All Fired Up

Joseph Farah wants the AP reporter who wrote about a senator's comments on gays to be pink-slipped for her alleged bias. Does that mean WorldNetDaily reporters will get fired for their biased reporting, too?

By Terry Krepel
Posted 5/5/2003

Hoo-boy. Where to begin?

Joseph Farah's April 28 WorldNetDaily column defending Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum's comments on homosexuality is so filled with hypocrisy and contradictory thought that it's difficult to pick a starting place. So, let's just jump right in.

Farah "suggests" that Lara Jakes Jordan, the Associated Press reporter who wrote the story on Santorum, be fired for it. But he also says Santorum's comments were rendered "candidly, dispassionately and accurately."

Farah says Jordan's story was "dripping in venom. It's an editorial camouflaged as a news story." But that alleged venom is nowhere to be found in the story. In fact, it's mostly a puff-piece profile. While Jordan puts Santorum's homosexual comments -- "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything" -- in the third paragraph, the story isn't about those comments.

These are the first two paragraphs of Jordan's story, which Farah also calls "a set-up. It was what we call in the news business a "hatchet job":

Sen. Rick Santorum, a self-described compassionate conservative intent on climbing the Republican leadership ladder, filters all politics and policy through one guiding principle: what is best for the American family.

Two-parent families, says Santorum, are good. Requiring people to work is good. So is banning late-term abortions and giving religion a greater role in government. Traditional welfare, on the other hand, hurts the family. Homosexuality, feminism, liberalism all undermine the family. Even parts of the Constitution can harm the family.

This is a hatchet job? It reads like it belongs on WorldNetDaily.

Okay, so Farah can't actually demonstrate bias or inaccuracy. That means he's down to attacking the reporter. "For starters, she is married to veteran Democratic Party operative Jim Jordan, the former executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and manager of Sen. John Kerry's presidential bid," Farah writes, repeating the talking point other conservatives have seized upon.

But that's not all: "In January of this year, Mrs. Jordan was one of the signatories on a letter to her bosses at the AP attacking the news organization for 'rolling back diversity' by not extending benefits to domestic partners," Farah writes, though he provides his readers no source for this information.

If Farah really wants to lead a witch hunt for journalistic purity, he should start with his own organization, where he can find much more egregious examples of biased writing. Case in point: WND reporter Jon Dougherty.

From rewriting press releases to whitewashing an anti-abortion extremist to not reporting exculpatory evidence in order to make the death of an Arkansas journalist look like it was caused by Bill Clinton's "political machine" to writing puff pieces about people WorldNetDaily has a financial interest in without disclosing that interest, Dougherty's journalistic goof-ups are legion. Yet Dougherty remains a member of the WND news staff. Why?

Why indeed, because Dougherty has also violated another journalistic credo Farah issues in his column: not reporting on any subject you have a personal interest in or have expressed a public opinion on -- or, as he put it, "I don't care if you sleep with elephants as long as you don't cover the circus." If Jordan shouldn't be allowed to report on, according to Farah, "an issue near and dear to her bleeding heart," it should work that way on the other side of the political fence.

Dougherty wrote in a January 2000 column: "... language frauds don't want you to call homosexuality 'perverted' because it is perverted; the act of two men or two women having sex with each other is not natural, is not 'normal,' and it isn't 'evolutionary.'" Yet he has written "news" articles for WND that touch on homosexual issues, from the Jesse Dirkhising case to the issue of homosexuals in the Boy Scouts (despite, again, his clearly expressed support in favor of the Boy Scouts being able to bar gays from joining).

Farah's implication that Jordan should be fired, or at least not be covering politics, because her husband works for a political candidate is also undercut by Dougherty. If being married to a political consultant undercuts your credibility (gee, we never heard that complaint about Mary Matalin), wouldn't one's own job record be even more indicative of the potential for bias? According to Dougherty's bio, issued when he was first hired by WND, there's no actual journalistic experience all before joining WorldNetDaily. Instead, it's noted he hosted his own talk programs on the Radio America Network -- whose roster includes conservatives Oliver North and Blanquita Cullum, libertarian Harry Browne and Judicial Watch -- and the Talk America Radio Network, current home of Geoff Metcalf, former WND columnist and star of WND's own now-defunct foray into talk radio and who now writes a column for NewsMax. There's nothing on Dougherty's resume that indicates he's capable of writing objective journalism not tainted by conservative bias, as his WND work has unfortunately borne out.

Farah claims in a May 5 column marking WND's sixth anniversary that "We believe we must be credible, relentless and fiercely independent to succeed." Unfortunately for WND, as Farah's call for Jordan's head on a pike illustrates, it has trouble getting beyond biased and hypocritical. We'll take Farah seriously when he treats Jon Dougherty as he would Lara Jakes Jordan.

Meanwhile, over at the Media Research Center, not only was Brent Bozell doing the usual conservative ranting we've come to expect from him in his April 29 column on the issue -- including digging up poor Jesse Dirkhising one more time to highlight AP's alleged hyping of the death of Matthew Shepherd as a prior offense -- he was reading things into Jordan's story that clearly aren't there. This is what he wrote:

She summarized his view: "Homosexuality, feminism, liberalism all undermine the family. Even parts of the Constitution can harm the family." Note the utterly untrue liberal assumption that the Constitution presently insures the right to sodomy.

Huh? How did Bozell get from issues that "undermine the family" to the "right to sodomy"?

Bozell further displays his ignorance of the way the AP works in alleging that "this allegedly objective wire service promoted (Jordan's story) like they were selling sunscreen at spring break." AP merely makes stories available to its members, who then decide if and how to use them -- and AP offers a lot stories over the course of a day. Perhaps Bozell could provide some evidence to back up his claim, like the news "budgets" AP offers that show what it considers to be the most important stories of the day -- where it "sells" its stories -- and the Santorum flap's ranking on them.

He won't, because -- speaking from my own experience working at a newspaper during what Bozell calls "Santorum Resignation Week at AP" -- most of the stories he details in his column never appeared on those budgets, which means that even the AP didn't consider them terribly important in the scheme of things.

AP just made the stories available. Bozell's beef is with the thousands of newspapers, radio and TV stations and Web sites who subscribe to it.