One of the more mysterious developments over the past few years in regard to the US media is why longtime conservative stalwart Matt Drudge decided to take his news aggregator site hard left. Theories abound, including a personal feud between Drudge and Trump to Drudge having sold the site. No one knows. What is apparent however is the fact that since turning hard port, the site’s viewership has fallen off a cliff:
Not even massive street riots, hordes of lawless vagrants burning cities throughout the United States and a dead-heat presidential election could help Matt Drudge’s spiraling news site in August. (RELATED Story: EXCLUSIVE: Drudge Insider Blows Whistle on Pay-to-Play Scheme)
The fall has been dramatic and historic, but also one predicted in mid 2019 by Thomas Paine.
Web numbers for the country’s biggest Joe Biden cheerleader just got worse for Matt Drudge’s spiraling news site.
Drudge’s monthly traffic in August was 63 million readers, according to similarweb.com analytics, down from 66 million in May. The spiral continues. In September 2019 Drudge was pulling close to 95 million readers and well over 100 million in August 2019, one year ago.
That’s roughly a 40 percent decline in clicks/traffic in a year, marking Drudge’s lowest volume of web visitors literally in decades.
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As with Jimmy Mordoch whose wife is a left leaning democrat, she exerts quite a bit of influence on changes at FOX. Drudge may have a female compangion exerting the same pressure on him
I used to read Drudge many years ago, but the tabloid quality/click-bait was off putting.
Speculation is that Drudge is a homosexual, but as is so much with Drudge, the evidence for this remains debatable.
Don, that is deep satire!!!
Wasn’t he going kinda left towards the end of Obama?
I remember people complaining about how it was barely any better for finding new stuff than the main stream TV.
Drudge declared some time ago that he wasn’t bent. But was before it was de riguer to be so.
Drudge is now king of the fake news–full time depressive. Just wants you to feel bad and mad at Trump. Who needs that??
Why read Drudge when CNN gives you the same thing with better production values?
I never read Drudge myself. I have been impressed with what he’s been able to accomplish starting with nothing. He’s also a rather perplexing character. AFAICT, no one knows any more about him than was generally known 20 years ago. As he’s a consequential figure in this era, a full-dress biography should be and with scant doubt will be written.
As for Drudge himself, I’m skeptical he ever had any ideology at all. He’s a news junkie. It’s just that as a youth the characters in which he took an interest in were not in sports and entertainment but in politics. He wasn’t steeped in the social ideology of the newsroom such as it was 25 years ago (nor was he steeped in the professional canons that tempered the expression of that ideology some). He seemed ‘conservative’ because his story selection didn’t have the bias you expected from your morning paper.
Here’s a hypothesis: the selection of content is being influenced by others with whom Drudge has a business or personal relationship. We don’t know who that is, because we don’t know much of anything about him. If he’s sold the site sub rosa, he’s not taking a hit from this. If he is losing money, he can sell the site or close it down. He’s 54, has an eight-digit net worth, and might have other ideas about what to do with the twenty-odd years he has left.
“Speculation is that Trump is a homosexual…”
Speculation was that because David loved Jonathan as himself (1st Samuel 18:1-4), David too must have been a homosexual. Never mind the fact that David had many wives and many more concubines – all women. Now yes, Trump may have aspired to equal David’s womanizing; however, he never came close (not for lack of trying as I understand it). But homosexual? Not credible for either man.
I meant Drudge. Trump has been accused of a lot of things but never of being a homosexual!
Don, now I have to retract my comment that you committed deep satire.
I meant Drudge.
He’s a childless 54 year-old bachelor with no known hobbies and (if I’m not mistaken) a home in Miami Beach. As Nathan Lane said, “You do the math”.
I’ve forgotten the details now, but students of Drudge have tracked his real estate transactions in South Florida and it appears he gave a residential property outright to a friend who also turns up in various search databases at residences Drudge or his shell companies are known to own. The friend in question is male. One thing that’s somewhat appealing about Drudge is that he doesn’t make a public point of much of anything.
His divorce from ordinary domestic life is poignant: he is an only child and his parents have no grandchildren.
with better production values?
The production values of nationally-broadcast news are commonly enough to trigger a migraine in those so afflicted. Fox may be the worst in this regard. I’ll watch Youtubes of Dave Garroway to clear my head.
I’m so old I remember when any man over 30 that wasn’t married was suspected to be a homosexual. Some likely were, mostly chaste. Alternatively, some of them were smarter than the rest of us.
Re: all the non-stick BS [fabrications] they constantly throw at Donald John Trump. It’s all lies. And, all of it is readily (in like ten seconds) refuted by briefly examining his official actions and massive achievements as POTUS.
I’m so old I remember when any man over 30 that wasn’t married was suspected to be a homosexual.
Where? Where I grew up, prior to about 1974, a bachelor who was in a line of work which incorporated aesthetic sense might be assumed homosexual, but discussion of it was sub rosa. The fellow I can recall from my parents’ circle of acquaintances ca. 1968 owned a dress shop. A decade later you heard more about it, but people were rather resistant to tagging bachelors as homosexual if they were in ordinary occupations. (The three dudes across the street from us included two schoolteachers and a water authority functionary).
My elder brother, 64 years old, had one girlfriend in his youth and after a bad breakup, never had another nor ever married. He’s a devout Pentecostal Christian. I never thought to ask him if he’s homosexual, nor would I. He’s been celibate and chaste all his life as far as I know, and I would never malign his reputation with such slander. You can live without sex. I couldn’t and got married. St. Paul says that’s ok. But St. Paul also says my elder brother’s way is better. It can be done.
Quite agree LQC. Our reprobate time tars many good men and women who decide to live celibate lives for various reasons.
My father would be in his early 90’s were he alive, so possibly older than T Shaw. I remember a conversation with him about the Catholic priesthood. He said homosexuals often became priests in order to “hide” and not be bothered by people asking “When are you getting a wife?” This was before the homosexual/child abuse scandals came to light.
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I do not know if what my father believed was a unspoken belief among the masses, or if his Catholic coworkers told him those things, possibly around around Vatican II.
My father would be in his early 90’s were he alive, so possibly older than T Shaw. I remember a conversation with him about the Catholic priesthood. He said homosexuals often became priests in order to “hide” and not be bothered by people asking “When are you getting a wife?” This was before the homosexual/child abuse scandals came to light.
Some measure of homosexuality is a problem for about 4% of the post-pubescent male population. That would have amounted to about 2.5 million males in 1958. I think there were about 50,000 Catholic priests in this country. How common latent (or not-so-latent) homosexuality was among the priesthood in 1958 is a mystery, but the data from the John Jay report suggests that the ratio men with problems to normal men increased by about 3-fold between 1955 to 1958 (or, perhaps, the abnormal males behaved in a more troublesome manner). Richard Sipe was of the opinion that the ratio of abnormal males to normal males in the Catholic priest corps ca. 2000 was 1:2. So, a passable guess might be that the ratio in 1958 was 0.3:2, or 13% of the priest corps. That’s 6,500 men for whom homosexuality is something of a problem (supplemented with another batch from the ranks of men religious). Not very numerous against a backdrop of 2.5 million.
Fr. Paul Mankowski SJ did attest that 55-60% of the men with whom he’d entered Jesuit formation in 1974 were homosexuals hiding in the tall grass (who had little interest in religion to boot). The Society of Jesus is an odd little microclimate, however.
1955 to 1985
A complicating factor is that homosexual behavior can be simply opportunity and cultural channeling– the ‘dancing boys’ thing in Arabic cultures, and Greek/Roman homosexual normalization.
So depending on the culture of the area, you’ll have selection forces such as being tempted but not wanting to do it (chaste priests) and various shades of planning to violate their oaths. (closeted gay, and predatory, priests)
A lot of modern cultures seem to be utterly fixated on the idea that it’s not possible to not have strong sexual urges, and that if you do not have them you are more seriously damaged than the predators.
That makes for a lot of very unhappy people.