Home Culture and Society Drudge Report, RIP – Ryan McMaken (06/18/2020)

Drudge Report, RIP – Ryan McMaken (06/18/2020)

Like many people, there was once a time when I visited the Drudge Report multiple times per day. Drudge often had a fun mix of contrarian articles and unusual viewpoints that were hard to find without its help as a curator of articles.

But in recent years, the site has become more or less indistinguishable from a standard mainline legacy media site. It has consistently carried articles and headlines that promote Russiagate hysteria and pro-FBI, pro-CIA positions.

To a certain extent, this wasn’t shocking, since the site has always been bad on foreign policy and had a neoconservative slant in that respect.

But now the Drudge Report consistently leans in favor of COVID lockdowns and promotes panic, authoritarianism, and generally pushes crisis porn on a daily basis. It is now, for all practical purposes, a sister site to CNN.com or The Atlantic.

The only aspect of the site that remains unchanged is its devotion to carrying lurid stories on the topics of pornography, brothels, and Hollywood gossip. Rarely does a week go by, for example, when the Drudge Report doesn’t carry at least one new headline on sex with robots, or perhaps robot brothels. These headlines historically were good for a laugh. But now these headlines, never actually worth a click, are just side by side with standard mainstream media headlines that parrot the views of the CDC, the WHO, or some other group of government “experts.”  In other words, the joke headlines aren’t valuable enough in themselves to warrant a visit to the site anymore.

Why did this happen?

Some claim that Matt Drudge sold the site to others and new editors have taken over. I have no idea if this is the case. It’s entirely possible that Drudge is still the editor but is phoning it in. After all, the problem may simply be that he’s just getting old and lacking in ideas. He may have just lost his touch.

Either way, it’s now safe to ignore the the Drudge Report as a source of any “alternative,” rare, or unusual viewpoints. You’d get pretty much the same content going straight tothe Washington Post.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY POSTED HERE.