Why Do Liberals Still Care About Matt Drudge?

The New Republic, continuing the political world's odd obsession with the Drudge Report, says its editor, Matt Drudge, has disappeared, or gone into seclusion like some latter-day Howard Hughes.

I do not think Drudge has disappeared. I think he is dead. Certainly the Drudge Report, which the New Republic claims gets "20 million hits per day" (a meaningless locution as old-fashioned as the Drudge Report itself) has been on automatic pilot for several years.

If he is not dead, he is definitely brain dead. There hasn't been a breaking story on the site in months. Drudge, once one of the most vaunted gossips in the nation, clearly isn't in the loop. Or he is just bored to death. He had been doing this for a decade. It is the same old Drudge Report, without improvement or variation. Or staff. Drudge may have theoretically gotten rich ("sources believe he makes millions per year off his site," says the New Republic breathlessly, although Compete.com reports his traffic at 2.6 million visitors a month, which certainly isn't going to make him millions), but he hasn't built a business -- it's him alone performing the same repetitive act. (Or him and one Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger who seems to help him, and who has a site Drudge links to -- and who exists only as an odd Drudge appendage; certainly nobody else seems to link to him.)

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