OPINION:
Matt Drudge of Drudge Report fame unleashed on The Washington Post on Twitter, calling out the media outlet for a headline and story that seemed to suggest the popular site was pro-Russia.
This is a well-deserved smack-down of The Post.
Drudge tweeted this: “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 similarweb.com. It’s a brutal business. Not even a thank you. Instead: YOU”RE A RUSSIAN OPERATIVE!”
Drudge included a link to the at-issue Post story. And click on it, and the headline that blares is this: “One of the busiest websites in the U.S. in 2016 regularly linked to Russia propaganda.”
The story, by Philip Bump, spoke of how SimilarWeb rated the Drudge Report as the second-most-visited online site in the United States by July 2016, with 1.4 billion page views during the month that that Democratic National Committee email hack was front and media center.
The Post story continues behind a paywall. But as Mediaite noted: “The Post analysis … detailed the Drudge Report’s traffic numbers throughout the 2016 presidential race, which topped a staggering 1.83 billion … in December, before noting that the website frequently included links Infowars … Alex Jones’s conspiracy theory cesspool.”
Bump apparently also wrote, Mediaite reported, that “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 responded by swiping The Post with his tweet and with a Drudge Report headline that ripped, Mediaite noted: “WASH POST: DRUDGE LINKS TO RUSSIANS! [AND TO WASH POST].”
Bam.
And note to Post: Probably shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds.
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