Who controls today’s Republican Party? Some point to the billionaire Koch brothers. Others have nominated Fox News chief Roger Ailes. According to a pair of recent reports, however, the most influential person in GOP politics is a reclusive 48-year-old named Matthew Drudge—the blissfully closeted proprietor of the Drudge Report.
On Friday afternoon, Huffington Post editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington sent a memo to her employees. The gist of the cloyingly adroit missive: Facebook’s proprietary news algorithm currently privileges “stories of people and communities doing amazing things,” so HuffPost needs to publish more of those stories. The global initiative will be called “What’s Working.”
Mitt Romney just told America that he will not run for president in 2016, which is confusing, because the Daily Beast and friends were just yelling the opposite.
Today is Oprah Winfrey's 61st birthday. Happy birthday, Oprah! At this point in her life, Oprah is a living legend. She can pretty much coast until death and her inevitable sainthood from Pope Whoeveritisnext. Even I would be fairly excited to meet Oprah. I bet she smells great, and wears really soft fabrics, and probably has some wise platitudes to sound off. She is a woman who has lived, and also knows how to live, and might give one a Pontiac at any time. This is how the world understands Oprah, and this will likely be her legacy.
In an endearingly longwinded post addressed to his readers, professional blogger Andrew Sullivan announced that he has “decided to stop blogging in the near future” because he is “saturated in digital life” and wants “to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me.” He also wants “stay healthy” and spend more time with his family.
The New York Times is shutting down its national race and ethnicity beat, naming reporter Tanzina Vega its first-ever full-time Bronx courthouse reporter. Memo below.
Last night, Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch tweeted the following:
Here is a sentence written by professional newspaper columnist Richard Cohen, a man paid to analyze politics, and published today in the Washington Post, America's most respected political news outlet: "I am an ardent supporter of Israel, but I am also an American: Do not insult my president!" Well done, everyone.
The uplifting story of Times writer Nick Bilton, who rose from obscurity as a technology reporter to a prominent position as the paper's chief Pens and Twitter Arguments correspondent, gained a new chapter today with news that Bilton would write an "investigative book about the black market website Silk Road," and that the book has already been optioned by 20th Century Fox.
The perks of working at Bloomberg LP are legendary: free cereal, free yogurt, free espresso drinks, free Swedish Fish, free healthcare and more all thanks to the benevolence of former Mayor Mikey B.
Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire and former Republican mayor of New York City, has never had an easy relationship with the New York Times. He even told New Yorker editor David Remnick that “he detests the New York Times … [he] thinks that the New York Times has an opinion page on the front page and he loathes it.” But that didn’t prevent Bloomberg—who already controls his own shop, Bloomberg News—from trying to buy the paper.
