Hill Staffers Urged to Avoid Drudge, “Potential Viruses”

by Dave Levy | 9:30 am, March 10th, 2010

» 4 comments

Earlier this week, the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, the body’s official gatekeeper, levied a warning to staffers to avoid such sites as Matt Drudge’s DrudgeReport.com and several other online destinations, such as WhitePages.com. The rationale? Apparently the Senate Help Desk has been dealing with a large number of viruses, and these sites were possible sources of computer problems. In a statement reported on FoxNews.com, a representative of the Environment and Public Works Committee indicated that the request to avoid the sites originated from a non-partisan systems administrator.

Drudge came back at the report with some statistics, indicating that there was no problem on his end when it came to delivering links and headlines to staffers coming from Congressional and other D.C. Internet servers. As noted in a post yesterday morning on the Drudge Report, there were no errors reported even though his volume of traffic remained high. According to the post, the site served 29 million pageviews on Monday, and it was seen 149,967 times since the beginning of the month from users at Senate.gov, and 244,347 times over the same time from house.gov.

Seems harmless, right? Of course not – this is Washington. Fox quoted the Media Research Center’s Vice President of research and publication, Brent Baker, who wondered why a conservative news site was used as the example instead of one of its liberal counterparts. Even Drudge thought the timing was convenient for the request to steer clear was “just as the healthcare drama in the capitol reaches a grand finale.”

Not to be missed here is the lede-battle between The Huffington Post and Fox News as both media outlets document the story. I’ll just post them both below and let you guess which one belongs to which organziation:

In the very body sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, an e-mail is circulating warning U.S. Senate staffers not to view one of the most popular news sites on the Web, claiming it could spread computer viruses.

A Senate committee has taken steps to black list the Drudge Report on Capitol Hill computers over concerns that the site may be “responsible for the many viruses popping up” recently.

(Just so there’s no confusion, the first is Fox, the latter is HuffPo).

So, legitimate threat or convenient timing by the Senate staff?

Drudge Report, Matt Drudge, senate

MichelleF

So, legitimate threat or convenient timing by the Senate staff?

I think we all know the truth. Their claim is ridiculous. Man, the left continues to be petrified that there are more and more places we can go to get the news rather than the state controlled media.
disgusted

What’s “good” for the Gander – is ‘GOOD’ for the goose!
pyrope

The thought police are on the beat in the -0bama regime
Helix

The claim is pure BS. Any virus would likely be from a third party ad and drudge doesn’t run those on his site. I personally have used his site for years and never once got a virus. Looks like someone is unhappy with Drudge, gee, wonder why. Could it be his conservative viewpoint???? Nahhh. Since he is an aggregator of stories, it is entirely possible that the sites he linked to had the virus, but again likely in the ads. Not Drudge’s fault. One of the senators said that there was no evidence any viruses had infected senate computers. He also said that he believed that there were some liberals who would prefer that people not see some of the information presented by Drudge. (see http://www.cnsnews.com/news/ for full story) Apparently the Drudge report is pretty popular among Senate staff. Also, no one reported to Drudge that their computer had been infected from visiting his site; considering the number of people who visit it, there should have been millions of infected people, not just teh senate.
Later, a follow up warning from the Senate sys admin warned about viruses but made no mention of the Drudge report. My guess is that’s as close we will get to a retraction of the claims. That “non-partisan sys admin” might not be so non-partisan after all…