Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Oct. 14 WorldNetDaily article claims that "Michelle Obama placed a surprise call to an African news agency to protest its coverage of WND investigative stories about her husband – characterizing the source of the material as "racist" and Jerome Corsi as 'evil.'"
Just one problem: it is rather obviously fake. From the Huffington Post:
Naturally, a mere contemplation of the obvious should have short-circuited the belief that this interview was real. ... The Obama campaign has been, throughout the season, notoriously disciplined and highly aloof from the press, so it's unlikely that Michelle Obama would have the green light to be calling up random bloggers to yell at them. If she did, she'd be doing that all the damned time! But Michelle is clearly working hard to avoid courting controversy.
[...]
Beyond that, there were obvious signs that the interview, and the organization, is fakety-fake McFake. For example: there are two "r's" in "Farrakhan." "Inauguration" is not spelled "innoguration." And you'd think that a writer for "African Press International" would be clear on the concept of capitalizing one's own publication's name. Nevertheless, these obvious signs proved too elusive for some people.
Among them is WND, which fully bought into it, complete with an email message from a representative from the alleged news agency (which appears to be nothing more than a blog):
However, in an e-mail to WND, a man who identified himself as API's "Chief Editor Korikr" confirmed the exchange.
"API hereby confirms to you that the story is true and if the huge interest on this particular story continues, we will post the recording on our website in the next immediate days.
"When we published the story we did not intend to cause any chaos but we are shocked by the huge interest the story is receiving from the Americans and the American media," he continued.
"Mrs. Obama called us just to ask API to stop joining the mainstream hate online media that is trying to destroy her husband's opportunity to get the presidency," he wrote.
He said his editorial board would meet to discuss how best to release the audio.
WND has a habit of letting its biases get in the way of its news judgment. This is not the first time that WND has treated a fake news story as real -- in 2005, WND treated an April Fool's item on the blog Defamer that Terri Schiavo's husband had sold the rights to his story for a TV movie was real.
On the other hand, WND thinks those Obama-smearing emails Jerome Corsi brought back from Kenya are real too.
