al-Zarqawi reportedly arrested in Iraq

Source - http://www.drudgereport.com/flashai.htm

It hasn't been reported on many other news sites yet, so who knows. But if it's true it's a bit of good news before the Iraqi elections.

Errors at the Report

Matt Drudge has been variously (mis)quoted as saying the Report is 80 percent accurate. The attribution stems from Drudge's most famous incident of erroneous reporting, which occurred on August 10, 1997 when Drudge published a report saying that incoming White House assistant Sidney Blumenthal beat his wife and was covering it up. Drudge retracted the story the next day, saying he was given bad information, but Blumenthal filed a $30 million libel lawsuit against Drudge. ( http://www.epic.org/free_speech/blumenthal_v_drudge.html ) Drudge told Salon magazine that "I seemed to have about 80 percent of the facts" about the Blumenthal report. ( http://archive.salon.com/aug97/news/news2970815.html ) This quote has since been applied, fairly or not, to all of Drudge's work. The libel suit was settled in 2001 when Blumenthal agreed to drop the charges if Drudge did not file counter-charges. The case lasted for so long because the burden of proof was on Blumenthal to show that Drudge had had actual malice in printing the false report. ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30046-2001May1 ) Drudge's legal defence was largely funded by the libertarian centre for the Study of Popular Culture.

The "80 percent" meme has been fueled by further articles and rumors in the Report occasionally revealed to be completely wrong or unsubstantiated. The Report was the source of a sensational rumor (a "World Exclusive") in February 2004, about presidential candidate John Kerry, alleging that he had an affair with a young intern named Alexandra Polier. ( http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2004/02/12/20040212_233205_mattjk1.htm ) The woman, who in fact was never an intern for Kerry, denied the claim, and the rumor has now been thoroughly repudiated. The story was never carried by any mainstream media, and Drudge has not meaningfully addressed it since its publication, although the story remained available on his website (though de-linked) up to a year after its publication.

A later erroneous report emerged in the 2004 campaign, one week before Senator Kerry announced his selection of Senator John Edwards as his vice presidential running mate. The Report headlined a prediction from a "top D.C. insider" saying that Senator Kerry would be announcing Senator Hillary Clinton as his running mate, declaring it to mark the beginning of a "massive love fest."( http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2004/07/01/20040701_012802_kerryhrc.htm ) The story was de-linked one day later. After Edward's selection, Drudge removed all "VP Hillary" coverage without comment; the correction or outright removal of false content published at the Report is usually handled in similar no-comment fashion.

Despite instances of unreliability, the Drudge Report profits from the nature of its electronic medium. Because the Drudge Report is not part of the mainstream media and is published electronically, and not in print, such inaccuracies and errors are often forgotten. Archives of older reports are generally not easy to find, and Drudge does not systematically archive any of his reports. A number of reports from 1995 to early 1997 are available in the Usenet archive provided by Google Groups. A more extensive archive of the website is provided by a third party (the Drudge Report Archives), which has taken snapshots every two minutes since mid-November 2001.