We need to talk about Drudge.
That's Matt Drudge, the king of conservative media, whose old-school site has 2 million daily unique visitors and roughly 700 million monthly page views.
When I first became a reporter (waaay back in the early aughts), I was shocked how many newsrooms — whose editors worshiped at the altar of objectivity — relied on the Drudge Report for story ideas.
To the site's credit, there was no equivalent at that time on the left. There were plenty of liberal publications like Mother Jones and The Nation, but they offered long, nuanced takes on important matters like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — not quick links to irresistible (and often fun) stories of the day.
And after years of conservatives whining about "liberal bias," Drudge offered an easy "correction" to that for newsrooms.