Is Matt Drudge openly calling for a race war?

by Ron Brynaert

The screaming, all-caps headline on the one-time influential Drudge Report blog isn't calling attention to a Democratic lawmaker caught doing something naughty or announcing that those "missing" WMD that Dick Cheney kept warning us Saddam Hussein had hidden have been found.

Nope.

It's about a school bus fight.

Apparently, Matt Drudge believes that during the Obama administration it's important to showcase stories like "WHITE STUDENT BEATEN ON SCHOOL BUS; CROWD CHEERS," as if they were the biggest stories in the world.

Is Matt Drudge openly calling for a race war?

A recent Columbia Journalism Review article referred to Drudge's site as a "middle-of-the-pack niche product."

CJR's Ethan Porter wrote, "As of this writing, Alexa, Amazon’s Web site counter, lists Drudge as the 704th most popular site on the Internet. (Politico is 2,078 and The Huffington Post is 331.) Compete.com, which tracks Web traffic over time, tells a fuller story: in June of 2008, all three sites had around two million unique visitors. Since then, The Huffington Post’s numbers have soared, reaching 6.7 million in June. Drudge and Politico have both seen their traffic rise slightly, yet remain under the three million mark monthly."

According to Alexa, the leading white supremacist website Stormfront is only ranked 11,777, so turning to straight-out racist hate probably won't help Matt catch up to Arianna.

But perhaps Drudge can attract readers like "Fed Up" who left a comment on the video of the bus attack, stating, "As a White man married to a Black woman for 20 years I am not afraid to say that despite my love for Black people, thanks to Obama and his ilk, it is getting close to lock and load time. The ingratitude of Black people is stunning. Truly sorry."

Update: As a reader noted in the comments, police officials are now saying that the attack probably wasn't racially motivated.

The Associated Press reports, "Police in the southwestern Illinois city of Belleville say the videotaped attack on a 17-year-old student by two other riders on a school bus doesn't appear to have racial overtones after all."

"Police Capt. Don Sax told media outlets Monday the beating of a white Belleville West High School student by two black schoolmates on the bus occupied mostly by black students appeared to be racially motivated," the AP article continues. "But on Tuesday, Sax said the attack appears to have been about where the victim wanted to sit on the bus, with no racial underpinnings."

The article that Drudge has linked to has also been updated to reflect the "police captain backtracking on whether attack was racially motivated" but Drudge's banner remains unchanged as of 'update press time' at half past 2 PM.

"It was premature on my part," Belleville Police Capt. Don Sax told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "It was my personal and emotional comment after only seeing the video briefly."

2nd Update

Since some commenters loved my use of a comment in this story I figured why not promote two diverse comments from the thread below.

Joe writes,

Are you kidding? Drudge reports this and he's trying to start a war?

Whoever you are who wrote this, quit your job. Find something else to do. You wasted my time.

The next comment, number 70 on the thread, was written by Srowles:

You people defending Drudge Report are fucking morons.

The actual piece is more responsible than the irresponsible Drudge-line. and the Belleville police actually say it may not have been racially motivated.

So, if Drudge Report wasn't trying to stir anything up, why did he qualify the headline with the word "WHITE"? Why was noting the student being white important?

Idiots.