David Frum has a short editorial on the Trayvon Martin shooting today, and what I liked was his highlighting what Drudge has really been about over the last many years:

fullcomment.nationalpost.com

“Stand your ground” laws become especially lethal when combined with other new laws that grant people in the majority of U.S. states the right to carry weapons in public, and even concealed weapons.

U.S. gun laws have become more permissive even as U.S. crime rates have sharply declined. Why?

You can read the answer on the past four years’ worth of front pages on the hugely popular website, the Drudge Report. Month in, month out, Drudge spotlights gruesome black-on-white crimes. In a country of 300 million people, there are always examples. These same stories circulate in e-mail chains — and often become the focus of local right-wing talk-radio shows.

The U.S. journalist Mickey Kaus calls it “under-news”: news that never quite emerges into the national media, but that shapes the consciousness of millions of people. And what is being shaped is a conviction among many white people — especially fearful elderly whites in the South — that the Obama presidency has licensed a rampage of black-on-white violence. That’s not what the statistics say. But as Stephen Colbert would say: statistics are elitist.

As is so often the case, Rush Limbaugh gave these new racial fears their most explicit voice. In September 2009, after Drudge publicized an assault on an Illinois school bus, Limbaugh had this to say: “It’s Obama’s America, is it not? Obama’s America — white kids getting beat up on school buses now.”