Does a political motive versus an authentic threat lurk behind a warning to Congressional staffers that the Drudge Report should be avoided due to it allegedly giving a computer virus? Here’s a great roundup on the issue.
Actually, I’ve surfed Drudge over the years and there has been no computer virus problem. Ever. The REAL virus threat is a credibility virus if you’re a weblog such as TMV and risked running a screaming headline on a post linking to a senational item with BIG HEADLINES based on original reporting on the Drudge Report. Some of these reports turned out to be…ahem…not accurate, but rather than run a correction, the item would just vanish off the site as if it never appeared while the weblogs that reported on them looked gullible (which is why TMV now waits for confirmation from mainstream media reporting to which we can link before we will run a post as fact from a piece of original Drudge Report reporting).
And: yes. I read Drudge — and also read the excellent Drudge alternative sites such as this, this, this, and this (and there are more). And Time’s Mark Halperin’s The Page has become absolutely addicting.
So could there be a political motive here? Yes. There is indeed a real, mean spirited tenor among people in both parties and in warring ideologies (even in the center and among independents since some will go after and hate those who don’t fit their own definition of what a “real” centrist or independent is…which is how they themselves see things).
The real virus is the mental virus that intense political skirmishes seem to create and is on display if you monitor the new media, old media and talk radio (on the left and right).
And, as of this writing, alas, Norton hasn’t come out with something to prevent that…
Now you can follow Joe Gandelman on Twitter.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.