Founded in the early days of the Internet, the Drudge Report is a U.S.-based news site whose bare-bones approach belied the role it played as a disrupter in American politics and media. Named for its brash, upstart founder, Matt Drudge, the publication was the first to break the news that U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton had had an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

The beginnings of Drudge

American journalist Matt Drudge started the Drudge Report in 1995, initially as a newsletter and subsequently as a website. While living in Hollywood and working in a studio gift shop, Drudge started by publishing gossipy entertainment industry tidbits. A year later he had turned his attention to politics, being the first to break the news that U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, the Republican Party’s 1996 presidential nominee, had chosen former New York Rep. Jack Kemp to be his running mate.

The Drudge Report had a conservative bent and a nontraditional approach in its earliest days. Drudge portrayed himself as a “citizen journalist” who objected to what he perceived as the way major news outlets covered—or, in his view, sometimes covered up—the news, particularly news involving Democratic politicians. In January 1998 Drudge learned that Newsweek had prepared a story about a sexual relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky but was holding back on publishing it. On January 17 the Drudge Report published the news that would lead to Clinton’s impeachment and shape the rest of his presidency.

Read Monica Lewinsky’s essay for Britannica on cyberbullying.

Not all Drudge Report scoops were as successful for the site, however. In 1997 Drudge ran—then retracted—a story claiming that White House aide Sidney Blumenthal had a history of spousal abuse. Blumenthal sued Drudge for $30 million. The case was settled in 2001, with Blumenthal dropping the libel accusation.

The secret to success

Although the Drudge Report would garner its own headlines for scoops, including Dole-Kemp and Clinton-Lewinsky, much of the site consisted simply of links to stories reported and published by other news outlets—what is commonly known as a news aggregator. The simple, formulaic layout with one bold headline followed by a menu of smaller headlines drew millions of readers each day. The site’s format invited readers to click in, and that meant that traditional news outlets came to rely on the Drudge Report to drive traffic to their sites. Having a story featured on the Drudge Report became a sought-after endorsement that could mean big business. A 2011 study by the Pew Research Center found that Drudge Report links accounted for 15 percent of all traffic to The Washington Post’s website.

The simplicity of the format meant that the Drudge Report could be maintained by a very small staff, which initially included Andrew Breitbart, the conservative pundit who would go on to cofound the Breitbart News organization. Describing Drudge in a 2011 New York Times article, Breitbart said,

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe

Matt Drudge is an American original.…He does not care about the next big Web innovation, he just has the best nose for news there is. He gives people everything, every single thing, they want to know in a single stop.

Drudge in the era of Donald Trump

Until 2019 the Drudge Report was a reliably conservative website; indeed, U.S. Pres. Donald Trump counted it, along with Fox News, among his favored news sources. In 2018 Trump called Drudge “a great gentleman” and applauded his “ability to capture stories that people want to see.” During Trump’s first run for the presidency, in 2016, Drudge was seen as being so squarely in Trump’s corner that Texas senator and would-be GOP nominee Ted Cruz called the Drudge Report “the attack site for the Donald Trump campaign.”

During Trump’s first term, however, Drudge seemed to become disenchanted with the president’s agenda, often featuring headlines attacking the president’s immigration policy. The schism between the two became irrefutable when Trump announced in 2020 that he had “[given] up on Drudge.” During Trump’s third presidential campaign, in 2024, the Drudge Report went so far as to label Trump “American Psycho” and to publish a headline predicting Kamala Harris’s victory.

Although the Drudge Report continues to publish its website, it wields less influence than it had in the heady days of the 2000s. The reasons for that include its move away from the right-wing media space and the growth of other outlets that now do a better job with an approach that Drudge invented. Those outlets include social media sites such as X (formerly Twitter), which in the 2010s became to the media and political elite what Drudge had been a decade earlier. Conservative commentator John Ziegler put it this way:

I think Twitter has diminished Drudge’s power within the right-wing media sphere. The retweet has replaced the link as the gold-standard.