The Drudge effect - twice in a week

Matt Drudge is having quite a week: first he causes mayhem on the presidential election trail by posting a photograph of Barack Obama dressed in Somali tribal robes; now he picks up on an obscure Australian magazine report and blows Prince Harry's cover in Afghanistan, as reported here on Thursday.

In the latter case, the man who runs the Drudge Report has made a lot of British journalists furious: those who were in the know about Harry's service in Helmand were hugely proud of their achievement in keeping a secret for a change; while those who didn't know are furious that it took an American to tell the Brits what was going on.

Jon Snow, presenter of Channel 4 News, is one of those who feel miffed. He wrote on his blog on Thursday, immediately after the 'Harry takes on the Taliban' story broke: "I never thought I'd find myself saying thank God for Drudge. The infamous US blogger has broken the best-kept editorial secret of recent times... One wonders whether viewers, readers and listeners will ever want to trust media bosses again."

Drudge doesn't write his own stories - he directs readers to stories he enjoys on other sites or posts stories which mainstream journalists are unable to persuade their bosses to go with. This was the case with the scoop that made his name - the January 1998 story, which Newsweek magazine had refused to publish, of President Bill Clinton's liaison with the White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.

Drudge was 31 then and home was a simple apartment in Hollywood where he had begun his career as a runner on The Price is Right. Today, with the income generated by 600m visits a month to the Drudge Report, he owns a condominium at the Four Seasons in Miami, a house on Rivo Alto Island in Florida's Biscayne Bay, and apparently drives a black Mustang. And, depending on your point of view, he's the most irresponsible gossip - or influential journalist - in the world.

His politics are right-wing - anti-abortion, anti-tax and anti-Clinton.
Which is why when someone from Hillary Clinton's campaign team sent the Obama photo to Drudge - with the clear intention of suggesting to Middle America that it was possibly sending a Muslim to the Oval Office - Drudge, reveling in his notoriety, was quite happy to tell the mainstream press where the photo had come from.