For a man whose notoriety is based on the speed with which he vacuums up sensational information and immediately regurgitates it upon an unsuspecting world, the question can only be: what took him so long?

Prince Harry had been in Afghanistan a whole ten weeks and the internet’s biggest peddler of gossip hadn’t uttered a word about it. Clearly he didn’t know. Matt Drudge is not one to agonise about ethics. He’ll post first and let others ask questions later.

Many in the British media and even a number of bloggers kept quiet about the Prince’s service all that time. But finally somebody blabbed. Foreign newspapers had said that the Prince was in Afghanistan or Iraq. But the final word could easily have come from one of Drudge’s many sources. In the decade since his biggest scoop many in the media have passed on information to Drudge, a process he has referred to as “kissing the ring”.

That story, of course, was that Newsweek magazine had killed a story about President Clinton having an affair with an intern in the Oval Office. The next day Drudge had her name: Monica Lewinsky. After a very sluggish start, the rest of the media played catch-up. We know the rest.

It is unlikely that Drudge will ever top that scoop. But as this week has shown, he still breaks stories. Before the Prince Harry furore he had detonated a small incendiary device in the presidential campaign by putting up a photograph of Barack Obama in the dress of a Somali elder. He said that it was being circulated by someone in Hillary’s campaign, sparking claims of dirty tricks from the Obama camp and furious denials from the Clintons.

His site has been called America’s “bulletin board” and he himself “the most powerful journalist in America” and “the Walter Cronkite of his era”, a reference to the news anchor of the 1960s and 70s who had huge power over the direction of the news agenda.

Much of the time Drudge does not break stories, but picks up and amplifies stories of others that are then followed by traditonal media outlets. This is even true in the case of Prince Harry. The story had been reported elsewhere, including an Australian magazine, but almost no one else had seen it. Once an item is on Drudge the world knows.

Drudge cultivates mystery about himself. He rarely gives interviews and little is known about his private life. In one of the few times that he has talked he said: “I have not missed a day in nearly 13 years. They keep saying, ‘Oh, the secret life of Matt Drudge’. There is no secret life here. It is found literally on the website, because this is all I’ve been doing.”

He was born in 1966, grew up in a Washington suburb, the son of liberal Democrat parents who divorced when he was 6. He did poorly at school, didn’t go to college and drifted to Los Angeles where he worked in a gift shop for years before realising the potential of the internet. He started a subscription gossip newsletter but became more famous than most of the people he had been writing about when he landed the Lewinsky scoop.

He has a nationwide radio show on which he expands on his hatred of surveillance and big government. On his site he displays some more obsessions, including pet rescues and the weather, particularly hurricanes. The latter would be explained by the fact that he lives in Miami. Or at least he did when somebody last pinned him down.

While he is reclusive, he loves being known. He once disclosed that he searches databases every morning to see how often the news media has written about him and joking that “I love it when I pop up in the Jakarta Times”.

Yesterday Drudge was running links to stories in American and British newspapers about Prince Harry, including that it had been broken on his website. But the story had dropped down his news agenda; his main item was a picture of Hillary Clinton grinning in a somewhat maniacal fashion in front of a picture of a horned figure.

Telltale’s story

— Matt Drudge, the founder of the Drudge Report website, grew up in a Washington suburb He graduated from high school 341st out of 355, giving himself a “more than adequate curriculum vitae for a post at 7-Eleven”.

— Drudge was arrested at the age of 15 for making harassing phone calls

— Before founding the Drudge Report, he worked as a telemarketer, a manager at a McDonald’s restaurant, and a sales assistant at a grocery store in New York

— The Drudge Report began life in 1995 as an e-mail that was sent out to Drudge’s friends. By 1997 it had ballooned and had 85,000 subscribers

— Drudge reputedly makes more than £250,000 a month from the website and lives in a penthouse in Florida

— The website has had 5,364,114,119 hits in the past year and 21,108,708 in the past 24 hours alone.

Sources: Drudge Report, Drudge Manifesto (2001), Times archives

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