Fox News host Tucker Carlson said the Drudge Report is losing its mojo and its devoutly conservative audience.
Speaking with Matthew Lysiak, the author of a new biography on Matt Drudge, Carlson compared the influential news aggregator to left-leaning news websites that often are full of unflattering headlines about President Trump.
“For decades, Matt Drudge was one of the most influential figures in conservatives news journalism,” Carlson said Friday evening. “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.”
“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,” Carlson said on his top-rated show. “At times, his site is indistinguishable from the Daily Beast or any other woke propaganda outlet posing as a news company.”
Some have suggested that this apparent lurch to the Left by Drudge, 53, is a result of new hires that now run the site, and, seeing an opportunity, alternative news aggregate websites have risen over the past year to challenge the dominance of the Drudge Report.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the anonymous editor of Citizen Free Press, which appears to be one of the most successful Drudge alternatives approaching nearly 30 million page views in the month of July. The former Lou Dobbs producer who writes under the alias Kane said he thinks Drudge is still manning the keys of his aggregation site.
“Matt Drudge is still running the site,” Kane said. “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.”
Kane told the Washington Examiner that he started Citizen Free Press, which competes with other aggregation sites, such as Bongino Report and Whatfinger, out of a desire to provide interesting stories to news junkies around the clock. He said his site, which includes a comment section reminiscent of the Gawker media empire, has seen explosive growth since Drudge’s drastic shift to anti-Trump content.
“I think he let his audience down, certainly,” Kane said. “As for being an alternative, I don’t think of it as being an alternative to Drudge, I think of it as an alternative to news junkies. The great majority of Drudge readers were news junkies that happened to lean conservative, and to me, that’s what was always the great value of Drudge. Providing a one-stop place where you can find 50 interesting stories. I am filling the void left by Drudge’s considerable shift to the Left.”
