It's easy to see how Matt Drudge can be taken seriously as a "journalist," what with the cool fedora he's usually portrayed with. After all, clothes make the man, right? Things like integrity, hard work, fact checking, none of those have anything to do with reporting the news. It's all about the hat.
Like, say, talking about how the government spent almost $2 million dollars to buy a couple of pounds of ham. Try to find the original article, and it's gone, but here's the precis:The purchases for sliced ham and other contracts - including mozzarella and other cheeses - were to provide soup kitchens and homeless shelters with food for the needy.
And governmentese references to 2 pounds of frozen ham and other sizes was to the products' packaging, not the overall amount of food purchased.
In fact, the Agriculture Department purchased some 760,000 pounds of ham with that $1.19 million - a cost of about $1.50 a pound, Vilsack said.
Now, a real reporter would have picked up the phone, and called the USDA and asked, "Hey, you know, there's this line item in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that says you folks spent over a million bucks on two pounds of ham. Care to comment?"
A cursory look at Drudge's website on any random minute, like, say, now, reveals these headlines:
- CLAIM: Fish are shrinking in response to global warming... (well, at least he acknowledges global warming is real)
Now, I'd bet that of these four stories, one is flat out true (the claim about the fish actually having been made), one is an exaggeration of circumstances (the town hall eruption), one is a joke reported as straight fact (the pot app...altho it's going to be fun downloading that one!), and the last one is a flat out distortion of what is likely a true-but-mundane story, so badly distorted now that the memory of a tragic death will be tarnished forever by a bunch of know-nothing bloggers who believe that Drudge only ever tells the truth.
After all, he wouldn't print it if it wasn't true, to quote the Joe Jackson song.
To his credit, he not only published the refutation by the USDA, specifically by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, but highlighted it on his home page.
To his dishonor, he mocked it, acting as a child who points to a load of shit he's just taken under the stairs and saying "See? See, Mommy? Look what I made!"
This reprehensible piece of human filth, this scum who dares call himself a newsman, is a disgrace to anything that walks the face of the earth and calls itself a human being. His job, his life, is to destroy anyone who is better than him and that means everyone. And one day, he'll turn his guns on anyone, including those who suck at his teat now and feed him his dredge information.
And I'll applaud. They deserve each other.
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