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Saturday, July 12, 2008
When Activists Write the 'News'
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Andrea Shea King is not a journalist. She is a blogger who has a webcast, calls Barack Obama a "moronic, inexperienced, elitist cardboard cut-out," and invokes discredited smears of the Clintons.

Which, of course, made her a natural choice to write a "news" article for WorldNetDaily.

King's July 12 WND article is a puff piece for Will Bower, who heads a group of anti-Obama activists who claim to be Hillary Clinton supporters. Because King is not a journalist, she does nothing of the things a real journalist would do:

  • She interviews only Bower, making no attempt to talk to others to put Bower's activism in perspective of the larger Democratic political situation.
  • She makes no apparent attempt to verify Bower's claims that he has 2 million supporters that have raised $10 million to retire Clinton's campaign debt; she merely regurgitates what Bowers says as the undisuputed truth, even dubious, unsubstantiated assertions like "Eight super-delegates left Obama this week." 
  • She does not disclose her own pimping of Bower's group on her webcast and blog, in which she calld it "a tsunami-like movement determined to topple the Democrat leadership's well laid plans to crown Obama at their National Convention in September."

Indeed, some cursory Googling would raise a couple red flags (for real journalists, at least):

In short, King offers no evidence whatsoever that Bower is anything more than a guy with a website, an ax to grind against Obama, and a knack for publicity. That hardly makes him a credible spokesman for anything, much less the unassailable movement leader King portrays him as.

Then again, King does point out that most of Bower's supporters (if they do indeed exist) will be supporting John McCain -- which means this whole thing ist just a part of WND's stealth pro-McCain agenda

Which, after all, is probably the reason WND had a biased anti-Obama activist write this article in the first place. 


Posted by Terry K. at 10:01 AM EDT
Updated: Saturday, July 12, 2008 4:17 PM EDT

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