Topic: WorldNetDaily
The headline on Jerome Corsi's Jan. 11 WorldNetDaily article reads, "Sorting fact from fiction about Jared Loughner." But Corsi himself is responsible for some of the fiction he's aiming to correct, and he doesn't touch the biggest myth about Loughner promoted by his employer.
One piece of fiction Corsi labored to correct was the relationship between Loughner and his apparent intended victim, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, prior to the shooting. He noted "numerous reports that Giffords and Loughner had encountered each other before Saturday's attempted assassination," he declared that "So far, no evidence has established that Loughner ever served as a formal volunteer to a Giffords' election campaign, or that Giffords knew Loughner well, even though she wrote him what appears to have been a typical congressional letter to a constituent."
Corsi didn't mention that two days earlier, he had falsely claimed that Giffords and Loughner had a much closer relationship, when he asserted that "it is now known that Loughner worked for Gifford's election campaign in 2007." Interestingly, that falsehood remains live and uncorrected on WND.
Corsi also touched on the issue that "that Rep. Giffords had subscribed her YouTube website to Jared Loughner's YouTube channel" without mentioning his own muddled reporting. In the same article containing the above-noted falsehood, Corsi stated that "Gifford subscribed to Loughner's website since Oct. 25, 2010." He may have meant to write that differently, but he's suggesting here that Gifford subscribed to Loughner's YouTube channel the day it was created -- something Corsi's own screenshots disprove. Again, this messed-up claim remains live and uncorrected on WND.
For all this concern about getting facts straight, Corsi avoided address perhaps the biggest myth being perpetrated in the media about Loughner -- that he was clearly influenced by Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler, as evidenced by the presence of "The Communist Manifesto" and "Mein Kampf" in a book list on his YouTube profile. In fact, as we detailed, there are 19 other books on Loughner's list that WND (as well as Newsmax and the Media Research Center) never saw fit to tell their readers about, including anti-totalitarian books by Ayn Rand and others that would seem to contradict the idea that he was some sort of commie Nazi.
But that's Corsi and WorldNetDaily -- where they can't be trusted to tell the truth, even when they insist that's what they're doing.