Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah has dialed things back a bit in his war on Wikipedia. In his Dec. 16 column, Farah praises a Wikipedia editor who removed the offending information on Farah's Wikipedia bio after reading Farah's Dec. 14 screed. Then Farah started hurling rhetorical questions:
Not everyone will go to such lengths to protect their reputation. Not everyone has the clout of a large Internet news forum they can use to address injustices. Not everyone has the resources to take on an Internet giant like Wikipedia.
What about them?
Where is their advocate?
Where is their ombudsman?
Where does someone go on Wikipedia for justice?
Whom does the average person appeal to when he or she has been slimed?
Where's the corrections department?
Where do you go to get your reputation back?
Where is the reparations department?
[...]
I don't want to be a victim of this beast any more.
I don't want others to be victims of it – whether I like them or not.
Of course a lot of these questions also need to be answered by Farah and WorldNetDaily:
Where is WND's ombudsman?
Where is WND's corrections department?
Whom does the average person appeal to when he or she has been slimed by WND? Where does Barack Obama appeal to demand that WND retract the repeated lies it has told about him?
Where does Clark Jones go to get his reputation back after WND spent seven years denying that it libeled him, then abruptly settled Jones' lawsuit against WND by admitting that it published false claims about him that it failed to fact-check before publication?
Will WND inform its readers about the nature of the reparations it made to Clark Jones for sullying his reputation? Will WND fact-check any of the other articles out of that 2000 Al Gore-bashing series and admit and apologize for any other false claims?
How about answering these questions, Mr. Farah, before getting all high and mighty about the behavior of other websites? How about treating the subjects of WND's stories with the same level of honesty you demand from others about yourself?
Or, better yet, try reporting facts instead of hurling smears.
If Farah does that, maybe he will be regarded as something other than a thin-skinned whiner.
UPDATE: Right Wing Watch concurs with the idea that Farah is really writing about himself and WND instead of Wikipedia.
