I’m old enough to remember when the Drudge Report was the place to find some of the most important links on the internet. The site, which started before America Online became AOL, has been credited over the last couple of decades with breaking news so fast as to put mainstream media outlets to shame. But that was then. This is now.
For a while, perhaps three or four years, the conservative stalwart of news aggregators has been showing a bit too much of its left-of-conservative leanings. That’s not to say owner and operator Matt Drudge is a leftist, but he’s more of an anti-Democrat than a true conservative. There’s nothing wrong with that if there were no other issues, but there are three other things that often leave me (and other conservatives, I’m sure) scratching my head.
- First, the site rails against leftist mainstream media sites like WaPo, NY Times, and CNN, but continues to link to them profusely. I wrote a public letter once asking him to stop linking to fake news media, but it was ignored.
- Second, readers must sift through offbeat stories to get to the conservative news pieces. We’re just as likely to see a story from TMZ about Paris Jackson as we are to see a link about border security on Breitbart.
- Lastly, the only Christian news published is bad news. Christian persecution around the world gets widely ignored on Drudge, but if a pastor gets caught in a scandal, it’s plastered on the site with multiple links.
The alternative I strongly recommend is The Liberty Daily. It’s pro-conservative, pro-Christian, and absolutely fearless. I had the pleasure to talk to long-time friend and co-owner of the site, Matthew Burke. He owns and operates the site with his wife, Jennifer.
“My wife Jennifer and I started The Liberty Daily in 2015 as a conservative alternative to Drudge, which I felt needed some competition,” he said. “I was frustrated by the amount of traffic he was driving to left-wing publications like the New York Times and Washington Post. Plus, he wasn’t doing anything to help conservatives in the culture wars which we’ve been getting clobbered on by the Left for decades.”
In case that sounded repetitive, please keep in mind I had written my complaints about Drudge before asking Burke, and he hadn’t seen my own perspectives before replying.
What I’ve found at The Liberty Daily is everything I believe conservatives and Christians need to know on daily basis in order to navigate through the treacherous waters of online media. There’a a dangerous combination of propaganda on the internet today. There’s the left-leaning news outlets who essentially act as the opposition communications board for Democrats. Then, there’s the pseudo-right with news outlets that purport to be right-leaning but invariably distort the conservative message, dumbing it down to being right-light. These are the same sites that love to pretend to be conservative but who justify John Kasich’s existence and who believe Mitt Romney is still the future of the Republican Party.
The Liberty Daily doesn’t mess with any of that. The Burkes understand conservative media because they’ve lived in it for years. My first occasion to learn of them was seeing Jennifer on Fox News representing their previous venture.
“We had another conservative site, Politistick, which was beginning to get tamped down by Facebook censorship and we both saw the writing on the wall,” Burke continued. “We needed to have a site that wasn’t dependent on social media like everybody else. Almost all traffic to The Liberty Daily is direct or from people who are fed up with Drudge, found the site, and tell their friends.”
It isn’t just about the need for more conservative media, as we discuss on a regular basis. NOQ Report is a crowdfunded site that relies on donations, so we enjoy some editorial freedom that other sites might not get. But even ad-supported sites can be bold if they’re willing to follow their conscience instead of focusing on click-bait. The Liberty Daily does it right:
“I don’t get caught up in trying to post links to stories that get the most clicks like most websites. I want to put up stories that are pro-Christian, pro-Constitution, Pro-America, anti-Communism and try to fight the evil forces that are trying to destroy America through the culture.” – Matthew Burke
The site, which started out around 50 views per month and continues to grow beyond its current level of 2 million visitors per month, has no problem calling things the way they should be seen. Unlike “polite” news aggregators and opinion sources, The Liberty Daily is bold with the way they present the news without going down the road of hysteria or hyperbole.
My last question for Burke was, “What does America need the most, in one sentence?” He didn’t need a sentence. He didn’t even need a phrase. He summed it up in one word. “Jesus.” That’s the type of people I want running The Liberty Daily.
Will you help revive the American Conservative Movement?
