The Sludge Report

Boy, another day like this and Matt Drudge isn't going to have any stories left up at his site. Twice today he's had to take down blatant lies. First he lied about Howard Dean sending DNC officials to try and get Mitch Landrieu elected over Ray Nagin in the New Orleans mayoral election. The DNC called their lawyers, and Drudge shrunk from the pressure and offered a retraction. Then he tried to smear Al Gore by claiming that he and his entourage took five cars to drive a short distance to the Cannes premiere of "An Inconvenient Truth." Not true. Think Progress nailed Drudge and he took the item down.

Digby has a knack for beating me to the punch on stuff like this, and he notes that back in Drudge's heyday, there wasn't any such thing as a progressive blogosphere to call him on his crap. Now there is, and it's only getting louder, and it's not going to brook these kinds of outright falsehoods.

On the flip side of this, Chris Bowers notes:

There is something else that this (DNC/Landrieu) story demonstrates: a difference in the willingness of many major left-wing sites online and major right-wing sites online to run with unsubstantiated stories. Last week, despite what appeared to be an extremely hot story from Leopold in Truthout about Rove, led by Peter Daou almost no major left-wing blogs ran with front-page supporting comments on Leopold's story. By contrast, Drudge posts this about Dean as his headline piece. Let's see how many right-wing blogs follow suit. (Quite a few -ed.)

The progressive political blogosphere is quite capable of self-policing, if for no other reason then we know the right-wing and the established news media are extremely eager to pounce on our mistakes to try and discredit us. As I have argued in the past, we grew as a response to establishment progressive defeats at the hand of conservatives, and as such we are always aware of the tactics conservatives use to defeat and undercut progressives. This hatchet job against Dean demonstrates that if, for once, the same level of scrutiny is applied to conservative media as was applied to progressives and progressive media, the entire right-wing media empire would disintegrate in a matter of weeks. However, should we expect Drudge to be thrashed in the established press for this train wreck? I'm not holding my breath.

And furthermore, the left blogosphere IS being discredited for hyping Leopold's Rove story, even though almost none of them did. Salon wrote a story criticizing the Leopold story. DHinMi exposed Leopold as a sock puppet, the kind of guy who would respond in comments as different people to bolster his claims. I probably was taken in more than any left-wing blogger on this one, and I was pretty equivocal:

Leopold has also said while tracking this case that up to 15 people could be indicted back in October, when only Scooter Libby was targeted. But this article is pretty believable, and given all we know what's been happening, with Rove's 5th appearance before the grand jury and Fitzgerald's stays in Washington, I think this is the real deal.

My belief came more out of the corroborating evidence than Leopold's reporting, which I knew to be suspect. And most were far more circumspect than I. But that didn't stop Howard Kurtz by tarring all liberal blogs with "breathlessly reporting the Leopold scoop" even when they didn't. Meanwhile many, many conservative blogs actually DID report Drudge's garbage, and when Drudge had to retract them, those guys get off scot-free. It's a double-standard.

I never understood the appeal of Drudge. He reprints stories 90% of the time, and his "exclusives" are usually things that will end up in the conservative media the next day, or outright lies. In the age of blogs he seems irrelevant. Sure the Right Wing Noise Machine still uses him as a megaphone, but there are so many others who don't have his credibility problems. Still he soldiers on. Maybe he's making shit up to get everyone's attention again.