drudge report credibility

Media Bias Update: Drudge Report

By Julie Mastrine

AllSides Media Bias Ratings are fluid and subject to change as media outlets change over time, or we acquire new information. 

AllSides previously rated The Drudge Report , an American news aggregation website, as having a Right media bias , but in August 2018, we conducted an editorial review and changed the Drudge Report to a  Lean Right media bias .

An editorial review is a key media bias rating methodology for AllSides. It means the AllSides editorial staff has reviewed the works of this source and come to a consensus on its media bias. Our editorial reviews are always conducted by a variety of individuals who have biases ranging from left to right. Learn more about  AllSides media bias rating methods .

Changing The Drudge Report's AllSides Media Bias Rating

Bias-leaning-right.png.

While The Drudge Report is often considered to be Far Right or very conservative, during the editorial review for The Drudge Report, the AllSides team noticed that the Drudge Report regularly features news stories that are being mostly covered by Left outlets. The Drudge Report often aggregates stories from outlets with a Left media bias, including The Huffington Post , The Washington Post , NBC , and more. While the Drudge Report does feature news stories and articles from Left sources, it also features lots of stories from sources with a Center, Right, Lean Right media bias, including Fox News , The Wall Street Journal , and Breitbart .

Notably, upon first looking at the Drudge Report, at least one member of the AllSides team initially thought that the Drudge Report might warrant a Lean Left or Center bias. This initial instinct is consistent with a  2005 UCLA study  which found the Drudge Report has a Lean Left media bias.

"One thing people should keep in mind is that our data for the Drudge Report was based almost entirely on the articles that the Drudge Report lists on other Websites," said study author Tim Groseclose, the study's lead author, formerly faculty at UCLA and currently Adam Smith Chair at George Mason University's Mercatus Center. "Very little was based on the stories that [conservative political commentator]  Matt Drudge himself wrote. The fact that the Drudge Report appears left of center is merely a reflection of the overall bias of the media."

Criticism About The Drudge Report's Media Bias

The Drudge Report has been criticized heavily in the past for running stories that were  hoaxes, poorly sourced, or unfactual , including a conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen, a hoax about a former prostitute who claimed her son was fathered by Bill Clinton, and a false statement that an undocumented immigrant started the October 2017 Northern California wildfires.

The AllSides editorial team noted that the Drudge Report often uses sensational stories or language in its headlines and the stories it chooses to feature. The AllSides staff expressed serious concerns about the Drudge Report publishing sensationalist or  fake news .

According to a  2014 Pew Research Study , the clear majority of the Drudge Report's audience (74%) is right-of-center (by comparison, 26% of all Pew panelists were right-of-center).

Do you agree with the AllSides Media Bias Rating for The Drudge Report? AllSides is made better when people like you vote. Rate the media bias of the Drudge Report .

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The Drudge Report is a news aggregation website founded by Matt Drudge. It is often considered conservative.

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Table of Contents

• Who Drives Traffic to News
• Google Drives Most Users
• Facebook Is Becoming Increasingly Important
• How Users Interact With News
• Where Users Go When They Leave
• Google: Parasite or Provider?
• The Importance of the Home Page
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Before Google or Facebook, an early major driver of Internet traffic was the Drudge Report. The site, founded by Matt Drudge, first gained national recognition during the Clinton presidency for posting insider information about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Two decades later, while Drudge is still a small scale operation, it remains, according to the data, an influential driver of traffic to top news sites. The Drudge Report ranked as a driver of traffic to all but six of the top sites studied. And, more striking, it ranked second or third in more than half (12), outpacing Facebook.  

In some cases, Drudgereport.com is an extremely important traffic driver. While Facebook never drove more than 8% of traffic to any one site, for instance, Drudgereport.com provided more than 30% of traffic to mailonline.co.uk (the British newspaper site the Daily Mail), 19% of the traffic to the NYPost.com, 15% to Washingtonpost.com and 11% to Boston.com and FoxNews.com.

In other words, the Drudge Report’s influence cuts across both traditional organizations such as ABC News to more tabloid style outlets such as the New York Post. What’s more, Drudge Report drove more links than Facebook or Twitter on all the sites to which it drove traffic.

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Right-Wing Media Are in Trouble

The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing; it’s utterly collapsing.

As you may have heard, mainstream news organizations are facing a financial crisis. Many liberal publications have taken an even more severe beating. But the most dramatic declines over the past few years belong to conservative and right-wing sites. The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing.

This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting , a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media. (February is the most recent month with available Comscore data.) Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report , the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist , founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent. (The site’s CEO and co-founder, Sean Davis, called that figure “laughably inaccurate” in an email but offered no further explanation.) FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing “only” 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago.

Some amount of the decline over that period was probably inevitable, given that 2020 was one of the most intense and newsiest years in decades, propping up publications across the political spectrum. But that doesn’t explain why the falloff has been especially steep on the right side of the media aisle.

What’s going on? The obvious culprit is Facebook. For years, Facebook’s mysterious algorithms served up links to news and commentary articles, sending droves of traffic to their publishers. But those days are gone. Amid criticism from elected officials and academics who said the social-media giant was spreading hate speech and harmful misinformation, including Russian propaganda, before the 2016 election, Facebook apparently came to question the value of featuring news on its platform. In early 2018, it began deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members. In 2021, it tightened the tap a little further. This past February, it announced that it would do the same on Instagram and Threads. All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites. The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sites—such as Slate (which saw a 42 percent traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after losing its two most prominent writers)—but the impact appears to have been the worst, on average, for conservative media. (Referral traffic from Google has also declined over the past few years, but far less sharply.)

Adrienne LaFrance: Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand journalism

Unsurprisingly, the people who run conservative outlets see this as straightforward proof that Big Tech is trying to silence them. Neil Patel, a co-founder (with Tucker Carlson) of the Daily Caller , told me that the tech giants want “to crush any independent media that was perceived to have been helpful to Trump’s rise.” Patel calls this a form of “Big Tech–driven viewpoint discrimination” that “should scare any fair-minded individual.”

A simpler explanation is that conservative digital media are disproportionately dependent on social-media referrals in the first place. Many mainstream publications have long-established brand names, large newsrooms to churn out copy, and, in a few cases, large numbers of loyal subscribers. Sites like Breitbart and Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire , however, were essentially Facebook-virality machines, adept at injecting irresistibly outrageous, clickable nuggets into people’s feeds. So the drying-up of referrals hit these publications much harder.

And so far, unlike some publications that have pivoted away from relying on traffic and programmatic advertising, they’ve struggled to adapt. Rather than stabilizing amid Facebook’s new world order, traffic on the right has mostly continued south. Among the big losers over the past year are The Washington Free Beacon , whose traffic was down 58 percent, and Gateway Pundit, down 62 percent. Compare that with prominent mainstream and liberal sites, which, although still well below their 2020 heights, have at least stanched the bleeding. Traffic to The Washington Post and The New York Times from February 2023 to February 2024 was essentially flat. Slate ’s was up 14 percent.

For conservative media publishers, the financial consequences of such a steep decline in readership are hard to know for certain. None of the best-known names publicly reports revenue figures, and many are supported by rich patrons who may not be in it for the money. But the situation can’t be good. Digital media still rely on advertising, and advertising still goes to places with more, not fewer, people paying attention. Traffic also drives subscriptions.

More broadly, the loss of readership can’t be helpful to the ideological cause. Top-drawing sites like the conspiratorial Gateway Pundit and Infowars help keep the MAGA faithful faithful by recirculating, amplifying, and sometimes creating the culture-war memes and talking points that dominate right and far-right opinion. Less traffic means less influence.

Paul Farhi: Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level event’?

The Daily Caller ’s Patel insisted that faltering traffic alone isn’t a death sentence for the onetime lords of the conservative web. With the addition of a subscription service and tighter financial management, the Daily Caller ’s financial health is solid and improving, he said. Outlets like his own can still succeed with people who “have lost trust in the corporate media and are actively seeking alternatives.”

The trouble is that there are now alternatives to the alternatives. The Righting’s proprietor, Howard Polskin, pointed out to me that the websites that dominated the field in 2016—Fox News, Breitbart, The Washington Times , and so on—are no longer the only players in MAGA world. The marketplace has expanded and fragmented since then, splintering the audience seeking conservative or even extremist perspectives among podcasts, YouTube videos, Substack newsletters, and boutique platforms like Rumble. “There’s a lot of choice,” Polskin said. “Even if [the big] sites went out of business tomorrow, there are a lot of voices still out there.”

The DIY ethic is embodied by the likes of Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, Steve Bannon, and Carlson, who became conservative celebrities while working for established media organizations but have maintained their profiles after leaving them in disgrace. Since being fired by Fox News last year, Carlson has moved his contentious commentaries and interviews (including one with Vladimir Putin) to X. Kelly has come back from a messy divorce with NBC in 2019 (which followed an unhappy exit from Fox News in 2017) to host a massively popular podcast. O’Reilly, likewise forced out of Fox in 2017, has kept talking via newsletters, video streams, and weekly appearances on the NewsNation cable channel. And Bannon, the former Trump consigliere who left Breitbart , which he founded, after publicly criticizing the Trump family, has gone the podcaster route himself; his War Room podcast was ranked as the leading source of false and misleading information in a broad study of the medium by the Brookings Institution last year.

The precipitous decline in traffic to conservative publications raises a larger and possibly unanswerable question: Did these operations ever really hold the political and cultural clout that critics ascribed to them at their peak? Recall the liberal anger in 2020 when Ben Shapiro was routinely dominating Facebook’s most-engaged content list, generating accusations that Facebook’s algorithm was favoring right-wing posts and pushing voters toward Trump. Yet Joe Biden went on to win the election easily, and Democrats overperformed in the 2022 midterms. Now, as conservatives cry that Big Tech has crushed their traffic, Trump is running neck and neck with Biden in the polls, even with a legal cloud hanging over him and shortfalls of campaign cash. Maybe who wins the traffic contest doesn’t matter as much as it once appeared.

Support for this project was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Matt Drudge Logs Off

The drudge report has become a conformist shadow of its formerly bratty, oppositional self. why.

It was the kind of story that would once have had Matt Drudge deploying font sizes that newspapers used to reserve for declarations of war. On Oct. 14, Twitter and Facebook blocked users from spreading a New York Post article alleging that Hunter Biden had brokered meetings between his father, then the vice president of the United States, and executives at a Ukrainian energy firm where the younger Biden held an $80,000-a-month sinecure. The Post ’s article included photos of what appeared to be an exhausted and intoxicated-looking Biden in various states of undress.

Yet the controversy over tech companies restricting the spread of a story unflattering to the Democratic presidential contender was nowhere to be seen in the upper half of The Drudge Report —once the most coveted and agenda-setting real estate in right-of-center media. “RECORD TURNOUT ALARMS REPUBLICANS... BIDEN +7 GA,” screamed the top headlines on Oct. 15.

“People have noticed that Drudge has basically become a liberal site over the past two years,” a senior figure in conservative media told me that week.

“Liberal” might be a stretch, but it’s hard to argue with the claim that The Drudge Report has changed over the past few years. At the very least, it became an anti-Trump site. “YOU’RE FIRED!,” the top story on Drudge read on Nov. 7 when Joe Biden’s Electoral College win was first projected, appearing above a full page of links celebrating the former vice president’s victory—Drudge screenshotted the headline in a rare tweet that same day . During the campaign, the site had touted any and all bad news for Drudge’s once-preferred candidate and sometimes-host at the White House —a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by the Media Critic-in-Chief.

“Our people have all left Drudge,” the president tweeted on Sept. 14. “He is a confused mess.”

Drudge has always been an enigma, but aspects of Trump’s critique appear to be accurate. The Drudge Report once cycled through 40-50 links in a single five-hour period. The page is now updated only once or twice a day and almost never reacts to breaking news, as if it’s being run by someone who simply doesn’t care anymore. Traffic has reportedly lagged, with Comscore data suggesting a 45% plunge in the year before this past September. In the glory days even a midpage Drudge link could pull a million views; the number is now down to the high tens of thousands. Drudge pulled the report’s app from Apple’s and Google’s app stores, only to later link to it in the Drudge sidebar after switching ad brokers without explanation in mid-2019. And unlike in past years, when the page had multiple staffers working morning and afternoon shifts, Drudge watchers have no idea who, if anyone else, works for the site. The last reported employee was Daniel Halper , a former Weekly Standard editor hired on in 2017, though it is unclear whether he still works there. When reached by Tablet, Halper would not comment on any past or current involvement with The Drudge Report.

In interviews with over a half-dozen various former Drudge associates, about half suggested that the site may no longer be under his control. For these people, politics alone couldn’t explain all the changes at the site. The humor, the oddball stories about sex robots and exorcisms, and the obsession with weather events are all almost entirely gone, along with any pretense to original reporting.

One former confidante cited a story in apparently wide circulation among the small number of people who know or knew Drudge: In the early 2010s, this person said, Drudge fantasized that he would keep the DrudgeReport.com domain forever, and that the site would simply go black one day without explanation. Others asserted that Drudge, reportedly a globetrotting lover of expensive cars, hotels, and real estate, actually would sell for the right amount. Two floated the theory to Tablet that the site had been bought by a liberal billionaire.

One of the few ex-Drudge associates who would discuss him on-record in any depth is the New York literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, a figure of some notoriety for her role in revealing then-president Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Goldberg is a former close confidante who said she had not spoken with Drudge in over five years. She believes he no longer runs the site. “It’s a totally different publication,” she told me. What was the biggest sign? I asked. “Oh, every line of the page,” she replied. “It’s just so obvious that he’s not interested, that somebody else is doing it.” This was just one of several theories volunteered by people who had been close to Drudge, though none was forthcoming with proof. Drudge himself did not respond to multiple requests for comment through both the email address listed on The Drudge Report and an intermediary.

“We don’t think Matt is there anymore,” tweeted the polling company Rasmussen last December. “Word is he sold, just waiting for confirmation. Now that will be a story.” (When reached for comment, Scott Rasmussen said he left the company in 2013 and was not aware of the tweet. Email requests for comment from Rasmussen the company went unreturned.) In mid-October the New York Post reported on “rumors that Drudge is looking for an investor” that were then “sweeping the publishing and financial world,” though without offering any further detail.

Tracy Sefl, a veteran Democratic Party strategist and the point of contact between Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and Drudge, also doubts he’s still in charge. “The writing’s on the wall that it’s not quote ‘him,’” she said. In December of 2017, a nine-song public Apple Music playlist attributed to a Matt Drudge was uploaded and linked to on the semi-official Drudge Report Archives website—with songs including “Let Go” by Connie Constance, “Life Goes On” by E^ST, “Say Goodbye” by Tom Chaplin, and “Easy Way Out” by Other Lives. It concludes with Seal’s “Still Love Remains.”

No one who spoke with Tablet really knows why the once-mighty Drudge Report has changed so much. The truth behind the site that adapted the fast pace and ethical flexibility of tabloid news to the web may be too tangled for a catchy 30-point font headline to capture, as it lies beneath a tangle of obscure family connections, complicated business arrangements, and the personal saga of a shadowy man who made himself an enigma at the height of his fame. But while there is no smoking gun or definitive final answer, there are still scattered clues as to what could be going on behind The Drudge Report’s curtain.

For instance, a 2007 New York magazine article probed the tortured relationship between Matt and his father, Bob Drudge, a Maryland social worker who started an AOL-era website called Refdesk . Robert had sometimes seemed to resent his depressive and occasionally delinquent son, whose life he turned around by buying him a Packard Bell computer in 1994. Refdesk is now owned by a California-based woman named Margaret Otto, who also owns the obscure web marketing company that became The Drudge Report’s sole ad broker in mid-2019—the contact number in the Refdesk “contact” page now redirects to her cellphone.

Perhaps in founding and then selling Refdesk, Bob Drudge created a means by which his son could finally leave behind the online economy of rumor and sensationalism that the younger Drudge had helped bring to life. Maybe Matt Drudge achieved something that’s proven all but impossible for polarizing media and political figures in the internet era: an exit that manages to be mysterious, lucrative, and, by his standards, strangely dignified.

The Drudge Report is one of the most influential websites in history. In 1998, Drudge, who ran a popular newsletter buoyed in part by information he’d dig out of trash cans near his job at the gift shop at CBS studios in Los Angeles, reported that Newsweek had spiked an article about an extramarital affair between Bill Clinton and a White House intern. Being first to a story that resulted in the impeachment of a president was a mere entree: In the 2000s, The Drudge Report became the only news aggregator that absolutely everyone read. A Drudge link had the power to kick off entire news cycles. Editors and reporters across the media often assigned stories and composed headlines as if they were writing for an audience of one.

Drudge’s political beliefs have always been a subject of speculation. But editors often had an idea of the types of stories that would catch Drudge’s attention. Freak weather events, signs of war between the United States and either China or North Korea, and the alleged invasion of undocumented immigrants were Drudge mainstays. Few would dispute the gossip-mongering media curator’s fascination with the salacious side of American politics—images of the future first son smoking a crack pipe in bed are newsworthy in part because of Drudge. Insomuch as Drudge has any clear convictions, they involve an intense suspicion of concentrated power and the glorification of his own free will. “You’re playing in Google’s hell pit,” Drudge—or at least a shadowy outline of Drudge—fumed to Alex Jones, America’s leading conspiracy-theory-based entertainer, during an October 2015 appearance on Infowars , Drudge’s last extended interview. “Make your own place. The internet allows you to make your own dynamic, your own universe. Why are you gravitating towards somebody else’s universe?” In the closest Drudge has come to a mission statement since the early 2000s, he described his website as “a correction to this groupthink.”

Drudge remained an opaque figure since ending his weekly radio show in the late 2000s, giving almost no interviews and making no public appearances. Early in the Trump presidency, he popped up for a 12-minute segment on the heterodox far-right-winger Michael Savage’s radio show to warn that Trump’s passivity in the face of both the Democratic and Republican parties’ various alleged conspiracies against him was endangering his young presidency . Drudge had been an early backer of Trump during the 2016 campaign, and had reportedly been shepherded through the White House by Jared Kushner. Drudge, like Trump, embodied the increasingly blurry barrier between serious politics and playacting, with the public square offering a venue for a lucrative brand of cynical yet spellbinding performance art. But the differences soon outweighed the similarities: As one Drudge confidante noted, the tone on The Drudge Report was hardly funereal when the Republicans were wiped out in the 2018 midterms. The pivot away from Trump began not long after that.

In early 2017, when Drudge and Trump were still on good terms, the news maven’s father, Bob Drudge, sold his website, Refdesk.com , to a California couple. A dry-as-dust compendium of web-based research tools, Refdesk had its moment of fame during the early Bush years when The New York Times reported that it was then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s favorite website. According to filings on the Maryland secretary of state’s website, Refdesk was transferred to Margaret and Adrian Otto, both identified as “director and manager of Refdesk Holdings, LLC,” that January. The California corporation that would assume ownership, the aforementioned Refdesk Holdings, Inc., had been registered in California in December of 2016.

According to her LinkedIn page, Margaret Otto resides in Mountain View, California, the Silicon Valley gold coast town that is home to Google, LinkedIn, and other tech giants. Mountain View is hardly a right-wing bastion—Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder, is a Democratic Party megadonor. It turns out that Drudge’s connections to the big tech “hell pit” are personal. Margaret’s husband, Adrian Otto, is currently the technical director of the office of the chief technical officer at Google, where he helps design and maintain the web giant’s cloud computing systems. Adrian’s Drudge association goes back to the very beginning, according to Margaret: “That was 25 years ago, probably,” she said when asked about her husband’s involvement with The Drudge Report.

As Buzzfeed reported last year, an archived version of the website for HA Hosting, a company Adrian Otto founded and that both Ottos managed, boasted in 2005 that it maintained the servers for the Drudge Report, helping the site to withstand a surge of 36 million unique visitors on election day in 2004 . Otto was also responsible for hosting Andrew Breitbart’s website and was thanked in one of the late Drudge assistant’s books. According to a source with first-hand familiarity with The Drudge Report’s operations, Adrian Otto continued to serve as the site’s de facto webmaster as late as 2019, overseeing its connection to the internet, communicating with its Japan-based developer, and addressing various back-end issues. A reference to an “Adrian” still shows up in the Drudge Report’s source code, at the very bottom of the page: “<!-- END -- DO NOT REMOVE THIS LINE --Adrian --!>” (based on a search of the Wayback Machine, this line first appeared in 2009).

In the summer of 2019, Drudge abruptly ended his relationship with Intermarkets, a Virginia-based web marketing firm and the only ad broker his site had ever used. He replaced it with a company called Granite Cubed whose California corporate filings listed Margaret Otto, the owner of Refdesk, as the entity’s CEO, secretary, chief financial officer, and director. Drudge provided his former ad broker with no explanation for the move and was similarly tight-lipped with Otto. “I have no idea, actually,” she said when asked why Drudge hired her company. “It was very sudden and yeah, I was never informed as to any details.”

I had reached Otto by accident, fairly early in the reporting process. The Refdesk contact page lists a Maryland telephone number, to be used for “reporting emergencies.” Instead of reaching Bob Drudge, whom directory listings place in or near Ocean City, Maryland, the number redirected to the cellphone of Otto, some 3,000 miles to the west. Otto was tight-lipped over the course of our unexpected 20-minute conversation—she was vague in addressing the question of whether it was at least notable that she’d ended up deeply enmeshed in both of the Drudges’ websites. Subsequent attempts to reach her again by phone and email were unsuccessful.

Advertising on one of the world’s most-trafficked news websites was suddenly the responsibility of a one-person shop run by a person who had no apparent experience in the complex world of online advertising but who served as the owner and operator of Bob Drudge’s website and whose husband had long-standing ties to The Drudge Report. Otto’s advertising company eventually changed its name to Voranda, and has only one other listed employee on LinkedIn, aside from Otto. That person worked in digital marketing at the conservative website World Net Daily for eight years, according to LinkedIn.

Otto claimed Voranda currently has six clients, including Refdesk and Drudge. She would not give an exact number of employees at Voranda, saying only that it had “a few.” She did not know who, if anyone, still works at The Drudge Report. “He’s doing a great job, however he manages it,” she said of Matt Drudge. Otto is one person close to Drudge—and the only person I spoke to with a current known business relationship with Drudge—who vouches on-record for Drudge still having an active role in the site.

Otto says that Refdesk Holdings, Inc. owns only its namesake website. Still, Refdesk Holdings, LLC and Refdesk.com, Inc. are two different entities in California. In November of 2019, Refdesk Holdings changed its description in required California state corporate filings from an “online reference site” to a “holding company.” Voranda and Refdesk.com, Inc. also share the same corporate address, a street and suite number that correspond to the location of a UPS store in Mountain View.

There is notable overlap between Refdesk and Drudge that goes beyond the connection to the Otto family. The sites’ ads.txt pages, which list information identifying the online sales channels through which ads are served on a given website, list over 20 direct ad IDs that appear on no other websites. “DIRECT only account IDs shared across on Refdesk/Drudge proves it’s a tight network, with the two orgs pooling data and money within these accounts,” explained Zach Edwards, a California-based data expert, founder of the boutique analytics firm Victory Medium, and longtime Drudge Report watcher. Edwards also observed similarities in the two sites’ application programming interface (API), the software by which the sites interact with other users and pages—they run a similar script to check if visitors are from California, which has more stringent privacy standards than the other 49 states. As Edwards puts it, the sites “have an overlapping data layer, generated from ads.txt, javascript, and the requests that are sent out to third-party companies and the responses those companies send back.”

This is to be expected: Both Drudge and Refdesk share an exclusive ad broker, Voranda. A mid-October search of scores of direct ad ID numbers in the Drudge and Voranda ads.txt page turned up no sites other than The Drudge Report and Refdesk that identified themselves as Voranda clients. Otto claimed that the marketer worked with a handful of other websites, although it is unclear who the company’s other clients might be.

Reclusion gives Drudge something his firebrand media peers never had: an escape hatch.

The Ottos’ Drudge connection is both personal and mysterious: Margaret Otto was active in the Junior League of Los Angeles, and was on the board of the FBI Los Angeles Citizens Academy Alumni Association. In addition to being one of the most prominent tech-side employees at Google, Adrian Otto is a founder of Open Stack, a freely available cloud computing program. There is no hint of a political agenda or of any malfeasance or graft in either person’s background—although there isn’t much of a hint of an interest in web advertising, either.

The online advertising business is both highly technical and nearly unregulated. A broker like Voranda is selling real estate on a given site through a constellation of online middlemen who buy space on behalf of their clients—the companies that actually serve web ads often operate under multiple names and have only a vague existence in the physical world. Sales shops like Voranda are selling more than just real estate, though. Advertisers sometimes also buy the privilege to cookie a site’s visitors and can gain a fairly granular understanding of who its users are.

Above all, online ad brokers are faced with the still-unsolved riddle of how to monetize people’s attention on the internet. If you’re The New York Times , your answer to the defining problem of 21st-century media is to produce quality content and hope that deep-pocketed brands will want to hand over money to access your discerning upper-middle-class customer base. If you’re servicing ads on the trashier end of the web spectrum—on say, an illegal streaming site—the answer is to pack in as many ads as possible, no matter how annoying they are and no matter what they’re for. If you’re selling ads for a site where the audience is reportedly falling and the former readership is puzzled or even openly hostile, one possible answer to your monetization problem is to skirt the boundaries of the existing industry standards—knowing, perhaps, that these standards are extremely vague and can be manipulated without taking on any legal risk, and also that the site’s namesake is too checked out to really care and had loose standards to begin with.

On Oct. 19 of this year, the top line of Drudge included a link to a plagiarized New York Times story hosted on an obscure website called Dnyuz.com . A Dnyuz link led the entire site on Oct. 21. There were multiple Dnyuz stories somewhere on the page for much of October, which is the kind of prime election-season Drudge placement editors might once have traded their expense accounts for—at least back in the days when editors had expense accounts and Drudge was seen as the kingmaker behind the entire American political information ecosystem.

According to a May article in Buzzfeed , Dnyuz is an Armenia-based website that rips off articles from American news outlets without permission. Buzzfeed reported that Google kicked Dnyuz off of its advertising network but did not suspect any business relationship between Drudge and Dnyuz.

Still, websites can profit off of one another without any kind of formal business ties. Some 89% of Dnyuz’s 2 million monthly total visits are from referrals, over 96% of which come from Drudge, according to the analytics website SimilarWeb . In other words, without Drudge, Dnyuz would barely have an audience to sell ads against.

The websites’ businesses turn out to be oddly similar, too. Advertising on the internet works through third-party networks communicating with websites where they serve ads, often through rapid-fire auctions. Each individual ad has its own bidding identification number, which is publicly viewable for any website by opening its domain followed by /ads.txt. These distributions, the vast majority of which are automated, happen through so-called direct ads, which advertisers prefer because they can know with certainty exactly where and when their ads will appear. Less desirable are reseller IDs, which might wind up just about anywhere. Direct ads are meant to be unique to a single corporate owner; reseller IDs can show up on tens of thousands of domains, and are more common on sites that lack the capacity, or the credibility, to fill out their page with direct ads. Thus there is a built-in incentive to disguise reseller ads as direct ads, slapping an expensive label on what is inevitably a much cheaper product. Per an analysis by Rocky Moss, a co-founder and CEO of DeepSee , a company whose programs help web advertisers detect and avoid fraudulent practices among online publishers, Drudge IDs show up across 40,000 different sites, while Dnyuz IDs appear on some 13,000. This is a sign that both organizations at least tolerate and perhaps even profit from this kind of rampant ad mislabeling, according to Moss.

The sites also seem to belong to the same corner of the same ecosystem. While Drudge and Dnyuz don’t share any direct IDs, they do share 13 reseller IDs. Moss found that these IDs are collectively shared by another 15,000 sites. But only 185 of these sites, some 1.2% of them, also share all 13 of the IDs common to Dnyuz and Drudge. Among them are several dozen U.S.-based local news websites, like FremontTribune.com and BillingsGazette.com, along with a smattering of red-meat conservative infotainment-type pages, like CarlHigbie.com, DrewBerquist.com, StacyOnTheRight, and Lifezette.

Edwards noted that several of the ad servicing companies that show up in Dnyuz’s ads.txt also lack much in the way of a clear grounding in physical space, with their sites offering little in the way of contact information—Surgeprice.com “doesn’t even seem to exist.”

Meanwhile, Edwards and Moss found a number of oddities in The Drudge Report’s advertising practices. In mid-October, Moss discovered that The Drudge Report was running a script that would load advertisements that do not render on the site’s publicly visible page. The existence of the hidden ads was further concealed through “detection evasions”—Moss found that the ads disappeared when they were examined with standard web developer tools. Advertisers paid for ads that were supposed to be featured on the site but which remained hidden, with steps taken to conceal the very fact of their being hidden. The advertisers, who are almost always represented by computer programs that make lightning-fast automated bids on available web real estate, are paying to place ads that a user simply never sees. Moss explained the discovery in a YouTube video , which was made after Tablet brought various other irregularities to Moss’ attention:

Drudge seems to have had a habit of gaming the web advertising economy, as Buzzfeed reported last year , citing online advertising industry concerns over the site’s suspiciously fast auto-refresh rate. Online ads are often priced based on the number of users expected to see a given ad. According to a source with first-hand familiarity of The Drudge Report, in early 2018, Google determined that Drudge’s suspiciously fast auto-reload rate artificially inflated the impressions for ads that the web giant was serving to the site. Drudge has manually tinkered with the automatic page refresh rate over the years, according to Edwards, a longtime watcher of the site’s HTML. Frequent automatic reloads were ostensibly meant to make users aware of content updates on the page, but they had the effect of also refreshing the ads, thus driving up the number of eyeballs recorded as seeing those ads. Google declared that it would halve its advertising payout to Drudge, though it’s unclear how badly this cut into the site’s bottom line, or how angry Google was at a website that had generated significant revenue for them over the years. Industry experts estimated The Drudge Report’s revenue at somewhere between $9 million and $30 million over the previous year, Buzzfeed reported in August of 2019 .

The Dnyuz links, mislabeled ad inventory, hidden ads, and recent history of inflating ad impression numbers—even if not illegal—point to a once highly influential news operation whose highest concern is now the extraction of monetary value from its audience. Still more proof of The Drudge Report’s mercenary outlook comes from a review of which websites share a Google ads publisher identification number with The Drudge Report. Google ads IDs and account numbers are typically linked to bank accounts through which websites are paid for advertising space. Buzzfeed identified the alleged owner of Dnyuz partly by looking at common ID numbers shared on Adsense, one of Google’s advertising platforms—the numbers are sometimes shared by sites that have a direct business relationship.

Moss discovered that some 960 websites share one of three Google publisher ID numbers with The Drudge Report. These IDs are associated with three online marketing companies that sell reseller inventory on Drudge: Saamba, PixFuture Media, and Project Agora, Ltd. Drudge is in a continent-spanning, if totally automated, revenue-sharing relationship with these 960 pages, a number of which also share direct IDs with Drudge. Interestingly, scores of the sites that share direct IDs, which typically only recur among sites that have the same publisher, are English-language media outlets based in foreign countries—the Deccan Herald , the daily newspaper of Karnataka, a state in southwestern India, shares some 40 direct advertising ID numbers with Drudge, to take just one of numerous examples. It’s at least theoretically possible the two websites have a common owner. For Moss, it’s likelier that these direct labeled ad IDs are falsified reseller ads, and that the shared Adsense ID indicates that the Deccan Herald and Drudge are cashing in on the same opaque ad market. However this arrangement came to be, it provides yet another monetization shortcut for a site that still claims 20 million page views a day.

Some of The Drudge Report’s unusual activity appears to have begun within the past four months—the hidden ads first showed up in early August. Moss noted “a significant change in the script profile” beginning around the same time late this summer, along with “a stark increase of the average number of ad frames loaded per-session” and an almost total reorganization of the site’s ad stack, which is the range of programs and companies serving ads to Drudge (see below). “The shared IDs have changed a ton over the past year,” Edwards also observed.

Drudge’s disenchantment with Trump predates these changes. Perhaps The Drudge Report’s new ad broker wanted to cash in on higher traffic during the stretch run of the presidential election. Or—if there’s any truth to the rumors— maybe its new owners did.

Perhaps the unusual practices reflect decisions made by Drudge himself rather than any change in ownership. But Drudge would be under no obligation to disclose a new owner—a former confidante speculated that if The Drudge Report ever sold, the only two people who would know about it would be Drudge and his buyer. One possibility is that Drudge has remained the site’s owner on paper while the meaningful decisions are made elsewhere—perhaps in Mountain View, where his ad broker and long-serving webmaster and the owner of his father’s website are located. The Ottos might not own both The Drudge Report and Refdesk, but they have a great deal of potential control over how both sites operate, along with valuable information about their audiences.

An exclusive web broker can act as a kind of gatekeeper for a website: Visitor data is part of the reason advertisers pay for space on other people’s pages in the first place. Drudge currently runs between 200 and 300 “cookies” through which advertisers can track users’ web activity; as Moss notes, the default version of the site at the time he examined it in mid-October, and then again in mid-November, was the “unsecured” page, leaving users unusually exposed to bad actors (unsecure pages are identifiable by the prefix “http” in their web address). In both cases the default soon changed back to the secure “https” version but for some span of time the election-season Drudge Report was a potential free-for-all for anyone looking to gather valuable and potentially identifying data on visitors to the site.

Even now, The Drudge Report is an information bonanza. Traffic may be down, but the site still claims tens of millions of daily visitors, on par with major news networks and newspapers. The question is: Whose bonanza is it?

I asked Lucianne Goldberg if Drudge’s old friends ever speculate about where he might be. “Gone,” she said. Not gone in the sense of dead, she quickly clarified. “Gone” in the sense of finished with his old life: “I think he was a little surprised he made it as far as he did, and that he was as quote ‘important’ to the general press scene as he was ... He had a cool operation. He didn’t have to work very hard, went swimming once a day in the ocean, and he liked going to parties. And he liked his hat.”

Multiple former acquaintances of Drudge’s theorize that his disappointment with Trump is sincere, and similar to that of his friend Ann Coulter’s: Both turned on the president because of his unseriousness in pursuing their agenda, particularly the construction of a U.S.-Mexico border wall. Drudge is famous for discarding friends over forgotten or half-invented slights, according to both news accounts like the New York magazine profile and to several former acquaintances who still aren’t quite sure why the web publisher cut them out of his life. In the greatest possible demonstration of his jealously guarded independence, Drudge may have done the same thing to a president of the United States whose White House he could freely crash.

Maybe Drudge decided he was sick of it all—and perhaps this was a wise move. Right-of-center media can be a bestiary of lightning rods and public villains. Former Breitbart chief Steve Bannon is under indictment on allegations of tax fraud; Tucker Carlson is subject to a nearly full-on advertiser boycott despite having the highest-rated show on cable. Twenty-five years into his career, Drudge, by having effectively disappeared, has become an object of fascination rather than scorn.

Reclusion gives Drudge something his firebrand media peers never had: an escape hatch. Tracy Sefl is one of the most unexpected of the former Drudge acquaintances, and thus someone with a unique vantage into his psychology. She is a professional Democrat who spent years working to advance the presidential aspirations of Hillary Clinton, perhaps the public figure that looms largest in Drudge’s tangled psyche. Sefl proved successful in placing stories during the 2008 campaign, during which Drudge emerged as somewhere between an affable adversary and an unlikely friend. “What I have to imagine is that there’s no joy in it anymore for Matt,” she said. “And that may be what it comes down to. What fun is it anymore to follow all of this for someone who’s been doing it as long as he has, someone who’s ridden the roller coasters that he helped build? What fun is it in 2020 to be mucking around in these news cycles?”

Sefl believed that Drudge was never all that political. He cared about “personalities—personalities of the principals, the candidates, the elected officials, personalities in media. He was attuned to those. He had opinions about them. I imagine he still does.” He had few rooting interests outside of himself. “I’ve never believed that he has a side that is a partisan side. His side is capitalism.”

Lucianne Goldberg had a similar read. “I don’t think he had any politics at all,” she said.

Drudge grasped the potential of the internet before almost anyone else in publishing. “We are entering an era vibrating with the din of small voices,” a smirking Drudge told the National Press Club during an infamous 1998 appearance . “Any citizen can be a reporter.” Maybe Drudge is undertaking one of his boldest moves of all, one that will hopefully prove as pioneering as his belief in the flattening effects of web media: Whether through a payday, political apathy, or a newfound slackerdom, Drudge might have actually pulled off everyone’s dream: making bank and then logging off.

Armin Rosen is a staff writer for Tablet Magazine.

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Drudge Report, a Former Trump Ally, Looks to Biden

Matt Drudge and Donald Trump boosted each other four years ago. Now his site says, in prominent type, “The World Moves On.”

By Tiffany Hsu

Matt Drudge started showing signs that he had soured on President Trump months before the election. Since the vote, the fedora-topped media pioneer has seemed even more eager to distance himself and his site from the man in the White House.

“YOU’RE FIRED!” Drudge Report blared in a headline within minutes of CNN’s calling the election for Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Saturday. For nearly 24 hours afterward, that headline remained at the top of the site. In addition, a screenshot of the Drudge Report main page, with the “YOU’RE FIRED!” headline, has been the only tweet on the @DRUDGE Twitter account since Saturday.

In his 25-year career, Mr. Drudge has proved himself an expert aggregator, a digital journalist who links to articles plucked from the web. And he has done it with style, packaging his links with tabloid-poetry headlines that make readers click.

After the “YOU’RE FIRED!” headline, Drudge Report turned this week to the coming transfer of power.

THE WORLD MOVES ON.

Americans pivot from red-hot Trump to Biden’s seasoned cool.

Trump defied gravity; now falls back to earth, future TBD.

Dogs will return to White House: Biden’s German shepherds!

Four years ago, Drudge Report heralded Mr. Trump’s “rock-star welcome in Florida” and linked to coverage of his rallies. The journalist Carl Bernstein credited Mr. Drudge’s support as a key part of Mr. Trump’s political rise, and Mr. Trump called Mr. Drudge “a great gentleman.”

Drudge Report started distancing itself from the president last year, a development that was not lost on Mr. Trump, who said on Twitter in April: “I gave up on Drudge (a really nice guy) long ago, as have many others.” Conservative sites accused Mr. Drudge of being an agent of the left.

Now Drudge Report is filled with headlines that describe the outgoing president as “bitter” and “not a good loser.” Several links lead to articles debunking Mr. Trump’s baseless accusations of election fraud.

Mr. Drudge, who rarely gives interviews, did not reply to requests for comment. His recent work shows him ready to close the chapter on the current president and focus on the president-elect.

On Wednesday, his site included two lines of commentary — prominently displayed, in red type — that did not link to an external story and compared Mr. Biden favorably to the conservative hero Ronald Reagan.

Biden now up to 50.8 percent of popular vote, topping Reagan’s 50.7 percent in 1980 …

Is highest percentage for challenger since FDR in 1932 …

Tiffany Hsu is a media reporter for the business desk, focusing on advertising and marketing. Previously, she covered breaking business news. Before joining The Times, she wrote about the California economy for The Los Angeles Times. More about Tiffany Hsu

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Did Drudge Report and Fox News turn blue in 2020?

Once seen as staunchly republican, the news site and cable news network raised eyebrows in their coverage of trump.

By Jennifer Graham

Once a reliable place to find unflattering photos of Hillary Clinton, the news aggregator Drudge Report mocked both President Donald Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani in recent weeks.

Meanwhile Fox News, long seen as a booster of conservatism, has become a target of the president, who cheers every decline in ratings and is rumored to be considering starting a media company that would compete with Fox.

Have Drudge and Fox, like voters in Georgia, turned blue, or at least faint purple?

If so, it would be a remarkable change, given that a subset of Americans called “ Fox News Republicans ” have been the president’s most loyal supporters. And as far back as 2006, the website founded by Matt Drudge has been seen as powerhouse of Republican support, with ABC News reporting that year that “Drudge Report sets the tone for national political coverage.”

It’s clear that Drudge Report is no longer a booster of Trump, who has called the website “fake news” this year although it has been credited with helping him get elected in 2016.

It’s not clear, however, if Matt Drudge is still the owner, or involved on a daily basis. There’s been speculation the site has been sold, although others say Drudge still owns and manages the site he founded in 1995.

As for Fox, the network recently changed its slogan to “ Standing Up for What’s Right ,” which some people saw as a dig at Trump, and by extension, his loyal supporters. Trump voters also took issue with the network calling states for Biden on election night.

Given their other content, it’s unlikely that Drudge Report and Fox have radically shifted to the left. As they say in medical school, “ when you hear hoofs, think horse, not zebra ,” meaning the simplest explanation is more likely than the more uncommon one.

As such, it’s more probable that the news outlets soured on Trump — as some other prominent Republicans did — not on conservatism in general.

But the perception that Drudge Report and Fox News have abandoned their base is getting oxygen from people who want to compete with them.

Drudge Report, a former Trump ally, is ready to move on. The site is filled with headlines that describe the outgoing president as "bitter" and "not a good loser.'" https://t.co/VSoJyMzWgN pic.twitter.com/SKBfNlq43H — Nieman Lab (@NiemanLab) November 12, 2020

Man of the Left?

Earlier this year, Ryan McMaken, writing on the blog of the Mises Institute , said Drudge Report has lost its edge, becoming instead a purveyor of predictable fare, spiced with “crisis porn.”

“It is now, for all practical purposes, a sister site to CNN.com or The Atlantic, ” McMaken wrote.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson went farther, in July calling Drudge “a man of the progressive left.”

“At times, his site is indistinguishable from The Daily Beast or any other woke propaganda outlet posing as a news company,” Carlson told Matthew Lysiak, the author of a biography on Drudge, “ The Drudge Revolution ,” released this year.

Lysiak did not interview the subject of his book. Drudge is famously reclusive and rarely grants interviews. But he did speak briefly to Florida journalist Bob Norman after he showed up unannounced at Drudge’s home.

As Norman recounted in an article in Columbia Journalism Review, he never saw Drudge when he was at the house, but called him later and told him he wanted to talk with him about Trump. “You and everybody else,” Drudge replied. When Norman said Drudge Report was supportive of Trump in 2016, Drudge said, “That was three years ago.”

“That response seemed rather telling, a clear distancing from the president. But Drudge wouldn’t go further,” Norman wrote.

In addition to Drudge Report’s increasingly frequent skewering of Trump, others have noticed the website has taken the pandemic seriously, unlike some of Trump’s supporters.

As one person wrote on Twitter, “Fox may have shifted to the center since 2016. Drudge Report was the biggest game changer. DR single-handedly made me deathly afraid of COVID-19 between February and May of this year.”

Fox News, meanwhile, has regularly enraged the president with reporting that the president believes is biased against him. At one point, he said he was the “golden goose” responsible for the network’s historic ratings. (Fox surpassed the legacy networks in primetime for the third quarter of 2020, and in that same quarter, four of the five most-watched cable news shows belonged to Fox.)

And his anger was renewed on election night after Fox News was the first network to project that eventual President-elect Joe Biden would win Arizona.

According to the political website The Hill , the Trump campaign urged people to call Fox to ask them to withdraw the call. “The campaign also sent out talking points attacking the head of the Fox News decision desk and highlighting his past contributions to Democratic candidates,” Brett Samuels wrote for The Hill.

The president has urged his supporters to abandon Fox for other conservative outlets such as Newmax, and Mike Allen at Axios has reported that Trump wants to start a digital media company to compete with Fox. According to Allen, an unidentified source said, “He plans to wreck Fox. No doubt about it.”

To do so, however, would require convincing Trump supporters to abandon their principle source of news.

According to an October report from the Public Religion Research Institute, about 40% of Republicans say they trust Fox News more than any other news source, comprising what the institute’s founder and CEO Robert P. Jones called “a party within a party.”

And those “Fox New Republicans” were largely supportive of the president.

Nearly all Republicans who report trusting most in Fox News for television news approved of the job Trump is doing in office, including 82% who strongly approve, according to the PRRI survey. (Among all other Republicans, 78% approved of the president and 42% strongly approved.)

Drudge alternative

If Trump decides to compete with what he perceives as anti-Trump media, he’ll have company. Conservative podcaster Dan Bongino is offering Trump supporters an alternative to Drudge Report in his Bongino Report , launched last year.

A news aggregator like Drudge Report, the site recently had headlines including “Biden Campaign Manager Called for Mandatory Gun Seizures” and “RINO Mitt Romney Scolds Trump for Not Accepting Election Irregularities Without Investigation.”

In announcing the launch, Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and police officer, said on Twitter, “Drudge has abandoned you. I NEVER will.”

Bongino is regularly among the top 10 performing Facebook posts on a given day, according to the Twitter account that tracks them. He’s also a regular commentator on Fox News, which shows the challenge that Trump and his supporters face if they try to extract themselves from Fox and Drudge Report, given their longtime entwinement. When Trump criticizes Fox, for example, he’s criticizing the employer of his ally Sean Hannity, a top-performing Fox host.

But a Biden presidency may be what reunites the team. Recently, Drudge Report has been publishing flattering photos of Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. If the past predicts the future, that will change.

And a recent article by Sarah Ellison and Jeremy Barr in The Washington Post suggests that Fox News will soon be making Trump happy again when it casts a critical eye on the Biden administration.

“Fox thrives when it is in the opposition because they have a real-time bad guy to beat up on,” former CNN President Jonathan Klein said in the Post. “A Biden win would be great for Fox’s business.”

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Someone is trying to take down the drudge report, and it's a mystery who's behind it.

(Matt Drudge.Mike Nudelman/Business Insider)

The Drudge Report , the highly trafficked conservative news website, has been knocked offline for extended periods during the past two weeks, succumbing to large distributed denial of service attacks, according to its founder, Matt Drudge.

And it's a mystery who's behind it.

Drudge wrote on Twitter that a December 30 attack was the "biggest DDoS since site's inception."

A DDoS attack is executed by using hijacked computers or electronic devices to flood a website with redundant requests, aiming to overload the website's hosting server and render it unavailable.

But, according to cybersecurity experts who spoke with Business Insider, using such a method to take down the Drudge Report would not be easy.

The site is already equipped to handle a high volume of visitors and scale out to accommodate spikes in traffic. Moreover, a website that generates so many page views would most likely employ strong defense measures, the cybersecurity experts said.

"The Drudge Report has a massive readership," said Ajay Arora, the CEO and cofounder of the cybersecurity firm Vera . "Generally someone that has that kind of viewership is going to have sophisticated hosting and counter defenses against DDoS attacks."

Since emerging in 1996, the Drudge Report has been a home to conservatives who feel disenfranchised by traditional media. Drudge has marketed his site as a news destination not controlled by corporate interests or politicians. And he's had great success.

SimilarWeb, an analytics firm, continually ranks the Drudge Report as one of the five most-trafficked media publishers in the US. According to analytics posted to the site, the Drudge Report has amassed about 775 million page views in the past 31 days — all with hardly any traffic coming from social-media channels.

(AP Photo/Michael Caulfield)

It's a high-prized target, one that now sees itself under attack by an unknown culprit.

Drudge has pointed the finger at the US government, tweeting that the traffic that downed his website had "VERY suspicious routing [and timing]."

"Attacking coming from 'thousands' of sources," he wrote on Twitter. "Of course none of them traceable to Fort Meade…"

Drudge seemed to imply that his site was taken down in connection with punishment leveled against Russia for election-related hacking . The first attack on his site came hours after President Barack Obama announced the US would impose sanctions against Moscow, and the Drudge Report had previously been identified in a discredited Washington Post story as responsible for spreading Russian propaganda.

"Maybe they think this is a proportional counterattack to Russia," tweeted Sharyl Attkisson, a former CBS News investigative journalist. "After all they have decided @Drudge is Russian fake news, right?"

Neither the White House nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded to requests for comment. But cybersecurity experts who spoke with Business Insider discounted Drudge's claim on grounds that the government attacking a US journalist's site would be a blatant violation of the Constitution — as well as generally improbable.

"If Putin wanted to take down a website, I'm sure he could order it," said Jared DeMott , a former security engineer for the National Security Agency who is now the chief technology officer of Binary Defense Systems. "If Obama wanted to do something like that, he'd have to go to different people. It would be a hard conversation to have."

"Maybe if there was a military reason to have it," DeMott added. "But domestically, there is no way."

(Evan Agostini/Getty Images)

DeMott, however, posited that another nation-state could be the potential culprit.

"It definitely could be a nation-state," he said. "They do stuff like that on an ongoing basis, whether they are looking for intel or trying to destabilize a political region."

Arora of the firm Vera agreed, saying that only a "small number of groups" in the world had the sophistication necessary to execute an attack to take out the Drudge Report for extended periods.

"I would say it would be a group or nation-state that has pretty sophisticated methods and means," he said. "Given the fact it's happened a number of times and is persistent for well over a few minutes, and it's coming from multiple sources, against a site that would have a lot of protection, it would indicate it's someone pretty sophisticated."

Chris Weber, the cofounder of Casaba Security , agreed that because the Drudge Report was "getting so much traffic already," a DDoS attack would need to be on a far "greater magnitude" to be effective against it.

"It does seem unlikely that the Drudge Report would be easily taken down or slowed significantly by a standard DDoS attack," he said. He surmised that the attack that took down the site was perhaps more on the scale of the massive cyberattack that temporarily knocked out Dyn , a large DNS company, in October. WikiLeaks said its supporters were behind that attack as a show of support for the group's founder, Julian Assange.

Outside nation-states, it is equally probable that the Drudge Report has come under fire from a "hacktivist" organization, perhaps unhappy with the political views espoused by the site's founder.

Drudge has always been a controversial conservative figure, but in 2016 he went all-in for President-elect Donald Trump, often igniting controversy with inflammatory headlines emblazoned on his site.

But hacktivist organizations almost always take credit after a successful attack has been executed, experts said. So far, no one has claimed credit for the attacks on the Drudge Report.

And without a group taking credit, it may be impossible to determine the culprit.

"Attribution has always been hard in cyber," DeMott said. "The science is just quite not mature."

Arora said any information Drudge "can provide in terms of motives" to a cybersecurity team would be helpful in identifying the responsible party.

"There's a lot of people that don't like Matt Drudge," he said. "He likes to push people's buttons. Anyone who he specifically has knowledge of, who would be out to get him."

Arora added: "It's not just a technology question. It's also a motive question."

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Drudge Retort – Bias and Credibility

These media sources are moderately to strongly biased toward liberal causes through story selection and/or political affiliation.  They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports and omit reporting of information that may damage liberal causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy.  See all Left Bias sources.

• Overall, we rate the Drudge Retort Left Biased based on the use of mostly left or left-center sources. We also rate them Mixed for factual reporting due to the use of some sources that have failed fact checks as well as a lack of transparency.

Detailed Report

Bias Rating: LEFT Factual Reporting: MIXED Country: USA MBFC’s Country Freedom Rating: MOSTLY FREE Media Type: Website Traffic/Popularity: Minimal Traffic MBFC Credibility Rating: MEDIUM CREDIBILITY

Founded in 1998 , The Drudge Retort was created as a left-leaning parody of the Drudge Report .  The site was designed in a similar style and releases news in a similar way. The website lacks transparency as they do not disclose an about page or ownership.

Read our profile on USA media and government.

Funded by / Ownership

The Drudge Retort does not disclose ownership and generates revenue through advertising.

Analysis / Bias

In review, the Drudge Retort does not produce original content but rather serves as a news aggregator for mostly left-leaning media sources. A quick review of sources reveals the following:

• The Daily Beast (Left)
• Courier-Journal ( Left-Center)
• MSN (Left-Center)
• Associated Press ( Least Biased)
• Washington Post (Left-Center)

Besides these sources, they sometimes aggregate sources that have failed fact checks, such as Raw Story , Alternet , and the Daily Kos . The website also provides links to liberal-leaning blogs and pundits such as Rachel Maddow, Robert Reich, and Paul Krugman. In general, most news published on the Drudge Retort leads to factual sources; however, some do not; therefore, we cannot rate them High for factual reporting.

Failed Fact Checks

• None, as they do not produce original content.

Overall, we rate the Drudge Retort Left Biased based on the use of mostly left or left-center sources. We also rate them Mixed for factual reporting due to the use of some sources that have failed fact checks as well as a lack of transparency. (D. Van Zandt 11/25/2016) Updated (05/26/2024)

Source: https://drudge.com/

Last Updated on May 26, 2024 by Media Bias Fact Check

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Left vs. Right Bias: How we rate the bias of media sources

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