Hot links served up daily

An author and son-in-law of actor Orson Bean, Breitbart has described himself as a "raucous, opinionated, red meat-eating libertarian who refuses to be relegated to a conservative ghetto." He's also Drudge's silent partner in picking stories and writing headlines for the site from his home on Los Angeles' Westside. "It's a one-man operation with a second guy," he says, careful not to upstage the boss.

When Breitbart is at the controls of the Drudge Report, which is almost every day, he regularly links to a website that provides up-to-the-minute wire-service stories -- a website he created to cash in on Drudge's legions. In its first month of operation in summer 2005, breitbart.com was a runaway success with a reported 2.64 million visits, easily enough to attract quality advertisers. How could it falter when he could personally deliver Drudge's audience?

Breitbart says Drudge blessed the profitable arrangement and has "zero creative or business interest in the site." Breitbart says he "wanted to create the single best place where I could go as an avid news reader to get headlines the second they hit the Internet so I don't have to go to 40 sites." Beyond that, he says only, "I'm grateful for the traffic that is sent my way."

Breitbart met Drudge in the mid- 1990s. Drudge was e-mailing a gossipy, entertainment-oriented newsletter for free to a growing list of subscribers and posting it in an Internet chat room. He worked on a computer that his father insisted on buying for him at the Circuit City on Sunset Boulevard. Dad was concerned that his son, a self-described "untrained D student," was meandering through life.

At the time, Drudge was holding the latest in a grab bag of odd jobs, presiding over souvenirs as a salesclerk and supervisor in the CBS gift shop in Studio City. But this job -- unlike, say, his stint as a 7-Eleven night manager back East -- let him get in touch with his inner snoop. He dipped into trash cans at the studio, retrieving confidential TV ratings data, and schmoozed the production staffs of sitcoms. The tidbits he obtained went into his newsletter and, in 1995, onto his newly created website.

Now, not so many years later, CBS is discreetly using its former shop boy to pump the ratings of its premier news program, "60 Minutes."