By Ruth King on February 15th, 2022
https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/15/drudge-is-dead/
What exactly has happened to the formerly must-read Drudge Report?
It may seem like yesterday to old Washington hands, but it was actually more than a quarter-century ago that a manager of a gift shop in a television network building in greater Hollywood, a 20-something with a thirst for movie star gossip, signaled the end of the establishment media’s chokehold on the American public. He started an amateurishly formatted website featuring links to important but under-the-radar online articles, to go along with his own mysteriously obtained scoops.
It was, let us never forget, Matt Drudge who broke the Monica Lewinsky story that led to Bill Clinton’s presidential impeachment and Senate trial, only the second in American history. Shortly before Drudge dropped his bomb, in an exquisite self-indictment of media bias and protectiveness of Democrats in power, Newsweek, then a half-century-old journalistic institution whose huge Washington bureau was near the top of a high rise on Pennsylvania Avenue a half block from the White House, killed its exclusive story revealing the sex scandal. It had been the work of Michael Isikoff, a famously aggressive – and left-leaning – veteran Washington reporter.
Yet today, it is the Drudge Report that is Newsweek.
The Drudge Report might quaintly sport the same typeface it used in the early days of the Internet, but on Sunday and then all day and all evening Monday, a story of Lewinskyesque scale rocked the nation’s capital.
In a court submission last week, Special Counsel John Durham alleged, as Fox News put it, “that lawyers from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign … paid to access servers belonging to Trump Tower and later the White House in order to establish an ‘inference’ and ‘narrative’ to bring to federal government agencies linking then-President Trump to Russia.”
Durham, probably the most straight-shooting, apolitical lawyer in the federal government, now years into an exhaustive probe, revealed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign sought out both the FBI and the CIA in peddling lies that Trump was colluding with Russia, so as to get every news outlet it could to keep that false story at the top of the news during the 2016 campaign, and then, when that failed, to use it to cripple the Trump presidency.