For months now, Eric Boehlert at Media Matters has been documenting how Politico has been deliberately crafting stories in order to get juicy links from Drudge, and, thusly, spikes in their traffic. In other words, "link trolling."
Yesterday, Politico posted a story in which they quote an anonymous "aide" who says that the president won't be making further pitches for the public insurance plan. For those of you keeping track, this would be how many breathless all-caps stories from Drudgico about the alleged "death" of the public option?
Anyway, the link trolling continues to work like a charm.
Of course the link points to the Politico story. Shocker. And "it's official?" The source was anonymous -- if he or she exists at all. That's hardly official, but then again it's, you know, Drudge.
Adding... MSNBC is repeating the public option aspect of the story as well. Very serious.