But perhaps the way the Drudge Report’s remarkable ability to manipulate the rest of the media can be best seen is through the events surrounding the soon-to-be-released book, Clinton Cash.

Drudge played up Sen. Rand Paul’s promises of a coming bombshell regarding donations to the Clinton Foundation. Then The New York Times took the extraordinary step of blessing the book while using Paul’s promises in their first paragraph. Drudge immediately linked that story very prominently. This gave whoever made the surely controversial call inside The Times political “cover” because it insured that their story was a huge traffic magnet. It also assured massive mainstream coverage for the book when it comes out as well as a place on the best-seller list. All of this not only allows the story to seep into the permanent mainstream narrative of “Hillary momentum,” but it also makes it clear that a fertile landscape exists for future anti-Clinton stories to grow and flourish (similarly, Drudge’s obvious affinity for Carly Fiorina now has even liberal commentator Eleanor Clift doing favorable features on her for The Daily Beast).

Given that the modern media only pursues tough stories which provide an expectation of some sort of pot of career “gold” at the end of the story “rainbow,” this will have profound implications for Hillary Clinton. In this new media era, it seems the only way to get the mainstream media to be highly critical of the Democratic presidential nominee is to literally pay them off.

Thanks to Matt Drudge, this time around there will be a mechanism which makes sure that almost literally happens.