Free Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics by Glenn Greenwald Page A

first day it began publishing, it was inescapably clear that The Politico would devote itself to the same types of vapid, base personality attacks on liberals and Democrats that drive our political and media culture generally. As John Harris, The Politico ’s editor in chief, recognizes, political media outlets receive attention (and therefore readers and page hits) only by adhering to the standard script, whereby “journalists” take their cues from the Drudge/Limbaugh right-wing noise machine, ignoring substantive policy disputes and focusing obsessively on shallow personality issues and smears.
    Almost immediately, The Politico became the prime beneficiary of the gossipmonger whom its editor in chief flattered as “the Walter Cronkite of our era.” A link from The Drudge Report is like no other on the Internet; a single Drudge link generates traffic at the linked site magnitudes above any other political website’s ability. Drudge is notoriously reluctant to link to new online ventures, reserving links almost exclusively for established newspapers. Yet virtually from its inception The Politico became one of the most linked-to—if not the single most linked-to—sites on Drudge. Sometimes on a daily basis, whatever story The Politico happened to churn out, The Drudge Report prominently promoted. From the most banal stories carried by every other news outlet and wire service, to the pettiest personality attacks published only by The Politico, the millions of daily Drudge readers were continuously sent to Politico stories.
    On March 28, 2007, Media Matters published an analysis documenting that it had “reviewed the Drudge Report Archives and found that since The Politico launched on January 23 [a mere sixty-four days earlier], Drudge has linked to Politico items on at least 45 separate occasions.”
    On some occasions, Drudge promoted and linked to Politico stories even before The Politico published the story on its own site. The two websites worked in perfect tandem with each other, and no publication promoted the gossip-obsessed, right-wing Drudge agenda as extensively as did The Politico. Drudge, in turn, repaid The Politico with links so numerous and continuous that one Web analyst estimated in March 2007 that Drudge accounted for 65 percent of The Politico ’s traffic (the next-highest source of traffic for The Politico was Google, at a mere 3 percent).
    And it was not hard to understand this coordinated linking strategy between Drudge and The Politico. The latter churned out one petty, personality-based attack story after another, aimed primarily at Democrats and liberals, exactly the type of shallow and vapid smears that already pervade our political landscape and that Matt Drudge eats up.
    That The Politico, as well as numerous other publications, crafts its stories with the hope of attracting Drudge’s attention is conceded by Harris himself in The Way to Win, describing the perception of Drudge’s importance:
     
Meanwhile, although there is no system for authorized leaks to the Drudge Report at the Washington Post, editors at the website and main newspaper are delighted when Drudge does link to stories at washingtonpost.com. Invariably, traffic to the site soars. And there is evident frustration when the Drudge Report does not acknowledge significant Washington Post pieces.
     
    Harris goes on to recount how a mere mention from Drudge single-handedly enabled Harris to get invited on major news shows to promote his new book.
    The Politico has followed this Drudge-based strategy tenaciously. The most attention-generating, petty Politico attack began on April 16, 2007, when former New York Daily News reporter Ben Smith, assigned to cover Democratic presidential candidates for The Politico, published an item regarding John Edwards’s haircuts. The item was titled “The Hair’s Still Perfect,” and at the top displayed a large, informal photograph of Edwards, grinning widely. Underneath the photograph,