Science & Tech Quote by Matt Drudge

Drudge’s line is bait-and-switch optimism, packaged as inevitability. “Television saved the movies” nods to a familiar media pattern: a new platform arrives, pundits predict extinction, and the old form survives by getting sharper about what it alone can do. Movies responded to TV by going big, experiential, eventized. The “saved” is doing sly work here: it reframes disruption not as theft but as forced evolution.

Then he pivots to the Internet and the news business, and the subtext kicks in. Drudge isn’t really comforting legacy journalism; he’s issuing a dare. If the Internet “saves” news, it won’t be by protecting newsroom payrolls or restoring ad monopolies. It will be by stripping gatekeepers of their scarcity and redistributing power to whoever can capture attention fastest. Coming from Drudge - a figure who rose by exploiting early web velocity, aggregation, and the thrill of the scoop - the claim reads less like prediction than self-justification: the wrecking ball insists it’s also a rescue mission.

Context matters: late-90s/early-2000s digital triumphalism, when “information wants to be free” sounded like a business plan. Drudge is pointing to a real possibility - lower distribution costs, new voices, direct audience relationships - while quietly ignoring the Internet’s matching talent for breaking revenue models, incentivizing outrage, and flattening trust into clicks. The sentence works because it borrows the soothing arc of media history to sell a far messier present: salvation that feels a lot like surrender.