Hillary Campaign Helping Matt Drudge Get Stronger -- Will Drudge Return The Favor?
October 22, 2007 -- 10:35 AM EST // //

Everybody's posting about today's New York Times piece on the odd dalliance going on between Hillary's campaign and Matt Drudge, the fellow who broke the story of her husband's affair and cheerfully traffics in all manner of comically grotesque distortions about her on a near-daily basis.

The story reports that the Hillary camp recently leaked Drudge a big story: Her decisive fundraising victory over Barack Obama. The paper says this shows that she is "learning to play nice" with the man who got the process rolling that almost led to her husband's removal from office. It adds this:

Nielsen/NetRatings has clocked three million unique visitors to the site over the course of a month, and the Drudge Report said its users clicked onto the site a combined 16 million times in the course of a single day last week. The site’s influence, which is not limited to politics, has survived the proliferation of blogs offering all manner of news, analysis and gossip, as well as the advent of one-stop shopping political sites like Politico, which has a big staff of established political reporters.

What sets Drudge apart as much as anything is its ability to attract well-placed leaks and traffic in the freshest and rawest material — though sometimes including what some have considered smears...

Aides in both parties acknowledge working harder than ever to get favorable coverage for their candidates — or unfavorable coverage of competitors — onto the Drudge Report’s home page, knowing that television producers, radio talk show hosts and newspaper reporters view it as a bulletin board for the latest news and gossip.

What this really means, of course, is that Hillary's leak of her fundraising numbers was enormously helpful to Drudge and is the sort of thing that helps him and his biz grow stronger. It's true, as Marc Ambinder notes, that Barack Obama appears to have a pipeline to Drudge too on occasion. Nonetheless, the Hillary-Drudge relationship is the thing that bears watching. And the key takeaway is that when they deem it in their interest Hillary advisers are happy to do stuff -- like this leak -- that helps Drudge to no end.

The Hillary campaign of course can leak to whomever they want to. But we should be under no illusions as to what's really going on here. The fact that he does deliver legit scoops amid the stream of mendacity and low-comedic distortions is partly what enables him to maintain his power and status as a kind of "bulletin board" for the nation's political reporters. And the Drudgification of our media proceeds apace.

The piece, interestingly, also reports that Drudge has often said positive things about Hillary on his radio show -- and has even said that he "needs" her. A Hillary Presidency, you'd assume, would drive Drudge traffic through the roof, and for this reason I submit that it would be premature to predict, as many do, that he'd work all that hard to defeat her in a general election. At any rate, each has much to gain from the other, and neither appears to be all that shy about acting on this fact.

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