The White House Wire Critique
- Fred
- May 2
- 4 min read
Donald Trump, for better or for worse, is really persistent with getting back at his "attackers."
One of Trump's "enemies" is the Drudge Report. Back in 2015, Rush Limbaugh and the Matt Drudge were two of Donald Trump's biggest supporters. Matt Drudge is notoriously camera shy and never came out, on the record, as to why he supported Trump in 2016.
I speculate that Drudge had a good pulse on how disastrous a Hillary Clinton Presidency would have been, and thusly, slanted his website toward Donald Trump.
This time around, again speculation, Matt Drudge found Donald Trump to be nothing more than a flim-flam man and dredged up some really not great stories about Trump, right up until the 2024 Election.
You argue that's the press' job? A lot of the stories in the days running up to the 2024 election were back dated by up to a decade before. That's was a bit of dirty pool.
Today, the Drudge Report is reporting that Donald Trump is launching his own version of the Drudge Report called White House Wire. I am not impressed with WHWire on a few different levels.
Now Drudge is factually right, Donald Trump should not be in the Media Aggregator Business if he's busy running the government, I won't argue that.
But a few years ago, we sourced every single story at the Drudge Report and were surprised at how few links were to Right-Wing sources, yet how many were from the NBC family of stations. (NBC, CNBC, MSNBC)
So using the same methodology, we decided to try the same thing with WHWire: Sources below:
Headline Sources - (Above Screen Shot)
Breitbart
X
Fox Business
Breitbart
X
Screen Shot Sources
White House
White House
X
White House
X
Daily Caller
Breitbart
Daily Wire
Fox News
Fox Business
Breitbart
Fox News
Washington Examiner
Daily Caller
RSBN
Do you know what it takes to create a news aggregator? We are amateur aggregators at Beacon of Speech, we pick 8 stories a week and put them on our front page. Not to promote, but to reference as the stories we usually pick for our webcast.
Editor's Note: Our webcast is on hiatus due to the fact that I went deaf. Being deaf is no fun, do not recommend.
We are Libertarians and aim for intriguing stories, not ideologically Left or Right stories, even though we do pick some of those out.
The sources on our home page right now?
Reason
SI.com
Fast Company
The Atlantic
The Blaze
HeyJackass!
The Wall Street Journal
The South China Post
Again, we are unprincipled Libertarians at Beacon of Speech. What I don't understand is why Donald Trump doesn't champion an independent Right-Wing Aggregator like Whatfinger?
Donald Trump puts out information, and Whatfinger amplifies it almost immediately. WHWire is kind of gratuitous, half of their sources are either the White House itself, or White House personnel on X.
To me, Whatfinger is the perfect Conservative aggregator. They have tons of stories, from the biggest corporations, like FoxNews, to the little guys with Right-Wing and Right-leaning blogs. They give you the story headline AND the link. They aren't tricking anyone.
Now today WHWire is a novelty, it isn't even 24 hours old. But if you ask the guys who run Whatfinger, they will tell you that the News is a 24/7 job. How soon before Trump's team tires of running a limited aggregator? Will the site eventually be delegated to eager interns? Where are the links to principled Conservatives unrelated to the White House?
Back in 2021, we wrote: Why Trump's Blog Failed. As gleeful as liberals were that it failed, I was a big more pragmatic. "Donald Trump was built for Twitter. He sees something he likes, or doesn't like, and he has 280 characters to say his peace. No matter what Chris Cillizza says, Trump is not Hitler, sweating over the smallest details of Mein Kampf. Trump uses Twitter like the Tourette's Syndrome of Literature, and then moves onto his next random thought.
Donald Trump's blog failed because it involved work and money. Trump could have hired ghost writers, but that would taken money and effort. He could have grinded out some articles, but that wouldn't have been any fun. He didn't want to build a platform, because he doesn't really care what other people had to say."
It is the same thing with the WHWire. It's not a coincidence many of its pieces are coming from Trump's own White House. In 6-8 months, WHWire will fold because the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Yesterday, the Drudge Report posted 135 article links, you can look it up on the Drudge Archive. Today, I stopped counting at Whatfinger with 200 links and I still had a ton of stories to scroll through. They are committed to the aggregator game.
When WHWire fails, and it will because its decision-makers won't have the time commitment to make it work, I hope Mr. Trump has the foresight to plug Whatfinger. They have the capability to metaphorically wound Drudge in the media wars.
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