Filtering the News
Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah starts off his Aug. 29 column this way:

In another time and place, in a universe that seems sometimes far, far away, I was a member of the Old Guard.

I was part of the Media Elite, that effete corps of impudent snobs who filtered the news for the American people.

In fact, I had arisen to the very top of the food chain – the elite of the Media Elite, the small club of those who actually ran newsrooms in major metro dailies.

We're not sure that being the editor of a dying Los Angeles Herald-Examiner (shut down in 1989) qualifies as "the very top of the food chain."

But Farah is implying that because he's no longer part of the "Old Guard" media, he's not "filtering the news for the American people." Wrong -- the very act of operating a news service is the act of filtering the news. If you are deciding what news is important to your readers -- which WND does every day via selection of articles and their placement on the page -- you are filtering the news. Just because Farah's WND uses a different filter than other news organizations (one with a predeliction toward lies, distortions and an embrace of convicted felons) doesn't mean news isn't being filtered.

Which makes Farah, by his own definition, the same "impudent snob" he was in his pre-WND days.