Well, that was prescient

The Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Center released a report last week that looks at how people in the United States access and use internet news sites. An overview of the results is here, with links to detailed analyses by topic. Among these – here’s where my own little blog turns out to be prescient: ‘Drudge Report: Small Operation, Large Influence’.

As Jim Carr of the NY Times writes: ‘Yes, Mr. Drudge is a conservative ideologue whose site also serves as a crib sheet for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity… [The Drudge Report] is, in its own way, a kind of utility, with stable traffic of about 12 million to 14 million unique visitors every month no matter what kind of news is breaking. Everyone goes there because, well, everyone else goes there. ‘ Considering there are over 300 million people in the US, there is relief in knowing that only 5% use Drudge as a guide to what they read; what did surprise me is that the sites most Drudge users are driven to are Yahoo News, MSNBC and CNN, respectively. i suppose i expected more reactionary linkages, but that probably just reflects my own view of those sites as bland, part of the general cerebral meltdown. They should all just follow The Onion's lead and say outright, "Telling you what we want you to know."

Honestly, i’m not on a mission to keep people away from The Drudge Report. It is what it is. The links there statistically come quite close to what people are driven to from Facebook – as least in the US. i think what this shows overall is that when people want to read and recommend news, they shoot from the hip. We all want exposure to lots of stuff without knowing a great deal about any of it - the nature of the information overload beast. A couple of decades ago, i killed my television. By contrast, i treat my laptop as something close to holy… yet we must remain ever vigilant. At the risk of ending up in Lars von Triers 2^nd class coach to purgatory, i’m reminded of Adolf Hitler’s remark that ‘all propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.' The issue isn’t so much the propaganda as it is the quality of the audience.