Ever since PJ's own managing editor, Paula Bolyard, gave ur-blogger Matt Drudge a virtual black eye, I've made it a point to visit the Drudge Report once or twice a week, just to keep an eye on lefty cray-cray over there. Today was one of those Drudge days and — as happens almost without fail — I found a cringeworthy instance of the site's increasingly laughable lefty bias.
Before I get to that, here's a quick history of the Drudge Report as a news junky's go-to site.
Since the invention of tabbed browsing almost 20 years ago, I must have spent more than a dozen of them with one browser tab permanently devoted to Drudge. Before then, his site was a more-than-daily visit from the time he broke the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky story that Newsweek had tried to bury. Long before the mainstream media had social media giants to help them hide dirty laundry like Hunter Biden's Laptop from Hell or peddle fiction like Donald Trump's Russia collusion, bloggers like Drudge were able to hold the MSM to account.
The job falls to sites like PJ Media now and, as someone who has been with the company since its 2005 launch, I'm fine with that.
I closed Drudge's perma-tab early in 2016. He was pushing Trump so hard, to the detriment of every other story that concerned me, that for the first time since 1998, there was no point in visiting even once a day. Three years later, I read that the Drudge Report had swung so hard and so fast in the other direction that the constant anti-Trump links — usually highlighted in red, often with the famous animated police siren GIF — that I had to see it with my own eyes.
After a week, I was cured and the perma-tab was closed permanently.
But imagine that: Going from Trump to anti-Trump in nothing flat and pretending that nothing had changed.
Some say Matt sold the Drudge Report to a lefty outfit. Others say he developed a personal grudge. My friend and former boss Roger L. Simon told me once he thinks Drudge might have gotten involved with a progressive woman.
Nobody knows for sure, which is why I've tried in this column to separate Matt Drudge, the man, from the Drudge Report, the proto-blog.
What I do know is this. If the Drudge Report is no longer worth a perma-tab or even just a daily visit, it's almost always worth a laugh — or more of a sad, knowing chuckle for those of us on the right who used to be his fans.
Let me show you the latest example, seen midday on Jan. 11.
Drudge Report has always used the same black, old-school newspaper font and the same ellipses trailing every link. When he REALLY! wants to push a link, he'll hit the Caps Lock key, change the color to red, and add an exclamation mark. It's been that way since 1995. So when I read "SHOCK POLL: Biden Leads Trump In Pennsylvania!" the old-school Drudge reader still buried deep somewhere inside me knew I had to click that link — STAT.
I'm here to tell you it's a BS oversold link to a BS poll.
First off, Quinnipiac polled 1,680 Pennsylvanians who self-identified as registered voters. With the election less than 11 months away, pollsters should be looking at nothing but likely voters. Secondly, the results of the poll aren't what the Drudge Report claimed. Biden garnered 49% support and Trump just 46% — putting the race within the margin of error. So not only did Quinnipiac fail to narrow its pool down to likely voters, but Drudge oversold the results.
This isn't SCREAMING RED FONT news. This is Page 4 news. And Drudge doesn't even have a Page 2.
The old Drudge Report would have known better than that — and I should known better than to open that tab again, even just to get a bitter chuckle.
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