Where is the nuclear catastrophe of yesterday?

At the Drudge Report tonight, there is not a single link about the radiation! radiation! radiation! meltdown! meltdown! meltdown! story with which Drudge filled the top of his page for all of the last week. After trying their best to scare the hell out of the human race for several days, the news industry, including Drudge, doesn’t have the honesty and decency to put any closure on the story by saying, “The problem is not as bad as we said.” No, they just go silent on that alarmist phenomenon and move on to the next sensation. The Drudge Report is useful at times. But it is also a garbage-in, garbage out website, assiduously pumping forth whatever line the mainstream media are most addicted to at any given moment. The fact that Drudge is no longer pumping out the garbage on the Japanese meltdown catastrophe, simply means that the media are no longer pumping it in to him, because the story is no longer there. Not that there’s not a huge and terribly costly problem at the Fukushima power plant, but it’s not a nation-threatening disaster, which is all the media—including Drudge—really care about.

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March 21

Nik S. writes:

Yeah, Drudge is no better than the rest of ‘em. As quickly as the MSM forgot about the catastrophic tsumani in favor of the nuclear disaster, all the better to forget about ALL of Japan’s catastrophes in favor of some ill-fated mission in Libya. Drudge is now officially a part of the MSM. A shame, but not surprising.

Gerard Van der Leun writes:

Some of what you say about Drudge and the radiation story is correct. However, what is not generally known is that Drudge is a click-driven site. By that I mean that Drudge or his minion (there is seldom more than one) watch the meter and the clicks on various links that come in from readers. The more clicks on a link, the higher that link goes in the page. At the time that Drudge’s previous minion, Andrew Breitbart, mentioned this to me (about four years back when he was no longer working for Drudge), it was mostly a human driven link-watch. Since then it’s possible Drudge has installed a Memeorandum type algorithm, but I’m not sure about that.

Of course Drudge overrides that link watch when it suits his purpose or his whim, but to put the whole thing on Drudge is not precisely accurate. Readers and their interests and clickage do play a roll.

LA replies:

You’re missing the fact that Drudge chooses what stories to link at his site. Furthermore, with a big story, such as the tsunami or the Libya incursion, he several links all together at the left top corner of the page, their shared placement at the top is obviously not determined by the number of clicks they’ve each received, because in that case they would be all over the page; they are at the top together because he has chosen to put them there.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 20, 2011 11:59 PM | Send