Drudge says the paper is ungrateful after decades of support from his website

Matt Drudge, the reclusive publisher of the digital media giant Drudge Report, was raging Monday after a Washington Post story attacked him for linking to “Russian propaganda” during the 2016 campaign and beyond.

Drudge fired back on Twitter, reminding the Post that he had linked to the Jeff Bezos-owned paper thousands of times and said he was responsible for more than a third of its referral traffic on the paper’s website.

“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 similarweb.com,” he wrote.

“It’s a brutal business. Not even a thank you. Instead: YOU’RE A RUSSIAN OPERATIVE!”

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

Also Read: Matt Drudge Calls Republicans Liars: 'Can We Get Our Votes Back?'

Drudge also placed the article prominently on his website — also with a reminder about his past links to the Post.

Still, the media titan did not refute the claims made by Post reporter Philip Bump, namely that his website served as a large amplifier for Russian-produced and -financed propaganda, including from Russian government-run news sites like RT and Sputnik, as well as the conspiracy-minded website InfoWars.

“DrudgeReportArchives captures an image of the Drudge Report every two minutes, as it has for 16 years. 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,” wrote Bump. “Over that period, excluding the two standing links to Infowars, we tallied more than 1,000 links to those sites.”

Representatives for the Washington Post were not immediately available for comment.