Topic: WorldNetDaily
It's the start of a new year, and you know what that means -- another year-end list from WorldNetDaily of all the right-wing stories they think are "underreported" that ignores the facts to show they were rightly ignored.
At the top of this year's list is -- surprise! -- a birther story. This is the one involving for Hawaii elections temp worker Tim Adams claiming that there is no Hawaiian birth certificate for President Obama. As it did when it first reported Adams' dubious story, WND ignores the fact that Adams first made his claim on the radio show of a self-described "pro-white" radio host that was broadcasting from a conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a decendent of the openly racist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s that the Anti-Defamation League describes as having a "white supremacy, white separatism" ideology. WND also ignores that the "senior elections clerk" position Adams claimed was described by his boss as a low-level data entry position, and that Adams would not have had access to any of Obama's election and related records since he is not registered to vote in Hawaii.
Another entry on WND's list is "the dark possibility of the manipulation of elections" as exemplied by, among other things, 'a formalized refusal by some states to follow election law regarding ballots for the military." WND asserted that "during the 2010 election some states simply disregarded – or demanded an exemption to – requirements that they get ballots to members of the military, who vote more conservatively than the general population, on time for them to be returned and counted." What WND didn't note is that claims about intentional efforts to prevent military members from receiving ballots are largely overblown, and states that failed to meet federal deadlines to send out military ballots reached settlements with the Justice Department to extend the deadline for their return to ensure those ballots were counted.
WND must have been running short on actual fake underreported news, so it had to come up wiht filler entries, like this one: "The push in the U.S. courts by homosexual advocates to demand the legalization of same-sex 'marriage' as well as through Congress to formally adopt the policy of allowing open homosexual behavior in the U.S. military." WND seems to concede it's not actually underreported, but it insisted that the issue "remains beyond the reach of most traditional reporting staffs." That seems to be code for saying that the media doesn't despise gays as much as WND does.
WND even threw in an "honorable mention" for its so-called "pink slip" campaign. If you'll recall, that was the right-wing screed that contained numerous factual errors. WND touted that the campaign "dispatched nearly 10 million warnings to members of Congress to return to the values of their constituents or face being removed from office in November," but if you divide 10 million by the 535 "pink slips" each participant generated,you have less than 18,690 people paying WND the princely sum of $29.95 to send out those slips -- hardly a massive outpouring (though WND grossed a cool $500,000-plus on the fleecing of its readers).
