White House, Drudge face off in cyberspace showdown

The White House is taking on perhaps the most influential new media correspondent on the Internet - Matt Drudge. A blog posting on the White House website responds directly to a posting on Drudge Report.

The White House posted a blog Tuesday morning featuring a top level communications official commenting on headlines listed by Matt Drudge, author of the influential new media website, the Drudge Report. On Monday, Drudge posted links to video's of United States President Barack Obama talking about the end of private health insurance in 2007, but saying more recently that he had no intentions of eliminating private coverage. In the video posted on the White House blog, Linda Douglass, a former ABC News Correspondent and now White House Deputy Communications Director, directly points out the Drudge headlines and calls them "outright falsehoods." Drudge's video shows President Obama during a 2007 interview. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be, potentially, some transition process: I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out," Obama says, during the clip. Douglass responds by saying the phrase was taken out of context. ["T]hey’re taking sentences and phrases out of context, and they’re cobbling them together to leave a very false impression." Douglass went out to say that the White House would be launching a viral assault against "false" Internet claims attacking the President's health care plan. Mike Allen of Politico reported on the showdown Tuesday morning. His story was headlined "Obama vs. Drudge." Matt Drudge is perhaps the most influential "new media" correspondent of this generation. He first broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998. Drudge is loathed on the left and, in most cases, loved by the right. He was named to TIME's most influential people of the world list in 2006.