The powerful conservative website Drudge Report does not want to take part in the COVID trivialization and the Trump election campaign. FOX News now scolds Matt Drudge as a traitor who defected to the left “woke” camp: Commentators sarcastically remarked that Fox is doing “Cancel Culture” here, the kind of which the leftists are always accused of doing.
Tucker Carlson segment tonight questions what happened to @DRUDGE, saying his site is at times no longer distinguishable from “woke” websites. Carlson calls Drudge “firmly a man of the progressive left.” pic.twitter.com/GobP77x3uX
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) July 25, 2020
Various sources from Fox suggest that behind the scenes preparations have long been made for a post-Trump era.
During the 2019 impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the Drudge Report began posting more and more reports that CNN Business called “an overwhelming amount of negative news for Trump’s White House”. CNN speculated that this meant that there had been a dispute. In 2019, Rasmussen Reports reported that Drudge had sold the website and was no longer involved in its operations, which would also explain the change in editorial direction, but this reporting was not confirmed.
In the period following the changes in 2019, traffic to the Drudge website dropped significantly – from a 90-day ranking of #632 in global internet engagement to #844 and a decline in December 2019. The site’s readership recovered briefly in March 2020 as the COVID 19 pandemic escalated, but continued to fall to new lows thereafter.
Drudge met Andrew Breitbart in Los Angeles in the 1990s and became his mentor, with Breitbart later helping to run the Drudge Report. Breitbart announced in 2005 that he would “leave the Drudge Report amicably after a long and close working relationship with Matt Drudge,” but still helped run the Drudge website from Los Angeles by working the afternoon shift in addition to Breitbart.
In 1998, Drudge claimed that his policies were “libertarian, except for drugs and abortion. In 2005, in an interview with the Sunday Times, Drudge described his policies as
“I am not a right-wing republican. I am a conservative and I want to pay less tax. And I voted Republican in the last election. But I am more of a populist.”
