The Matt Drudge primary
How professional political operatives secretly control the news you read about the 2008 campaign. Hint: It involves the Drudge Report.
By Michael Scherer
(Photo: Laura Farr/AdMedia)
Photo composite of Matt Drudge.
...As news events go, the (John McCain YouTube) "Bomb Iran" episode was surprisingly typical for the 2008 campaign. It resulted from an anonymous leak, most likely from a rival campaign, rather than the shoe-leather reporting of independent journalists. It was, in the lingo of the campaign trail, an "oppo dump," apparently compiled with the help of one of the vast, secretive propaganda machines housed in each of the major campaigns. In recent months, such invisible releases of information have often dominated the news cycle and have become ubiquitous for reporters covering the candidates. Official e-mails from campaigns regularly arrive in reporter in boxes with subject lines like "n/a," or "not for attribution." Unsigned white papers are delivered with damning facts about opponents' fundraising reports. Information is passed along by senior campaign officials in hushed tones on the telephone, only after the reporter has sworn never to reveal the source.
Both reporters and the campaigns benefit from this thriving black market of information, as does the public, in many cases, because noteworthy facts about the candidates are widely disseminated. But the growing profusion of campaign-driven stories has also sidelined traditional on-the-ground journalism, while at the same time misleading the public about the true source of information. Though reporters, and blogs like the Drudge Report, take credit for scoops, the news of the day is more often than not produced by the invisible hand of one campaign or another. Journalists long ago learned how to play the game. "Reporters will often call and ask proactively, 'What kind of dirt do you have for me?'" said one senior official at a presidential campaign who asked not to be identified.
Most of the time, the fingerprints of opposition research shops are untraceable. The first reporter to note the $400 haircuts of John Edwards, the Politico's Ben Smith, would not reveal to Salon whether he uncovered the fact himself from financial filings or had received a leak from a rival campaign. Similarly, Rick Klein, the senior political reporter for ABC News, declined a request to reveal how he uncovered last week the 13-year-old Planned Parenthood contributions of Mitt Romney's wife. Both stories may have resulted from impressive investigative reporting or from oppo dumps selectively leaked as a package of facts, gift-wrapped and tied with a bow.
In other cases, reporters do attempt to disclose the behind-the-scenes machinations that lead to news. When the Politico's Jonathan Martin reported last week that Rudy Giuliani had given money to a pro-choice group in the 1990s, he noted that the information had come from "aides to a rival campaign." Similarly, when the Hill reported last month that Mitt Romney had spent more than $1 million on early television advertising, the reporter admitted he had not directly asked television stations for the size of the ad buy. "A rival campaign compiled the data from the stations and provided it to the Hill," wrote the reporter, Alexander Bolton....
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/05/14/drudge/ 
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