How Matt Drudge became the pipeline for Russian propaganda

[DonViejo]

Drudge Report has linked nearly 400 times to RT, Sputnik News, TASS since 2012

Blog ››› 5 hours 8 min ago ››› MATT GERTZ

On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 passengers and crew. The next day, President Barack Obama alleged that the responsible parties were Russian-backed separatists seizing territory in the region following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Obama’s statement came amid a furious effort by Russian propaganda outlets to foster confusion about the act. In their telling, the tragedy had actually been a failed attempt by Ukrainians to shoot down President Vladimir Putin’s plane.

The Russian propaganda effort received a substantial boost when right-wing internet journalist Matt Drudge highlighted a story on the topic from RT.com, the website of the Russian government-backed English-language news channel RT. Drudge titled the resulting item on the Drudge Report, his highly trafficked link aggregation website, “RT: Putin’s plane might have been target...” in bright red text.

After Drudge propelled the RT story to his massive audience, it was picked up by right-wing U.S. conspiracy websites. (Others on the right warned that Drudge had gone too far by aiding a Russian disinformation campaign.)



This was not an anomaly. Drudge has for years used his site as a web traffic pipeline for Russian propaganda sites, directing his massive audience to nearly 400 stories from RT.com and fellow Russian-government-run English-language news sites SputnikNews.com and TASS.com since the beginning of 2012, according to a Media Matters review. Those numbers spiked in 2016, when Drudge collectively linked to the three sites 122 times.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/09/20/how-matt-drudge-became-pipeline-russian-propaganda/217989

[Wellstone ruled]

1. Again,this is only one of the Actors

involved in the Corruption of our Elections.

[Leith]

2. A Few Years Ago, I Read an Article

The author seemed to be in worshipful awe as to how Drudge had scoops before everyone else. Sure they sometimes turned out to be wrong, but not too often, and he generally had news before everyone else.

Now, I think we can see that he was fed his stories by Russians throwing out their propaganda.

I looked at the Drudge Reports once. It was astonishing at how amateurish it was. I studied web design and development, but obviously nobody working for Drudge ever did. I just downloaded today's page and this will come as a complete shock to anyone who has ever created a webpage: he has no CSS file. That means an efficient way to style the webpage (like when text is red or there are 3 columns). Instead what little style is added is all mixed up in the HTML code. Oddly enough, he DOES have JavaScript files. What he has is for tracking how many people view his website and he obviously got professional help for that.