Once pro-Trump, DrudgeReport has changed — '180 degrees'

FPI / July 27, 2020

The Drudge Report has jumped on the leftist anti-Trump media bandwagon, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said.

"For decades, Matt Drudge was one of the most influential figures in conservatives news journalism," Carlson said during his Friday broadcast.

"His self-titled Drudge Report broke news and set priorities in digital media. Republican presidential candidates made wooing the famously secretive Drudge a high priority, and for several of them, including Donald Trump, it paid off big."

Carlson continued: "But if you've seen the Drudge Report recently, you know that it has changed dramatically — 180 degrees. Matt Drudge is now firmly a man of the progressive Left. At times, his site is indistinguishable from the Daily Beast or any other woke propaganda outlet posing as a news company."

WorldTribune.com reported the Drudge shift in October of last year, noting that the Drudge Report "which was seen as being solidly in President Donald Trump’s corner during and after the 2016 presidential election, has recently been linking to some of the president’s fiercest critics on impeachment."

Related: Drudge mystery: The brand lives, but who runs it and where is Matt?, October 25, 2019

Author and political commentator Jerome Corsi has repeatedly tweeted about the shift in coverage, saying Drudge has “lost his mind,” “turned left,” and become a “leftist hack beating [the] impeachment drum.”

Rush Limbaugh, a friend of Matt Drudge, has also chimed in on the matter. In late August, Limbaugh told a caller that he’s repeatedly been asked about the sudden shift to the left at the Drudge Report. “My email inbox every day, ‘What’s happening to Drudge, Rush?’ ” Limbaugh said. “And I tell people, ‘Have you ever heard of clicks?’ ”

President Donald Trump said in April of this year said that he "gave up on Drudge ... long ago," though he said at the time that Drudge himself was "a really nice guy."

A former producer who writes under the alias "Kane" for the Citizen Free Press aggregation site told the Washington Examiner he believes “Matt Drudge is still running the site. He hired a guy from the New York Post in 2017, and that guy obviously has had some effect on the daily headlines, but Matt Drudge is still running the site. He still links to Camille Paglia and InfoWars, which makes me believe he’s running the site. He’s still linking to his favorites.”

“I think he let his audience down, certainly," Kane added.

Free Press International