What Matt Drudge Predicted is Now Becoming a Reality After 20 years

Matt Drudge gave a speech before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. in 1998. He was already deemed an internet leader in both news and aggregated news distribution. His Drudge Report challenged the ethos of the newspaper society, which was just the beginning of dynamic revolutionary change in the news world order. The Drudge Report made friends, added enemies, created new futures and helped forced everyone in the industry to change many times over in order just to stay relevant.

About the large corporate publishing business Drudge said, “clearly there is a hunger for unedited information, absent corporate considerations…This marks the first time that an individual has access to the news wires outside of a newsroom.”

Today, in 2019, the news business is changing even faster. With the internet and open news distribution platforms, the average person can now report the news. With only a little editing, and thanks to what Drudge called a “network of ordinary guys” you can read the every day ordinary guy’s news, thoughts and opinions– and it’s turned out (to the shock of the elites) that the ordinary guy is quite smart.

Even though the majority of the news coverage is still controlled by only a handful of major web corporations (often referred to as the mainstream media, MSM), over the last few years their honesty and ethical values have been challenged so extensively that “Fake News” has become a household term. The majority of American news services (what used to be called the local papers) are not only being questioned for placing their opinions into news stories, they are also very financially sick with plummeting ad rates. Their near term future does not look bright.

The days of what Drudge called “endless layers of editors” is dying.

That’s what happens when you hold on to a dying but established product. Especially if you put out an inferior product many consider to be politically biased. Since many local papers are natural monopolies their decline and decay has been slowed. If they don’t provide good information using modern distribution channels, the market economies will and are killing these newspapers. Many of them don’t or won’t communicate (even today) that they understand the issues destroying them, even though they are the same revolutionary forces Drudge predicted over 20 years ago.

“…clearly there is a hunger for unedited information, absent corporate considerations.” –Matt Drudge

Drudge forecast a new world for news where the national press was free of editors and not beholden to corporate masters but driven by the industrious spirit of the American citizen reporter. That new order is now gripping the news industry in ways no one expected, where the new aggregators like Google news and the Drudge Report have more clout and reader influence than the news cycle kings of old such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. All three are struggling to simply be profitable.

Who would have ever expected that the legacy corporate model would fight against a free, open press as they continue to publish marginal news that is still bureaucratically driven– defending their ideological and past power with little or no news merit. Their political victories are small and fleeting.

It has taken time but change is a foot. Town Hall reported:

“The rulers of legacy media think that they have a monopoly on truth. They believe they should decide who is a journalist and who is not. Citizen journalists are disdained by the legacy media.”

Communal News is leading the change. One of our own contributors, a woman from Canada, has seen her work on CN linked and aggregated by the World News.  A woman, not writing in her first language (English), who has published only a few posts, but one of her articles has been republished on the world news stage, without any bureaucracy other than spelling and grammar checks. That is happening now; Just this week!

CN published a college student reporting about administrators who are racist behind closed doors. The post describes how the people in charge of the college’s social justice efforts were the ones repeatedly making very racist remarks, while telling their students and other faculty members that racism is wrong. One administrator used race as a tool for her own race hating, seemingly without a clue that other’s saw her words as racist. Again, that was just this week. Finally, the average person has a voice and they are using it.

CN is continuing to expose the fake reviews fraud that is actually rewarded by Amazon. While the megacorporation tells the mainstream media that it’s taking fake reviews very seriously, the problem is much bigger and involves many more companies than Amazon is willing to admit. Fake reviews have become common practice, and judging by Amazon’s inaction have become an accepted part of the business model. The online retail giant just skirts the entire issue, even when they are presented with evidence, all the while saying, “One fake review is too many.”

This revolutionary change in the structure of news is continuing.  The legacy news media will never recover. The had their day. It’s a new free press and an open world for news. The average guy now has a voice, and it’s getting louder every day.

Thank you Matt Drudge for breaking the glass ceiling, helping to open, first news and then, distribution for “the ordinary guys.”