Exposing Matt Drudge’s Lazy Journalism

I used to be a huge fan of DrudgeReport.com… but ever since it was clear that Obama was going to be our next president (I peg that to be sometime mid-October), Drudge has taken a hard turn to the “right”. Here’s a shining example. Last night, Matt Drudge ran the following headline vis a vis Nielsen television ratings for presidential inaugurations:

REAGAN BEATS OBAMA: 41,800,260 to 37,793,008…

These numbers are accurate— yet they leave out an absolutely essential viewership component of the 21st century. Online viewers.

Just in this one YouTube video of Obama’s inauguration, there are over 2.4 million hits. Add that to Obama’s original total and he’s almost a million viewers away from beating Reagan’s inauguration. And given the varying lengths, quality, and sheer number of Obama inauguration videos, I feel confident in assuming in this digital era that easily more than 2 million people watched Obama’s inauguration online in some capacity.

Come on Drudge… what happened to you? Don’t make me set my homepage to HuffingtonPost.com…

Am I in trouble? The Associated Press and blogging group to discuss possible standards for quoting AP news stories online

NEW YORK (AP) — The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers’ group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.

Jim Kennedy, the AP’s director of strategic planning, said Monday that he planned to meet Thursday with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, as part of an effort to create standards for online use of AP stories by bloggers that would protect AP content without discouraging bloggers from legitimately quoting from it.

The meeting comes after AP sent a legal notice last week to Rogers Cadenhead, the author of a blog called the Drudge Retort, a news community site whose name is a parody of the prominent blog the Drudge Report.

The notice called for the blog to remove several postings that AP believed was an improper use of its stories. Other bloggers subsequently lambasted AP for going after a small blogger whom they thought appeared to be engaging in a legally permissible and widely practiced activity protected under “fair use” provisions of copyright law…

Click here for the full story

BREAKING from DrudgeReport.com

CONGRESSIONAL SOURCE: Hillary having trouble finding superdelegates who will meet with her... 'No one wants to see her today'... Developing...

http://www.drudgereport.com