The Drudge Report still reigns supreme as an influential aggregator of right wing-leaning news and is run by the increasingly reclusive Matt Drudge out of his home that, as of last report, is somewhere in an undisclosed portion of Miami. Unsurprisingly, he's decided to blow up the incidents on Miami Beach this weekend surrounding "Urban Beach Weekend" to the top of his highly trafficked site and linked them to other stories involving "black," "urban" and "gang" violence. Yeah, it's kinda racist.
Here's a screenshot of Drudge's site right now (click for a larger view):
That top link which calls Miami a "war zone," by the way, links to a post on Herald's Gay South Florida blog that features Herb Sosa's now infamous over-reactionary response to the police shootings in Miami Beach this weekend. The "I was scared for my life" quote comes from a CBS Miami story. The girl who gave the quote was the sister of an innocent bystander shot by a police officer, and not, as Drudge might lead you to believe, by a random scary black person.
"Since young people in large groups often make poor decisions, particularly when they've been drinking, holiday weekends often result in an elevated number of white people being arrested for criminal behavior and a proportionally smaller, but still elevated, number of black people being arrested for criminal behavior," writes John Cook over at Gawker. "But since the president of the United States is a black man, and since black voters tend to align with his party, it is to the advantage of the Republican Party and its allies to inculcate fear and apprehension about people who look like him. Hence the top stories on the Drudge Report today."
More mainstream news sources notoriously look to Drudge for story ideas, and it will be interesting to see how the coverage of the incident in Miami Beach plays in the rest of the media now that Drudge has linked it to other racially charged stories.
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