national waves when he broke the news that Newsweek magazine had information on an inappropriate relationship between "a White House intern" and President Bill Clinton (the Monica Lewinsky scandal), but was withholding publication.• After Drudge's report, Newsweek published the story. In addition, Drudge was the first to announce Connie Chung's departure from CBS News, Jerry Seinfeld's million dollar contract, and John McCain notifying his staff that he had decided to run for president in 2000. Content The website has a simple design, consisting of a banner headline and a number of other selected headlines in three columns. These linked stories are almost always hosted on the external websites of mainstream media outlets. The rest of the site is filled with links to media outlets and a number of columnists. Although the site initially featured very few images, it is now usually illustrated with five or six photographs. Generally the images are also hosted on other news agencies' servers. The Drudge Report site sometimes includes stories authored by Drudge himself, usually two to three paragraphs in length. These stories generally break a rumor concerning a story that is about to break in a major magazine or newspaper. Drudge also occasionally publishes Nielsen, Arbitron, or BookScan ratings, internal email messages, or early election exit polls that are otherwise not made available to the public. Charges of bias Though Drudge is widely seen as a conservative news outlet, a UCLA political scientist published a study of media bias in December 2004• which found -- based on a comparison of articles linked to by Drudge with Congressional voting records -- that the Drudge Report leans "left of center, compared to the average American voter", which the researcher also found to be true in the newspapers he studied.• Drudge has said his politics more accurately reflect libertarianism. For example, he is often critical of the Federal Communications Commission's regulation of indecency, the USA PATRIOT Act, the prevalence of hidden cameras in public places, of an increased and visible presence of police, and of attempts to limit online file-sharing. Errors at the Report The Drudge Report ran a story saying that incoming White House assistant Sidney Blumenthal beat his wife and was covering it up. Drudge retracted the story the next day, saying he was given bad information. Drudge told ''Salon'' magazine that "I seemed to have about 80 percent of the facts" about the Blumenthal report.• In 2001, Blumenthal dropped his lawsuit after agreeing to a settlement which required Blumenthal to pay cash to Drudge's attorneys if Drudge did not file a counter-suit.• Archives of older reports are generally not easy to find. A number of reports from 1995 to early 1997 are available in the Usenet archive provided by Google Groups. A more extensive archive of the website is provided by Drudge Report Archives, which claims to have taken and stored snapshots of the Drudge Report homepage every two minutes since mid-November 2001. Traffic In the year of 2005, Drudge reported 3,641,002,163 visits to his website. Alexa Internet reports that of every 10,000 page views online, approximately 1 is of the Drudge Report.* Alexa also shows that for every 500 people online each day, 2-3 visit the Drudge Report. In October, 2006, Washington Post editor Leonard Downie, Jr., speaking at the Online News Association's annual convention in Washington, D.C., stated "Our largest driver of traffic is Matt Drudge."• Parody sites Notes | ||||||||||
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