Matt Drudge Fires Back at the Washington Post: I Currently Give Them 37% Traffic, ‘Not Even a Thank You’

Matt Drudge, creator and editor of the Drudge Report, fired back at the Washington Post on Monday for a story that he said accused him of acting as a Russian operative.

“I’ve linked to @washingtonpost over 10,000X in 25 years of doing DRUDGEREPORT. I currently give them 37% of their referral traffic, according to http://similarweb.com . It’s a brutal business. Not even a thank you. Instead: YOU’RE A RUSSIAN OPERATIVE!” he tweeted.

https://twitter.com/DRUDGE/status/930089993233666048

The Post ran a story last week headlined “One of the busiest websites in the U.S. in 2016 regularly linked to Russia propaganda” — while adding a caveat at the end of the story that the site linked “far more” to the Post and Breitbart News.

The story stated that over the course of the election, Drudge was “not shy” about linking directly to RT and Sputnik News — “content-sharing arms of the Russian government.”

The Post said it researched how many times after 9:00 a.m. every day of the past decade that Drudge linked to Infowars, RT, or Sputnik and found “more than 1,000 links.”

Using the statistics provided by Drudge, the average of Post links over the timespan of a decade would have been more than 4,000 — or about 75 percent more times.

The story acknowledges towards the end that “from 2014 to 2016, links to Infowars, RT and Sputnik were only a small part of the links on the site. There were far more links to The Post, for example — and to Breitbart.”

But, it says, “there’s no question that the three sites saw a lot of traffic that was driven by Drudge.”

The statistics were not broken down as to how many times Drudge linked to RT, Sputnik, and Infowars each, but it did note that Infowars made an “extraordinary leap” in October 2016. Infowars is not a Russian website.