Matt Drudge, the man behind one of the Internet’s most famous sites, The Drudge Report, blasted The Washington Post, after the paper accused Drudge of linking to and using Russian propaganda sites.
According to a rather desperate WaPo article, seemingly designed to link the conservative news site to Russian sources, Drudge “regularly” linked to sites like Infowars, Russia Today, and Sputnik news, that often traffic in Russian propaganda.
But WaPo’s earth-shattering revelation about Drudge seems less incendiary when you look at the numbers. Each of those sites had only a handful of links during 2016 — and Drudge linked to them fewer times during the 2016 presidential election than he did in 2014, well before Donald Trump was even on the scene. All three of the “propaganda” news sites received more traffic in 2016 than they had previously, but the Drudge links seem to correlate to an increase in traffic and interest, not necessarily cause that same increase.
At any rate, the WaPo investigation into whether Matt Drudge is, in fact, a Russian operative, seems to have come up dry. But that doesn’t mean that Drudge is about to forgive and forget that WaPo tried to tie him into a multi-level Russian conspiracy to control the news.
On Twitter, Drudge revealed that the same site The Washington Post used to calculate how much traffic Drudge throws to Infowars and Russia Today, shows The Washington Post gets more than 35% of its referral traffic from the Drudge Report.
I’ve linked to @washingtonpost over 10,000X in 25 years of doing DRUDGEREPORT. I currently give them 37% of their referral traffic, according to https://t.co/ryZX1supbD. It’s a brutal business. Not even a thank you. Instead: YOU’RE A RUSSIAN OPERATIVE! https://t.co/pFjPYxkzqa
— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) November 13, 2017
They should probably send flowers and chocolates before their digital operation tanks completely.