Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah's March 3 column takes another stab at bashing Keith Olbermann for tweaking WorldNetDaily -- and fails yet again to tell the full truth about what WND reported about Barack Obama's birth certificate.
To recap the story thus far: last December, we caught Farah baldly lying about the fact that last August, WND reported that "WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts" found the certificate released by Obama's campaign "to be authentic." Olbermann picked it up and reported it on "Countdown" in January. That got Farah riled up, and he obfuscated, claiming that WND "appeared to suggest an image of Barack Obama's birth certificate on his website was found conclusively to be genuine." Again, not true. WND did a lot more than "suggested" its authenticity -- it affirmatively declared it.
So last week, when Olbermann discussed the birth certificate issue again and noted that "the right-wing site the WorldNetDaily authenticated the Obama birth certificate," it was almost guaranteed that Farah would respond -- and obfuscate again:
It is simply untrue that WND ever "authenticated" the document on Obama's campaign site. First of all, we would have to examine the original document, not a web posting, to do that. Second of all, assuming it is not a fraud, which is more than I would assume, it proves nothing about Obama's actual place of birth, for the reason stated above.
Again, here's what WND wrote last August:
Philip J. Berg, a former member of Pennsylvania's Democratic State Committee and former deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania, filed the lawsuit this week in U.S District Court, asking the court to declare Obama ineligible for the presidency and to prevent him from running for the position.
However, a WND investigation has found that at least part of Berg's lawsuit relies on discredited claims.
[...]
A separate WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic. The investigation also revealed methods used by some of the bloggers to determine the document was fake involved forgeries, in that a few bloggers added text and images to the certificate scan that weren't originally there.
It is reasonable -- not to mention entirely accurate -- to deduce that if a "WND investigation ... found the document to be authentic," then WND has, in fact, authenticated the document. Needless to say, Farah again fails to link to the original August article so his readers can judge for themselves whether WND "authenticated" the birth certificate.
The simple solution to this crisis -- and to avoid further ridicule from Olbermann -- is for Farah to do what real news organizations would do: acknowledge what WND wrote last August, formally retract the story, then explain to readers why he and his website no longer stand by that conclusion.
But for some reason, he won't do that. Why? Perhaps because he knows that the original report is true and that he's now playing a partisan game to undermine Obama's authority by peddling a lie.
Farah ironically concludes: "If you're sick of being lied to, I urge you to show the Keith Olbermanns and Jonathan Alters of the world what you think of them." But what good does it do to go after Olbermann and Alter if the person doing the lying is Joseph Farah?
