Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh is still pushing the claims of homeschooling mom Denise Mafi -- who asserts, in Unruh's words, that she was "ordered by a juvenile court judge to enroll her children in public school or lose custody of them" -- but he still lacks solid independent verification of her claims.
Following up on a Dec. 16 article in which he first reported Mafi's story -- and included no evidence whatsover that he tried to verify her story -- a Dec. 20 article by Unruh is now claiming that Mafi "has abandoned her home, furniture and other possessions to escape the order." The only stab at verification that Unruh concedes is this paragraph:
Mafi has reported, and her recollection of events has been confirmed by attorneys, that Johansen told her homeschooling fails 100 percent of the time and he would not allow it.
What "attorneys" is Unruh talking about? Are they Mafi's attorneys? Why won't he name them or quote them on the record? What is Unruh afraid of?
Further, there is a court record of the case, and Unruh claims that Mafi has been "[C]ounseled by a public defender." Yet while Unruh did include the standard paragraph about how the various officials he purportedly contacted didn't respond or comment, there's no evidence that Unruh has tried to contact the public defender Mafi claims she was counseled by.
Unruh, however, was apparently shamed into including some balance; he noted a defense of the judge in the case by someone "who identified himself as a friend of the judge." This was apparently in response to a Dec. 18 article by Unruh that is essenetially a one-sided attack on the judge by John Yarrington, president of the Utah Home Education Association -- who similarly offers no corroborating evidence vefifying what he claims happened to Mafi or support his accusations against the judge, such as "This guy's nuts. He has no clue. ... He's [stepped] on so many rights it's ridiculous."
In all of these articles, Unruh threw in his standard Godwin's Law paragraph about how such actions are reminiscent of Germany, where homeschooling is "illegal under a law launched when Hitler expressed a desire to control the minds of youth." That references a series of stories he wrote earlier this year in which he made no effort whatsoever to contact German officials for their side of the story.
