Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Aug. 27 WorldNetDaily article serves up a biased presentation of an ban on teacher's texts of schoolbooks on the auction site eBay.
The headline -- "eBay prohibits textbooks for homeschool teachers: Lumps them with illegal drugs, bootleg recordings, prompting avalanche of complaints from customers" -- most egregiously misstates the issue. It's not "textbooks" that have been banned; it's teacher's texts, which, as athe article itself notes, contain "special answer keys, exams, teaching tips, and guides." And the headline's claim that the teacher's text are being "lump[ed] with illegal drugs, bootleg recordings" is simply inflammatory, especially given the misleading reference to "textbooks." This leaves the impression that eBay considers homeschool textbooks as "illegal" or "bootleg," which has no basis in fact.
The unbylined article itself is somewhat more balanced. It does note in the third paragraph that the ban "is inclusive of all teachers' texts," but it waits until the 23rd paragraph to give an example of how inclusive it is, quoting a "public school teacher" as stating that "she cannot get a teacher's edition from a publisher unless she provides proof of her teaching employment." For all the complaints from homeschool teachers, neither WND nor the people it quotes offers no explanation of why homeschool teachers should be exempt from having to provide proof of being a teacher before obtaining teacher's texts.
The article also contradicts itself about eBay's response. It states about halfway through that "WorldNetDaily did not get an immediate response from eBay about the situation," but the very last paragraph notes that an eBay spokesman "told WND" that "we are actively working on a solution."
