All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Sometimes the biggest forces at work are the unseen, invisible ones.

Take gravity, for example. Big deal. You know, apples and Isaac Newton and all that. Something that scientists and high-wire performers struggle with every day.

Then there’s the Drudge Report. Also a big deal. Not entirely unseen – it gets loads of hits – but its effect extends far beyond mere eyeballs. Media professionals and political operatives deal with it every day.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gotten a call from a TV or radio producer wanting to have me discuss a certain topic, catching me unaware, and have them say “It’s up on Drudge. Check it out.”

Then yesterday, there was an extremely fascinating take on the Drudge Effect in the New York Times indicating that the Hillary Clinton campaign was providing carefully-timed leaks to the Drudge Report team, to both gain widespread notice and divert attention from Barack Obama events.

That people in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign orbit would tip off the Drudge Report to its fund-raising numbers is in part a reflection of her pragmatic approach to dealing with potential enemies, like Newt Gingrich or Rupert Murdoch. But it also speaks to the enduring power of the Drudge Report, which mixes original reporting with links to newspaper, Internet or television reports far and wide.

The site is a potent combination of real scoops, gossip and innuendo aimed at Mr. Drudge’s targets of choice — some of it delivered with no apparent effort to determine its truth, as politicians of all stripes have discovered at times.

Aides in both parties acknowledge working harder than ever to get favorable coverage for their candidates — or unfavorable coverage of competitors — onto the Drudge Report’s home page, knowing that television producers, radio talk show hosts and newspaper reporters view it as a bulletin board for the latest news and gossip.

I think that, to most observers, the Drudge Report is a website that runs political and cultural scuttlebutt. But it very clearly doesn't end there. (Here's another great anecdote from earlier this year, from the liberally-inclined TalkingPointsMemo.) So what is the Drudge Effect? How much does it ripple throughout MediaLand, and reverberate? I am but one modest media soul, so I decided to tug the ears of some media insiders.

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Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week we turned to Tim Graham, Director of Media Analysis for the Media Research Center. From his conservative media watchdog perch, Graham (a frequent commenter on Public Eye) answers some of the questions he's often asked, and gives his take on the differences between right and left media critics. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices. Take it away, Tim:

If a conservative were to start a career in the field of politics with the goal of gaining maximum exposure in the "mainstream media," probably the last thing he or she would do is sign up with a conservative media watchdog group. Conservatives of a certain pre-Internet vintage knew it was hard enough getting your name in the paper without picking a fight with the media giants. But since Public Eye was kind enough to solicit this "outside voice," let’s explore a few questions we are often asked:

1. Are you anti-journalist? Left-wing media-watch groups like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting make a show of how they’re "pro-journalist," as if we at the MRC are not. Surely, Dan Rather is not on our Most Admired list. But we have a deep, geeky love of the news. Several of us can remember being grade-school age and watching Vietnam stories with ‘VIA SATELLITE’ graphics on screen, when the technology was new and exciting. At 17, I was a little late for my dishwashing job the night Walter Cronkite did his last newscast.

We know the value of reporting done right, but we also warn of the harm of reporting done wrong. We’re media critics in part because we’re angered by media unfairness, inaccuracy and even injustice in reporting on our ideas and our think tanks, on our political leaders and our historical heroes, on our religious faiths and our traditional family upbringings. But the great majority of what we watch and read is not noticeably unfair or inaccurate. If we were asked the recent CBS poll question, "How often do the news media tell the truth," we would answer "most of the time." So much of the news our patient analysts review every day is focused on subjects without earth-shaking political impact: who won at the Olympics, wildfires and church arsons, low-fat diets and teenage alcohol consumption, missing white girls and Britney Spears neglecting to belt up her baby. We don’t suspect the networks are twisting or omitting facts for a political agenda in these hours.

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