Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Aug. 18 WorldNetDaily article defends Jerome Corsi from the charge that he is a 9/11 "truther," insisting that Corsi "has rejected the arguments from '9/11 Truthers' who allege the U.S. government brought about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." It includes the following claim:
Obama's rebuttal used as evidence for its claim a radio interview in which Corsi discussed a story he was researching concerning the chemical analysis of debris from the Twin Tower collapse.
While Corsi claims in the interview that he intended to publish the story, the WND editorial panel rejected the article, with Corsi's agreement, after reaching a consensus that the research failed to answer several critical questions which left the results inconclusive.
"After the review of my draft article by the WND editorial staff, I agreed the piece should be withdrawn," Corsi affirmed.
"As I explained on the radio, I am typically interested in scientific evidence that lies outside the explanation of conventional hypotheses," he continued. "Science advances by rejecting hypotheses, not by establishing hypotheses. In other words, should somebody find convincing scientific evidence that challenges some aspect of any official report, that evidence will not automatically confirm the truth of an alternative hypothesis."
"Put simply, even if we had published the article, all we would have established was that there were some questions yet to be resolved with the government's 9/11 explanation, not that an alternative hypothesis was suddenly correct," he explained[.]
The big revelation here is the suggestion that WND has an "editorial panel" that purports to have certain journalistic standards and would actually refuse to run an article. That's not something we would have suspected -- we thought WND's only standard was to smear Democrats and liberals regardless of whether the smear has any basis in fact.
After all, it has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of journalistic standards, from printing sleazy, never-verified claims about Barack Obama to publishing a series of articles attacking Al Gore that it never fact-checked, ultimately resulting in a libel lawsuit and a (presumably costly) out-of-court settlement in which WND admitted that claims it published were false and that "the sources named in the publications have stated under oath that statements attributed to them in the articles were either not made by them, were misquoted by the authors, were misconstrued, or the statements were taken out of context."
This suggests that WND's status as a horribly biased, unreliable news organization is part of an actual, deliberate plan. Horrors!
