Topic: WorldNetDaily
A March 14 WorldNetDaily article by Drew Zahn touts how Obama birth certificate obsessive Orly Taitz "confronted" Chief Justice John Roberts "with legal briefs and a WND petition bearing names of over 325,000 people asking the court to rule on whether or not the sitting president fulfills the Constitution's 'natural-born citizen' clause." Zahn added that a Secret Service agent accompanying Roberts "accepted two suitcases of documents and pledged to deliver them to Roberts," among them "[t]he WND petition, consisting of 3,300 pages of names – over 325,000 in all – of people demanding the Supreme Court hear the Obama eligibility case."
But as we've detailed, the WND petition is highly secretive and apparently problematic -- the signees are not publicly posted, and there's no apparent verification mechanism to prevent people from signing it more than once or the use of fictitious names. Nor are signers apparently screened for being of legal voting age. Further, there is no evidence whatsoever there are actually the number of signatures on the petition that WND claims.
Given that you and I cannot obtain basic information about this petition, and WND has failed to make such information available to its readers, how did Orly Tatiz get a hold of it?
This smells of a WND-orchestrated stunt. Zahn doesn't disclose how Taitz obtained the signatures on WND's petition, but given the logistics of printing out "3,300 pages of names," the only possible conclusion is that WND teamed up with Taitz -- and perhaps paid some expenses to cover Taitz's trip from California to Idaho, where Roberts spoke -- to create this story.
As with Aaron Klein's Wikipedia-bashing stunt, in which he has now admitted that he set in motion the events he wrote about, the issue is one of disclosure. WND still hasn't told its readers that Klein's articles were altered after publication to remove references tracing Klein to his manipulation, and WND hasn't disclosed its role in supplying Taitz with a copy of its petition.
News organizations are supposed to report the news, not create it. And if they do, they're supposed to fully disclose their role in doing so. WND has done neither.
It's time for WND to man up and start telling the full truth to its readers.
