Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jerome Corsi continues hammering away at Ted Strickland. An Oct. 28 WorldNetDaily column yet again recycles the claim that Strickland hired a campaign manager for his 1998 re-election campaign who, four years earlier, had been convicted on a charge of public indecency. Again, Corsi overstates his claim, calling the man a "convicted criminal sex offender" while not noting that the charge on which he was convicted was, in fact, a fourth-degree misdeameanor -- in other words, it's not as serious as Corsi and his co-author-slash-Strickland opponent Ken Blackwell have made it out to be.
Corsi, meanwhile, has been silent on a similar situation facing his buddy Blackwell: While Blackwell served as Ohio state treasurer, his office hired a man who had a history of arrests -- one for robbery, two for cocaine possession; he was sentenced to probation and drug treatment on one of the possession charges -- and was kept on after Blackwell was alerted to the man's criminal record. Further, three months after the man left his job there, he was sentenced to four years in prison for sexually abusing a girl.
It appears that the Blackwell-linked employee had a much more severe criminal record than the Strickland-linked employee. If it was OK for Blackwell to hire a convicted criminal -- as Corsi's silence about it indicates it is -- why wasn't it OK for Strickland?
We also noted that Corsi has ceased using the name of the offending Strickland employee, even though he used it in a earlier column. Why? Perhaps because the misdeameanor Corsi keeps writing about was officially expunged from the man's criminal record and it may not be, you know, legal to be publicly distributing expunged records. Which may be also why Corsi is protecting the identity of the "Ohio Concerned Citizen" who is his main source for these accusations. While Corsi insists that "[t]he information given me by Ohio Concerned Citizen in the past has been true and verifiable," such use of an anonymous violates WorldNetDaily's policy against using anonymous sources (as articulated by Joseph Farah in a January 1999 WND column: "usually quotes made up out of whole cloth to help make the story read better"). Of course, as we've noted with WND's Aaron Klein, stated policy and practice are two very different things; anonymous sources appear to be quite permissible when needed to achieve WND's agenda.
