Topic: WorldNetDaily
In an Aug. 9 attack on the Associated Press for agreeing to distribute reporting by "groups with financing from philanthropist George Soros and another far-leftist billionaire," WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein repeated a discredited attack on one of those groups, ProPublica. Klein wrote: "A report by the Capital Research Center concluded ProPublica 'churns out little more than left-wing hit pieces about Sarah Palin and blames the U.S. government for giving out too little foreign aid.'"
But as we detailed, the CRC's report on ProPublica is unbalanced, factually deficient and more about advancing a partisan agenda than actual "research." It mostly complained that ProPublica didn't slavishly repeat right-wing talking points on Palin, and it even contradicted the claim that it's a left-wing shill by stating, "ProPublica reporters should receive high praise for their stories on Obama’s stimulus package and banking bailouts, on recent business and financial scandals, and on other issues related to open records and open government."
Klein apparently didn't read that far into the report to find that claim.
Klein also asserted that another group, the Center for Public Integrity, "churns out regular partisan pieces," adding, "One widely debunked CPI study from last year, covered extensively by the AP, claimed it found President Bush and top administration officials had issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq as 'part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.'" But Klein offers no evidence that the claim was questioned at all, let alone "widely debunked."
Klein also failed to mention that WND published a series of articles that were underwritten by CPI -- the notorious multipart 2000 series by Charles C. Thompson II and Tony Hays attempting to link the-Vice President Al Gore to all sorts of nefarious goings-on in Tennessee. Then again, WND got sued for libel over that series, and despite fighting it for seven years, WND abruptly settled the case just before it was to go to trial by admitting it had published numerous false claims about one person named in the series. That, in turn, cast shadow over the rest of the series and, by extension, the journalistic integrity (such as it is) of WND itself.
But since when has WND ever cared about telling its readers the truth?
