Rick Santorum on Friday, for the first time, called out The Drudge Report, a well-known news aggregation site, for supporting Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential primary.
Santorum appeared on a talk radio show broadcast out of Cincinnati, and was asked by the show's host, Bill Cunningham, whether he had hung up on another radio show host on same station, 700AM WLW, during a contentious interview the day before.
"It's on The Drudge Report that you hung up on Scott Sloan," Cunningham told Santorum.
"That's baloney," Santorum said. "I was driving and we lost the call and I called him back two minutes later and we finished the conversation. Drudge, again showing for Romney, gets the facts wrong."
Drudge's supportive stance toward Romney -- the site rarely highlights negative stories about the former Massachusetts governor and has conspicuously gone after Santorum and Newt Gingrich -- started drawing attention last year.
"Matt Drudge has done more for Romney than Romney's super PAC in my estimation," Republican operative John Feehery told HuffPost's Sam Stein on Friday.
But Santorum's comment was the first time that one of Romney's opponents in the race openly called Drudge out for a pro-Romney bias.
Incidentally, WLW disputed Santorum's version of events. They said that Sloan was "able to get back in touch with Santorum’s handlers, and they declined the invitation to go back on the air and finish the conversation," according to the Cincinnati Enquirer's John Kiesewetter.
A Santorum aide "also expressed surprise that Sloan was so combative," Kiesewetter wrote.