Monday, January 2, 2006
IT'S ALL HIS FAULT
And this time, I'm not talking about Bush. The Hollywood Reporter is blaming Drudge for the lest than stellar performance of King Kong. It cost $207 Million to make and it's only make around half of that back at the box office, and somehow it's Matt Drudge's fault. I love Hollywood. It's never the fact that it's a crappy movie, there has to be another reason a "masterpiece" like King Kong isn't succeeding. You know, if Drudge really had the power to kill a film, Micheal Moore's outhouse of a mockumentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, would have sank faster than the stomach of the manager of a Western Sizzler holding an All You Can Eat day and Moore himself walked in.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well given that Drudge has about all the journalistic ethics of a toilet brush and yet manages to get a readership in the millions.

The only reason it didn't kill Fahrenheit is because unlike King Kong, it was a controversial film. Controversial films THRIVE on people attacking it. King Kong was dismissed, not attacked - hence the difference.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, that should read, "Well given that Drudge has about all the journalistic ethics of a toilet brush and yet manages to get a readership in the millions, I wouldn't be too surprised."

Christopher Lee said...

How does he have the journalistic ethics of a toilet brush? All he does it find stories and link to them. He's not a journalist. He's a blogger, sort of.

Anonymous said...

He poses as a journalist, and has an impact on actual journalism. And he doesn't "find stories and link to them" - he pre-empts stories.

Originally he was an amateur Hollywood gossip who fished through garbage cans (that alone puts him off to a good start). Now however, he steals working journalist's stories without actually researching them himself. The article that put him on the map was the article about Monica Lewinsky he stole off Newsweek's Michael Isikoff while the magazine's editors sought further confirmation before publishing.

Just as an example of where he's gone wrong in the past:
He posted three false articles saying that Tim Russert was considering running for governor of NY.
"All three stories - they are just plain dead wrong. And he never called me about them, never."
- Russert (quoted from Howard Kurtz, "Out There: It's 10 Past Monica, America, Do You Know Where Matt Drudge Is?" Washington Post, March 28 1999, p. F1)

He also posted a story about Clinton's alleged mulatto "love child", which was then reprinted by the New York Post and the Washington Times, neither of which bothered to check their facts.

Oh, and he accused Sidney Blumenthal of having "a spousal abuse past that has been effectively covered up," replete with "court records of Blumenthal's violence against his wife". Pity Blumenthal was innocent. Even greater pity that it took a libel suit for him to bother retracting the story.

So the guy does NO fact checking, doesn't give a damn who he damages, and requires litigation to actually remove his lies. Journalistic ethics of a toilet brush. And yeah a "blogger, sort of", who just happens to get his trash republished by larger media outlets.