By Alton Jerome McFarland
The Drudge Report (located at www.drugereport.com)
is a popular website offering a column by its namesake Matt Drudge
and multitude of clickable news headlines and reporters' names. Following
any of these links leads to an offsite article on the specified topic
or written by the specified reporter.
When first visiting the Drudge Report, I was surprised by
its extremely simple layout. The site has a white background and uses
black text for the links. Three columns of these links make up the
entire site. The format of the site evokes the feeling of a traditional
newsletter, full of several brief stories and little else. The main
difference is that all of the stories in this newsletter, excluding
Drudge's own column, actually come from other sources.
Since the site only uses links to real stories posted around the
web from various reputable sources (AP, Reuters, etc.), one's first
impression might be that the Drudge Report is simply a summary
of important events. Exploitation of that impression is precisely
what makes sites like the Drudge Report powerful, and dangerous.
The news they offer may be authentic, but it is nowhere near complete.
The Drudge Report is a site linking to news stories that have
passed through a filter before making it to your computer screen.
Although traditional news sites must also make decisions on what to
feature and what to leave out entirely, those decisions reflect the
views of a respected agency. The decisions made on the Drudge Report,
however, reflect the views of one man. Such individualistic bias should
be taken into consideration when looking at the site as a whole. The
individual stories may not be biased, but the views presented subtly
through those stories' selection may very well be.
Today, with the internet explosion allowing society unparalleled
access to all sorts of information, it has become more important than
ever to carefully select the sources of that information. Many sites,
like the Drudge Report, offer a means of quickly consuming
a large amount of news. It is the responsibility of the reader, though,
to be conscious of just what he/she is being fed. What is omitted
from such a site is just as important as what is presented. Recognizing
that, I think readers should take the Drudge Report with a
heavy grain of salt, for it necessarily presents the world as viewed
through Drudge-colored glasses.