The editorial page crew at Investor's Business Daily published an editorial Tuesday on "Recoiling at Drudge's Pro-Trump Bias." Surely, they acknowledged, the Drudge Report has never pretended to be unbiased. But Matt Drudge's formula of grasping any hot political story with viral potential has clearly been abandoned for a more obvious calculation of promoting one candidate for president.
When Michelle Fields, a reporter at the conservative news site Breitbart, accused Donald Trump’s campaign manager of accosting her, it was a story that seemed tailor-made for the Drudge Report.
Fields said that after she tried to ask Trump a question at a rally last Tuesday in Florida, Corey Lewandowski yanked her arm so hard that he left bruises. Not only did Lewandowski deny the claim, but the Trump campaign mounted an effort to smear the reporter. Then video evidence emerged that appeared to support Fields’ story as she filed assault charges.
Then, on Monday, Fields and Breitbart editor-at-large Ben Shapiro resigned over the way that Breitbart — which has been relentlessly pro-Trump in its coverage — handled the matter. In his resignation letter, Shapiro charged that Breitbart had become “Trump’s personal Pravda.”
Newsworthy stuff, especially for conservatives who rely on the Drudge Report. But Drudge’s 2 million daily visitors were left in the dark, since the site completely ignored the story.
Instead, as the Breitbart scandal was unfolding last week, Drudge published a huge Photoshopped picture of Marco Rubio that made him look like a midget and ran a banner headline linking to an op-ed about how Ted Cruz’s “ties run deep” with the Bushes. And then, on Friday, Drudge ran a massive stacked headline that seemed to suggest Cruz was captive of a religious cult.
IBD noted they were not the first to notice this trend, citing liberal Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast writing last December that what Drudge readers were getting in 2015 was "a steady stream of pro-Trump agitprop."
As much as Drudge has blown kisses at Trump, the candidate has been singing Drudge’s praises. “What’s better than Drudge? He’s a fantastic guy. What he’s built is unbelievably respected,” Trump said after a Drudge reader poll showed him winning a GOP debate — which every Drudge poll has shown.
But now as Trump gets closer to sealing the Republican nomination, some conservatives are starting to publicly attack Drudge’s biased approach to the GOP nomination, not just because he backs Trump but also because he often promotes vicious attacks against Trump’s more reliably conservative rivals.
Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin posted a video on Saturday blasting Drudge for the Cruz headlines noted above, calling the display an “anti-Christian smear” and an example of Drudge’s double standard when it comes to covering Cruz and Trump.
Trump’s altered Rubio picture prompted Glenn Beck to wonder on his radio show “what the hell has happened to Matt Drudge.”
After Drudge ran a photo of a young-looking Trump above the banner headline “Trump Shakes World Order,” blogger Ann Althouse described it as “stunning pro-Trump propaganda from Drudge.”
The Reaganite Republican blog complained, “Something sure stinks in the way Breitbart and Drudge have lost their neutrality/conservative-street-cred while collaborating with the left, MSM and Trump-bots to smear a good man — Ted Cruz.”
The Drudge Report used to be seen as a place where the conservative movement would go to navigate around a "mainstream" press that seemed to be too invested in a candidate to seem objective. Conservatives would joke the press was proudly in a candidate's pocket. But that's exactly how the Drudge Report appears to many conservatives in this last Trump-dominated year.
