For years, one man controlled all the news: Matt Drudge, nutty conservative weather-obsessed Miami queen blogger. He "broke" the Monica Lewinsky thing, sort of, and then for nearly ten years his website drove news narratives and pushed stories to the forefront. Even as recently as the primary season, some years past his peak influence, Drudge helped destroy the Clinton campaign with relentless Obama-boosting. Then, of course, he had to switch back to being a straight-up GOP hack. We'd say he just boosted Obama because he felt McCain would beat the Illinois Senator, but the fact is, his visceral hatred for the Clintons probably drove him just as much as anything else. Since the conventions, though, he's been an embarrassment. He highlights completely misleading bullshit and can't get anyone but the dumbest of bloggers to pick up on his pet stories.
As Eric Bohlert notes in Media Matters today, Drudge has become so divorced from reality that even the serious press people who've religiously trusted his instincts since the Clinton days can't square his headlines with reality. His cherry-picked poll results are plainly ridiculous, last week's Drudge-touted "McCain Comeback" never even pretended to materialize, and he's completely, completely missed, by design, the major narratives of the last month of the campaign: Palin's national meltdown, the increasingly crazed McCain rallies, and Obama's fundraising and ground advantages. Instead we get... Biden on Botox, a little ACORN, and feeble attempts at finding crazy liberals attacking McCain supporters. They all work like a charm on the Conservative Blogosphere, but back in the good old days, that was just the first step toward mainstream discussion. Now, no one gives a shit.
Maybe after the election Drudge will buckle down, like Fox, and provide the voice of the embattled opposition. But a conservative crack-up and the apparent disillusion of the tacit MSM/right-wing noise machine cooperative venture is not great news for Matt. And it's a long time until the next hurricane season.
