A Florida-based Columbia Journalism Review contributor wanted to find out why the world’s largest online news aggregator, the Drudge Report, stopped supporting President Trump.
Bob Norman writes in CJR that he passed the “Keep Out” signs and snuck onto Drudge’s secreted property near the Florida Everglades to learn the secret of the news mogul’s disaffection.
Pulling up to the entrance after driving on some of Redland’s idyllic tree-domed roads, I expected nothing less than a high-walled bunker. A wooden gate greeted me instead. It was wide open. …
After a brief conversation with an apparent groundskeeper on a golf cart who spoke little English, I knocked on his door with no answer. Then I left.
Norman says that Drudge later told him he was lucky he wasn’t hurt:
“That was you?” he asked with apparent astonishment.
He said he couldn’t make out who it was in surveillance videos, noted that he’d put up “Keep Out” signs on his property for just this kind of occasion, and had even called the police. …
“Ambushing someone on a private property, you can get yourself hurt Bob,” he said. “I’ve followed your career. I watched you on [local Miami television], and I’m surprised you would conduct yourself in that way.”
The reporter never got an answer from Matt Drudge about why he fell off the Trump bandwagon, though he surmises it might have been due to Trump’s failure to “build the wall.”
Here’s what he wrote:
“And Drudge clearly wasn’t pleased when Trump didn’t follow through on some of his campaign promises. This summer he posted a banner headline that slammed Trump for building “no new wall at all!”
In his treatment of the Drudge disaffection, he also painted radio talk host Michael Savage as a “white nationalist” – that’s a new one – and repeated the phony story about Trump calling all illegal aliens (a term of art) “rapists.” Issue yourselves a “dart,” CJR.
He called his interview, such as it was, “tortured” and said:
I told him I was curious about his current thoughts on Trump.
“You and everybody else,” he said.
I noted that he went all in on Trump during the election.
“That was three years ago,” he said.
So what happened? PJMedia reported in December that it appeared the website reportedly had been sold. In August, as Buzzfeed News reported, the business plan and advertising completely switched.
This may be a case of all-of-the-above.
Screenshot/Twitter
At some point, the blue-check-mark “Drudge” Twitter account belonging to the news mogul was emptied of all content. Poof! It was gone. Zero tweets.
Drudge may have quietly sold the news site, signed a non-compete (or something like it) and a confidentiality agreement, promised to be a good boy and stay out of politics to avoid sullying his former site, and gone into hiding from the outside world while he plans his next conquest.
We don’t know.
And neither does CJR.
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