Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily tries hard to push a scandal in a July 27 article:
While the re-election campaign of U.S. Sen. Joe Walsh, D-Mont., has been rocked by claims that he plagiarized 25 percent of his 2007 master’s thesis, another well-known Democrat senator is in the hot seat, facing plagiarism accusations from an author.
As a radio host on the left-leaning network Air America, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., regularly emphasized the importance of telling the truth.
“Telling the truth is something I take seriously, and I try to hold myself to an impossibly high standard,” he wrote in his book “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.”
But Alan Skorski, author of “Pants on Fire: How Al Franken Lies, Smears and Deceives,” contends Franken plagiarized a chapter, “The Chapter on Fox,” lifting the words from a leftist group called Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, or FAIR.
Skorski lists at least 18 examples of what he claims is Franken quoting almost word for word from the group’s reports on Fox News and conservatives.
There are two significant pieces of information missing from this unbylined article. First, WND published Skorski's book. Second, WND published it in 2005.
That's right -- WND is reporting 9-year-old allegations as new. Heck, Skorski himself stopped promoting his book in 2006. And WND certainly won't tell you that Skorski's main attacks against Franken have been discredited.
What we seem to have here is a desperate attempt to move some books moldering away in WND's seemingly vast warehouse. WND is currently selling the book for $19.96, which is about $19.95 more than you will pay for a nice used copy of it through Amazon.
Further, WND's sudden concern about plagiarism is laughable given WND's own lengthy history of stealing the work of others.
Before accusing Franken of "massive plagiarism," perhaps WND should clean up its own archives first.
