http://finance.yahoo.com/news/dallas-conservatives-rebel-against-drudge-144308586.htmlAfter Dallas, conservatives rebel against the Drudge Report7/10/16
"BLACK LIVES KILL."
Those were the three words that blared across the Drudge Report early Friday morning after five Dallas police officers were killed in a horrific ambush attack.
And immediately upon seeing the race-baiting headline, conservatives rebelled against a once reliable ally who has become more and more divisive to them over the course of the 2016 campaign.
“In moments like these, we should do the opposite of what Drudge is doing,” Commentary Magazine Editor Noah Rothman wrote on Twitter.
“Responsible reporting as always,” sarcastically tweeted Jeff Blehar, from the popular Ace of Spades blog.
Others piled on.
Allahpundit, an influential anonymous conservative blogger, skewered the site for a subsequent banner headline claiming a “black power group” had claimed responsibility for the attack.
“Dallas chief says suspect told them before he died that he wasn’t part of a group,” the blogger wrote.
And David French, the National Review writer who flirted with a third-party presidential run, went as far as to say that he had deleted the Drudge Report app from his phone.
The anti-Drudge sentiment had been simmering for months. But it seemed to finally come to a boil with the Drudge Report’s coverage of the Dallas attack.
Since its inception in 1996, the Drudge Report has been a home to conservatives who feel disenfranchised by traditional media. Drudge has marketed his website as a news destination not controlled by corporate interests or politicians.
But that's a narrative that was heavily challenged during the 2016 Republican Primary, when it became clear the news aggregator was pushing a pro-Trump agenda.
Many conservatives who frequent the right-wing link aggregator had grown upset over how founder Matt Drudge had covered the 2016 election. The Drudge Report, they say, trashed true-bred conservatives like Ted Cruz in favor of promoting a squishy moderate in Donald Trump.
“I don’t know what the hell happened to Matt Drudge,” Glenn Beck, the prominent conservative talk-show host and founder of The Blaze, said in March.
The Drudge Report, operating from the same playbook as Trump, has used the racial tension in the country to generate page views, its critics say. And the website’s controversial three-word headline in the aftermath of the Dallas attack was the final straw.
“Matt Drudge, for whom my late friend Andrew Breitbart used to work closely and for whom I used to fill in on his old national radio show, is not a conservative,” conservative talk-radio host John Ziegler told Business Insider. “He is a brilliant businessman who doesn't care at all about the conservative cause.”
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