WaPo Claims Drudge Links To Russian Propaganda

Drudge Links (Washington Post graphic)

By July 2016, according to the analysis site SimilarWeb, Matt Drudge’s link-aggregation site Drudge Report was the second-most-visited on the Internet in the United States. Over the course of the month — the month of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions and the month of the leak of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee — SimilarWeb estimates that Drudge had 1,472,220,000 page views. That’s 1.4 billion, the equivalent of 47 views of the Drudge Report every second of every minute that month, according to The Washington Post.

Being the second-most-visited site, incidentally, means that Drudge had more page views than Yahoo, Disney (including ABC and ESPN) and Time Warner. It had more than the New York Times and The Washington Post, combined — with enough space left over to also outpace Hearst.

Translated into universally accessible terms, the Drudge Report was a traffic behemoth during the 2016 election. And every time the page was loaded last year there were two direct links to the conspiracy-theory-hawking site Infowars.

Over the course of the campaign, Drudge was also not shy about linking directly to individual stories at Infowars, as well as RT and Sputnik News, both content-sharing arms of the Russian government.

Drudge started linking to Infowars in 2010. His first link to RT was that same year. Sputnik News wasn’t created until November 2014; Drudge’s first link to that site came later that month.

WaPo surmises there are probably two reasons that the Drudge Report linked to these sites with regularity. The first is that Drudge’s taste in news often tends toward the more exotic; he clearly understands the sorts of things that people like to read. The other is that Drudge himself seems to share some of the same sense of impending apocalypse and systemic collapse that undergirds a lot of the reports from these sites.

Meanwhile, Matt Drudge slammed The Washington Post for a story published Friday that analyzed Drudge Report for what the paper called regularly linking to "Russia propaganda" during the 2016 presidential campaign.

"I've linked to @washingtonpost over 10,000X in 25 years of doing DRUDGEREPORT," Drudge wrote to his 546,000 followers.

"I currently give them 37% of their referral traffic, according to http://similarweb.com. It's a brutal business. Not even a thank you. Instead: YOU'RE A RUSSIAN OPERATIVE!"