Who would know about NSA/Snowden without Drudge?
Conservatives have been dragged kicking and screaming to the privacy debate brought about by the revelations of Edward Snowden, by and large, by the persistent coverage of Matt Drudge. Today was no exception. This was splashed across the Drudge Report for most of the day–linking directly to the new site founded by Glenn Greenwald to cover the after shocks from the original Snowden revelations.
Even with Barack Obama as president (Who everyone knows is a secret Muslim terrorist trained by Bill Ayers and deeply influenced by a book dedicated to Lucifer and, gasp, a community organizer from Chicago!), many conservatives are still reticent about taking a stand against NSA abuses because they either celebrated the powers used by George Bush or yearn to wield these powers again when a Republican regains the Oval Office. The only prominent exception being Senator Rand Paul. While a few conservative figures started out supporting Edward Snowden (Like Rush Limbaugh, here and here), Drudge has consistently driven traffic to stories about NSA abuses even as Limbaugh has increasingly buried his head in the sand. Just how influential is Drudge? According to Politico,
In 2014, DrudgeReport.com was the No. 1 site of referral traffic to the Daily Mail, CNN, Fox News, Roll Call, Breitbart, The New York Times, National Journal, USA Today, Associated Press, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and POLITICO…87 percent of its own traffic is from readers going directly to DrudgeReport.com and staying there for an average of 30 minutes.
Drudge has 2 million daily unique visitors and around 700 million monthly page views, almost entirely from within the United States…
According to the site Drudge Report Archives, “Snowden” has featured in more than 420 headlines and “NSA” 609 times–usually unsympathetically.
Thoughtful conservatives and civil libertarians owe Matt Drudge a great deal of credit for bringing these important topics into the public eye.
Check out the story featured today…
NSA CONVERTING SPOKEN WORDS INTO SEARCHABLE TEXT… http://t.co/av17UBXx9Y
— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) May 5, 2015
Despite many conservatives waking up to these issues, Jeb Bush still represents perfectly the establishment line. Saying recently,
I would say the best part of the Obama administration would be his continuance of the protections of the homeland using the big metadata programs, the NSA being enhanced. Advancing this — even though he never defends it, even though he never openly admits it, there has been a continuation of a very important service, which is the first obligation, I think of our national government is to keep us safe…
And Ben Franklin continues to roll in his grave…