Did Matt Drudge just reverse-jujitsu a Rupert Murdoch rumor into the news? Australian website Crikey reported that Murdoch split with his wife Wendi Deng. No one, anywhere, picked it up, because Murdoch runs half the gossip industry. But here's Matt!

We cannot even find the original item. Just this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald referencing and more or less refuting it. Michael Wolff, quoted in the SMH story, did not even picked it up for Newser.

But Drudge now announces, just below the screaming climate conference "news," that those rumors—which never made it out of Australia, and were barely even noticed there—are totally untrue.

Which is a great way to get those rumors out there!

But what would Matt Drudge, Conservative New Media Superstar, have against Murdoch, Conservative Old Media Baron? Well, a lot of Drudge's favorite content comes from News Corp newspapers, and Rupert doesn't want anyone to read anything from those papers anymore on the internet, which is where Drudge lives.

So this is maybe a really passive aggressive way of tweaking Murdoch before he goes all-in on paywalls?

And, in not linking to or explaining anything, Matt has caused a million readers to turn to Rupert's second-least favorite website: Google. (His least fave is obviously MySpace.)