Matt Drudge slams Washington Post over claims that Drudge Report shares Russian propaganda

Matt Drudge, founder of the famed Drudge Report, sent a rare tweet Monday morning blasting The Washington Post for a report on Friday that said the popular link aggregation site shared Russian propaganda.

What did the Post's report say?

The Post analysis, written by Philip Bump, asserted that the Drudge Report often linked to Russian propaganda during the 2016 presidential election cycle.

Bump, in the report, wrote, "Drudge was also not shy about linking directly to individual stories at Infowars, as well as RT and Sputnik News, both content-sharing arms of the Russian government."

"DrudgeReportArchives captures an image of the Drudge Report every two minutes, as it has for 16 years," the report read.

"We ran a script that checked the first update to Drudge Report after 9 a.m. on every day of the past decade, counting the number of times Drudge linked to Infowars, RT or Sputnik," it went on. "Over that period, excluding the two standing links to Infowars, we tallied more than 1,000 links to those sites."

Bump, however, noted that the amount of links included in the report only take up a small percentage of total links on the site, and speculated that Drudge shared the links because his "taste in news tends toward the more exotic."

What was Drudge's response?

Drudge was clearly not pleased with The Post's insistence that the successful site shared Russian propaganda.

He shared the article on his Twitter feed Monday and said that the Post — which receives 37 percent of its referral traffic from the Drudge Report, Drudge stated — couldn't even spare a "thank you."

"I've linked to @washingtonpost over 10,000X in 25 years of doing DRUDGEREPORT. I currently give them 37% of their referral traffic, according to https://similarweb.com. It's a brutal business. Not even a thank you. Instead: YOU'RE A RUSSIAN OPERATIVE!" Drudge tweeted.

I've linked to @washingtonpost over 10,000X in 25 years of doing DRUDGEREPORT. I currently give them 37% of their referral traffic, according to https://t.co/ryZX1supbD. It's a brutal business. Not even a thank you. Instead: YOU'RE A RUSSIAN OPERATIVE! https://t.co/pFjPYxkzqa

— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) November 13, 2017

A link to the Post story is live on the Drudge Report's homepage and reads, "Wash Post: Drudge Links to Russians! [And to Wash Post].