Earlier this week, Eric Boelhert at Media Matters examined the declining influence of Matt Drudge:

[T]here's no question that Drudge's Web traffic remains strong and continues to grow, thanks to a burgeoning international audience. But in terms of setting the ground rules -- in terms of setting the campaign agenda -- Drudge has been AWOL since mid-September when the credit crisis erupted....

Four years ago, Drudge and the right-wing bloggers were at the peak of their political power. Today, they're pretty much watching the election pass them by, reduced to the role of frustrated sideline hecklers.

Boelhert argues that it's the economic meltdown that has primarily contributed to Drudge's reduced ability to control the narrative:

[I]t's obvious that since Wall Street's meltdown commenced five weeks ago, and since America's economic crisis became a tsunami of a news story that's not only dominated the media landscape, but also irrevocably altered the course of the campaign, the Drudge Report has become largely irrelevant in terms of the setting the news agenda for the White House run.

Boelhert makes some good points about how Drudge's laundering of conservative talking points has failed to move the Washington press corps this cycle, as it has in the past.

In part, this is because the talking points themselves are vacuous and desperate at this point. Consider, for example, the headline Drudge has been blaring all day today:

JOE THE PLUMBER 'SCARED FOR AMERICA' IF OBAMA PREZ

What sort of reaction does Drudge expect this to elicit other than: so fucking what?

Nobody cares what Joe the Plumber thinks -- except for Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the junkies who shoot up in the conservative media echo chamber.

If Drudge has lost his influence, it is in no small part because he hasn't realized that the noise in the conservative echo chamber is making him tone deaf to the actual zeitgeist.

But it's not just his laundering of GOP talking points that is causing Drudge to lose influence, in my opinion.

While he's always been a partisan hack, he's always been a partisan hack with some pretty good news instincts, and who utilized those instincts to consistently beat others to the story.

And despite what some would say, that story wasn't always colored by his politics.

From 1996 to about 2006, he had a knack for being a good twenty minutes ahead of cable TV and other sources, even when the story was as non-political as an earthquake.

But those news instincts seem to be failing him lately, and he has become laconically slow at a time when the monopoly he once held on breaking news has been, erm, broken by the growth of the blogosphere and other internet news sources.

Nowadays, everyone knows the value of speed -- yet Drudge himself is getting consistently beaten to the break with even the most obvious of stories.

For example: when Paul Newman passed away a few weeks ago, the story first appeared early in the morning on the blogs, where it lingered for several hours before it was confirmed by reporters.

But not only did the blogs beat Drudge to posting the story: so too did CBSNews.com, the BBC, MSNBC, Huffington Post, and Yahoo! News.

Even when the headline was blaring across the net, it took another full hour for it to appear on Drudge.

Such slowness is unforgivable for a site that wants to set the news agenda.

But not only is he slow at picking up on news nowadays -- he's agonizingly slow at letting it go.

I've checked Drudge perhaps six times today, as I do most days. And the problem is not that his Joe the Plumber headline is laughably transparent and meaningless, though it is.

The problem is that, in six hours, he has neither added to the story (not that there is anything to add) nor replaced it. It just sits there, seeping in its own irrelevance.

So too have the links about the Jennifer Hudson tragedy remained equally static.

I've never cared for Drudge's politics, but anyone interested in how news travels across the Internet -- and, from there, onto TV screens and into newspapers -- has to recognize the contribution he made to Internet news and to the accelerated news cycle.

That Drudge now seems to be falling behind in the very media landscape that he helped to create -- that, to me, is the story.