Montana made national headlines in the days leading to 2009’s exit. First, there was the controversy, or non-controversy (depending on your point of view), surrounding our senior Sen. Max Baucus’ floor speech defending the Democrats’ health care plan. Then there were the Bozeman tennis courts.
These stories aren’t at all related, but they each show the influence that Matt Drudge has in conservative circles and beyond – even in the far-flung corners of Montana. He is the founder and editor of the Drudge Report, a news aggregation Web site that gained notoriety in the late ‘90s for first exposing the Monica Lewinsky scandal and has since grown exponentially.
With Baucus, Drudge essentially made the story. His archives show that early Sunday morning, Dec. 27, he posted a headline as a top item on his Web site that read: “Drunk With Power? Top Dem Slurs on Senate Floor.” It linked to a YouTube video named “Senator Max Baucus Drunk/Intoxicated on Senate Floor – Shouts Down Wicker.” While the Dec. 22 speech was far from the senator’s most eloquent, implications that he was drunk lacked any evidence besides the video. It didn’t matter.
The story had legs and, in Drudge, a strong wind at its back. The link spent more than two days on the popular Web site and, as of last week, the video had been viewed more than 1.2 million times.
Because of Drudge, the Washington, D.C. newspaper Politico ran a short story about how Baucus’ speech was “generating buzz on the Internet.” And Montana’s media followed. The Billings Gazette, the state’s largest newspaper, wrote a story on Dec. 28 titled, “Baucus denounces as ‘personal smear’ video that suggests he was drunk on Senate floor.” The Great Falls Tribune wrote a story; so did the Daily Inter Lake. I posted the video on our political blog on the Beacon’s Web site.
Baucus’ office had no choice but to respond to the allegation. His spokesman Ty Matsdorf released a statement that said in part: “It is this type of slander that makes Montanans, and Americans, disgusted with the politics as usual in Washington. And what is even more sad is that such a personal attack would be given any validity at all, let alone being elevated to the status of ‘news.'”
But the Drudge Report is one of a handful of online outlets that can create or elevate any story it chooses and is almost guaranteed to generate a response. It’s strength in numbers, and Drudge draws 10 million readers a month, according to quantcast.com.
The same week Drudge aimed his sights on Baucus, he turned a local news story on Bozeman spending stimulus money on new tennis courts into a national one on government waste.
On Monday, Dec. 28, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported a short piece on that city approving a contract to install rubber-tiled tennis courts at one of its parks. The next morning, Drudge linked to it, and by that afternoon Montana’s Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer was criticizing Bozeman commissioners for wasting cash. Coincidence?
Soon, the story of Bozeman spending $49,140 on tennis courts became a referendum on the stimulus. At the state level, the governor and Republican lawmakers sparred over who was to blame for doling out federal funds without more strings attached. At the national level, Fox News’ “On the Record With Greta” was on the case.
“You know, I’m a huge tennis fanatic, so I love the idea of building tennis courts,” the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore said on the show. “I just don’t like them being paid for with federal tax dollars, and that’s what’s happening in this situation.”
Bozeman officials went on the defensive, but the story had already spread and caused heavy backlash. And that Montana controversy, like the one surrounding Baucus, was made by one man. Ironically, he lives in Florida.