Congratulations to Stewart Baker of Volokh Conspiracy for acknowledging the elephant in the room.
“Say it ain’t so, Matt”

Like millions of others, I’m a regular reader of the Drudge Report. It’s like having an alternative editor for the news; the “paper” Drudge edits is an entertaining complilation of tabloidish stories with a conservative/libertarian bent.

Lately, though, I’ve begun to wonder about Drudge’s judgment. Because every once in a while, when I click on a Drudge link I end up on a “Prison Planet” website.

And Prison Planet is, frankly, beyond the pale. It has an extensive “9/11 Prior Knowledge Archive” that collects truther stories. And it runs birther stories as well, all compiled by a talk radio jock named Alex Jones.

Drudge’s links to Prison Planet may be recent, but they seem to be getting a lot more common these days.

On the web, in a very real sense, you are what you link. So Drudge’s ties to Prison Planet make me wonder if he’s gone off the deep end. Or, to be fair, since I’ve heard that Matt Drudge is a little disengaged from the site these days, maybe he simply made a bad hire in recent months.

Or it could be that the Drudge Report only links to Prison Planet when it really wants to run a story but can’t find a respectable source for it. (That would explain the latest link.)

But I’m not sure that any of those explanations really reconciles me to Drudge’s new fondness for Prison Planet. No one wants an editor who just makes things up to fit his view of the world. And it seems to me that the line between using “Prison Planet” as a source and just plain making things up is too thin for comfort.

So, what do you think? Am I being unfair to Drudge? To Prison Planet? Or is the Drudge Report finally jumping the shark?

Sadly his cobloggers at Volokh are also linking to bogus stories from Alex Jones.
Did the TSA Back Down?

It’s nice to see someone on the right notice the mainstreaming of 9-11 conspiracy lunatics but I don’t expect to see much outrage over this.