I have always been a big fan of the Drudge Report. In a world where leftist mainstream media rules the airwaves and covers the internet, Matt Drudge and his report has been a strong aggregator of right-leaning stories that help to educate people about the problems with liberalism while highlighting some of the stories that don’t normally hit mass media coverage. Unfortunately, he/they also tend to display poor judgment from time to time when it comes to promoting the right ideas.
The most recent example falls under the category of yellow journalism. They chose to lead with a story about Martin O’Malley’s failed campaign event that only had one voter attend. The headline itself is damning and enough to make anyone considering O’Malley to pack their bags, sigh, and jump on the Hillary Clinton bandwagon. The reality is that the whole story isn’t nearly as sensational as the headline on Drudge makes it seem. Weather in Iowa has been so horrendous that most campaigns have cancelled events. O’Malley’s team made a late decision on cancelling and decided to brave the weather in case anybody did show up. They didn’t think anyone would and that would have been a better outcome than the image you see above of a single person sitting with a hopeless candidate.
As we’ve described recently, headlines are more powerful than the news itself, especially on sites like Drudge. From a purely political perspective, it’s important for as many Democrats to support O’Malley and Bernie Sanders for as long as possible. The sooner they’re eliminated, the easier it will be for Clinton to win the nomination and start working on her general election campaign. As Republicans, we want that race to drag out as long as possible. Drudge knows this. He or his team simply couldn’t resist the juicy headline even if leading with that story hurts the Republican party.
This isn’t the only example. Drudge has been very supportive without outright endorsing Donald Trump. Just as he helped Mitt Romney get the nomination in 2012, he’s trying to help Trump get the nomination this time. It makes sense from a journalistic perspective; Trump is a wealth of headlines waiting to happen whether he’s a GOP candidate, the GOP nominee, or the President. I’m not suggesting that it’s a purely selfish move for Drudge to support him, but it’s conspicuous that he would be throwing his weight in that direction when it also happens to benefit him the most.
Again, I believe that he truly likes Trump. His motives have never been questioned and I wouldn’t try to dredge that idea up. However, I do question his choices from time to time and this is one of them. Yes, Drudge is very opposed to illegal immigration like Trump, but on other issues they seem to diverge. Is Drudge like Ann Coulter in that they both like Trump for his straight talk about illegal immigration? I hope so. The alternative is that he’s latching onto the candidate who would help his site prosper and that’s not the Matt Drudge I want to imagine.
via Soshable http://ift.tt/1QVH6XE
No comments:
Post a Comment