Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily has apparently gotten tired of certain people pointing out that in August 2008, it reported that the birth certificate released by Barack Obama's campaign was "authentic" -- after all, that assertion clashed with all of WND's subsequent attempts to discredit the certificate (most recently by Jerome Corsi).
Here's what it originally reported:
A separate WND investigation into Obama's certification of live birth utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic. The investigation also revealed methods used by some of the bloggers to determine the document was fake involved forgeries, in that a few bloggers added text and images to the certificate scan that weren't originally there.
Sometime recently, however, WND has added an "editor's note" to that 2008 article, immediately following the above paragraph:
(Editor's note: WND's investigation into the certification of live birth did not include inspecting the actual document, but only asking experts to evaluate the online image. Those experts, therefore, could not "prove" the document's authenticity. The experts told WND merely that many of the forgery claims made against the image were inconclusive or falsified, leaving them no evidence that would cast doubt on the image's authenticity.)
That's a pretty aggressive walk-back of the original claim -- even redefining the article's use of "authentic." But that's the sort of redefinition that is done when previous work is suddenly out of step with present-day political agendas.
But that's not the only agenda-clashing issue in that original article. In pointing out that "at least part" of Philip Berg's birther lawsuit "relies on discredited claims," the article also lays out the evidence against the claim that Obama "lost any hypothetical American citizenship he had as a child." That statement is immediately followed by an editor's note, dating to its original publication, that "This point is not supported by U.S. citizenship law."
Yet WND editor Joseph Farah has tried to advance a variation of that claim -- that Obama holding dual citizenship as a child disqualifies him as a "natural born citizen."
Will we see yet another "editor's note" appended to the article in the near future attempting to explain that one away too?
