Our Fascination with Drudge
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Illustration by Darrow (Photo: Evan Agostini/Getty Images [Drudge Head]) |
He’s been called everything from a “right-wing hack,” to the “Walter Cronkite of his era.” MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan says he is “just about the most powerful journalist in America.”
He hides, but craves attention. He is prurient and prudish, powerful and paranoid, an icon of the right who seems obsessed with making Hillary Clinton our next president. And he has America caught in the grip of his contradictions.
He is Matt Drudge (the new Garboesque figurehead of American journalism). He’s the go to guy in his ability to steer the public agenda during those “freak show” moments that celebrities and politicians habitually fall into.
Drudge gained his notoriety in bringing the world’s attention to an unknown intern Monica Lewinsky about ten years ago, and has since parlayed his renown into getting the media to take seriously trivial and scurrilous gossip, like John Edwards’s $400 haircut, or the Swift Boat Veterans’ attack on John Kerry. That’s classic Drudge or what the left considers the “snake in the Eden of American democracy.”
If you aren’t following him, you’re simply not in the know.
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