Topic: WorldNetDaily
It's ultimately self-serving, but WorldNetDaily did something extrordinary last week: it debunked a false claim about President Obama. From an Oct. 21 WND article:
A video by the Republican National Trust has falsely accused President Obama of accepting campaign contributions from the Hamas terrorist organization.
In a blast e-mail, the GOP Trust, an ally of the Newsmax.com website, has touted a newly released, 25-minute video as capable of "chang[ing] this election and catapult[ing] Conservatives into Congress if enough voters see it before Election Day."
"Our film is the ONLY strategy for Conservatives that NATIONALIZES this election," continued the GOP Trust e-mail.
The GOP Trust e-mail went on to spell "aggressive" wrong: "THIS IS THE MOST AGREESIVE ELECTION STRATEGY EVER LAUNCHED."
The entire film is based on news stories that have already been reported, with some of the stories first breaking at WND. Many of the stories have received wide attention on talk radio and the Fox News Channel.
The video accuses Obama of taking money from Hamas."During his presidential election," begins the narrator, "he wound up with a record shattering $750 million in his campaign. To this day, he refuses to report from whence it came. One reason might be that some of it comes from Hamas, which also endorsed Obama for president."
Hamas, however, has never been accused of funding Obama's presidential campaign.
The ad apparently confused a different report – that Palestinian brothers inside the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip illegally contributed to Obama's campaign.
So not only does WND get to tweak a competitor in linking GOP Trust to Newsmax, the article goes on to rehash its own out-of-date reporting. Then, because the GOP Trust ad referenced "the radicalism of some of Obama's 'czars,'" the article goes on to take credit for Anita Dunn leaving the the White House because she "stepped down immediately after WND released a video of her boasting how Obama's presidential campaign 'controlled' the media."
As we've previously detailed, Politico reported months before WND focused on Dunn that she was filling her White House job on an interim basis. And WND's framing of the quote is false as well -- Dunn is talking about efforts by political campaigns to manage media coverage of their candidate, which every political campaign of any size tries to do. There's nothing remotely surprising about that at all.
