Drudge Report holds sway over media elite

Don Day May 29th, 2008

I got a fascinating look at the anatomy of a minor political story in the past 48 hours. Tuesday night, Idaho Sen. Larry Craig spoke with a KTVB anchor during our live coverage of the Idaho primary election. Craig revealed that he was writing a book that would cover a number of topics - including his time in the Senate, and the events of the past year. Of course - the biggest of those events would be his arrest in a Minnesota bathroom on allegations he was soliciting gay sex.

After the interview, I quickly flipped a story for KTVB.COM - and turned around the video of the interview. The Idaho Associated Press glommed on, citing us - and the story went out on the national wire. While the auto-feed version ran on hundreds of news sites, it didn’t get a whole lot of notice Wednesday.

This morning, the item appeared high on the left hand column of Drudge with a link to our story. While the pageview bounce is always nice - it was funny to watch what happened next. Several national news outlets called looking for video - and even wanted to interview our reporter. Yes… interview the interviewer. The story is everywhere today - even though it broke on the wire late Tuesday night. It’s starting to look to me like the Drudge Report has more influence on the nation’s media than the Associated Press…