Suddenly announces that tonight is the last of his very lame radio
show. Wonder if the closet fag got caught in a compromising position?

Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Gay
Occupation: Blogger, Radio Personality, Pundit

Nationality: United States
Executive summary: The Drudge Report

Matt Drudge was a C- and D-student in high school, then worked a
steady succession of unsteady low-pay jobs. He delivered newspapers,
engaged in telemarketing, suffered the overnight shift at a 7-Eleven,
and was hired as a runner at CBS Studios in California. Eventually he
was promoted to the gift shop, where he manned the cash register and
overheard juicy gossip. When his father gave him a computer in 1994,
Drudge started posting the gossip to online newsgroups, along with
snippets he collected from listening to talk radio and police
scanners, and watching TV news. Among his early scoops were advance
copies of TV ratings, found in the trash at CBS.

A pioneer in what came to be called weblogging, Drudge's site had
80,000 visitors daily even before his big scoop, the Bill Clinton-
Monica Lewinsky affair. Newsweek had the story, but they hesitated,
pondering the unprecedented enormity of reporting on a sitting
President's extramarital affairs. When Newsweek decided to hold off
until they could verify a few more details, someone at the magazine
(Michael Isikoff is widely suspected) sent Drudge an email. With no
editor to hold him back, Drudge ran the story, and his site was
suddenly getting hundreds of thousands, then millions of hits daily.

The site's relatively scant original material is based on tips from
Drudge's far-flung network of online informants, many of whom are
employed by mainstream media or right-wing operations. Among his
biggest "scoops" Drudge reported that Clinton had fathered a child
through an affair with an African-American woman (which never
happened), broke the 2004 story of John Kerry's extramarital affair
(which never happened), and reported that Alec Baldwin had promised to
leave America if George W. Bush won the 2000 election (which was
actually a joke Baldwin had cracked during the 1992 election between
Clinton and Bush's father).

In 1997, Drudge reported that "...one influential Republican, who
demanded anonymity, [told] the Drudge Report that court records
existed showing that then-White House aide Sidney Blumenthal had
committed violent acts against his wife." As with many of Drudge's
scoops, it was untrue, and despite a retraction and apology,
Blumenthal sued. But he dropped the suit before it came to trial,
after Drudge -- with lawyers provided by arch right-winger David
Horowitz's Individual Rights Foundation, funded in turn by billionaire
conservative Richard Scaife -- was able to stretch out the proceedings
until Blumenthal could no longer afford the cost.

Drudge rarely names his sources, and the evidence shows that he has
his facts wrong more often than not. Brill's Content tracked Drudge's
news for nine months in 1998, and found that 20 of the 51 stories
Drudge labeled "exclusive" actually weren't -- they were simply items
mainstream newspapers and networks had reported. Of the 31 remaining
Drudge "exclusives", 11 (36%) were true, 10 (32%) were demonstrably
false and/or never happened, and the accuracy or inaccuracy of the
remaining 10 items (32%) was impossible to verify.

Those odds may do well for a baseball batting average, but if a real
reporter had the facts with him only four times out of ten, he would
be looking for a new line of work. But with no staff and none of the
research expenses that come with traditional journalism, Drudge is not
scouring the want ads. He quit his job at CBS when Wired started
running his web column for $3,000 a month. From there he jumped to
America Online, and now Drudge makes an estimated $1.2 million a year
through ads rotated on his site. For a time he hosted a weekly show
for Fox News, and another weekly show for ABC, but both were cancelled
within a year. He still hosts a syndicated radio show on the weekends,
and of course, he is the author of the subliterate bestseller Drudge
Manifesto.

He now lives in a comfortable Miami home/office/condo, where several
TVs are on most of the time while he is awake. He updates the site
several times daily, with links leading to mainstream newspaper and
wire-service websites, headlines rewritten to reflect Drudge's
perspective, and the occasional "exclusive". Overnight, while Drudge
slumbers, a friend in California monitors the incoming email, watches
the news, and keeps the site updated.

Drudge is widely whispered to be gay. "I go to bars", Drudge once
explained. "I go to straight bars, I go to gay bars." When
photographed, he is almost invariably dressed like a 1930s muckraker,
complete with a "press style" hat.

Father: Bob Drudge (webmaster, refdesk.com)
Boyfriend: David Cohen (Washington landscaper, and Drudge's ex-lover,
according to Cohen)

High School: Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Spring, MD
(1984)

The Drudge Report
The Washington Star paperboy in Takoma Park, MD
7-Eleven