{"id":89208,"date":"2017-11-14T08:45:28","date_gmt":"2017-11-14T12:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=89208"},"modified":"2017-11-14T08:53:24","modified_gmt":"2017-11-14T12:53:24","slug":"the-washington-post-insinuates-that-the-drudge-report-colludes-with-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=89208","title":{"rendered":"The Washington Post Insinuates that the DRUDGE REPORT<\/i><\/b> Colludes with Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u00a0Analysis<\/div>\n
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One of the busiest websites in the U.S. in 2016 regularly linked to Russia propaganda<\/h1>\n

By Philip Bump<\/span>
\nThe Washington Post<\/p>\n

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By July 2016, according to the analysis site SimilarWeb<\/a>, Matt Drudge\u2019s link-aggregation site Drudge Report was the second-most-visited on the Internet in the United States. Over the course of the month \u2014 the month of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions and the month of the leak of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee \u2014 SimilarWeb estimates that Drudge had 1,472,220,000 page views. That\u2019s 1.4 billion<\/em>, the equivalent of 47 views of the Drudge Report every second of every minute that month.<\/h3>\n

Being the second-most-visited site, incidentally, means that Drudge had more page views than Yahoo, Disney (including ABC and ESPN) and Time Warner. It had more than the New York Times and The Washington Post, combined<\/em> \u2014 with enough space left over to also outpace Hearst.<\/p>\n

By December, Drudge had fallen to third, the position it had held for most of 2016. That month, though, the number of page views had climbed to 1.83 billion. That\u2019s as though 58 people loaded Drudge Report every second that month.<\/p>\n

Translated into universally accessible terms, the Drudge Report was a traffic behemoth during the 2016 election. And every time the page was loaded last year (and today, should you visit<\/a>), there were two direct links to the conspiracy-theory-hawking site Infowars.<\/p>\n

To be fair, those two links were included in the long list of links to news websites and pundits at the bottom of the Drudge homepage. But over the course of the campaign, Drudge was also not shy about linking directly to individual stories at Infowars, as well as RT and Sputnik News, both content-sharing arms of the Russian government.<\/p>\n

DrudgeReportArchives<\/a> captures an image of the Drudge Report every two minutes, as it has for 16 years. We ran a script that checked the first update to Drudge Report after 9 a.m. on every day of the past decade, counting the number of times Drudge linked to Infowars, RT or Sputnik. Over that period, excluding the two standing links to Infowars, we tallied more than 1,000 links to those sites.<\/p>\n

Drudge started linking to Infowars in 2010. His first link to RT was that same year. Sputnik News wasn\u2019t created until November 2014; Drudge\u2019s first link to that site came later that month.<\/p>\n

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The first links to each:<\/p>\n