Topic: WorldNetDaily
In 2011, WorldNetDaily editor declared, "I don’t pay too much attention to MSNBC and Rachel Maddow. About the only time I watch this kind of programming is when it focuses on me." It's in that spirit of selective obliviousness -- and Farah's notoriously thin skin -- that a Feb. 5 WND article by Bob Unruh is dedicated to spinning away Maddow's criticism of WND:
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow says it’s really hard for the left wing of the U.S. government to operate because the other half – the conservatives – are not willing to adopt the “evidence” she suggests is irrefutable.
And she can’t stop herself from taking public swipes at WND for its reporting on some of the issues liberals have had difficulty advancing.
Immediately thereafter, Unruh quotes Maddow mentioning the false story about "the Muslim Obama jihad on child Reagan’s home" without acknowledging that WND promoted that false story.
The bulk of Unruh's article is dedicated to rebutting claims by Maddow and fellow MSNBC host Chris Hayes on the issue of global warming -- an issue about what Maddow did not specifically criticize.
Unruh wrote that Maddow and Hayes "did not discuss the evidence from emails leaked from the University of East Anglia, the premiere global warming advocacy center," going on to reference how WND columnist Christopher Monckton is "regarded as an expert on the issue." But in doing so, Unruh ends up justifying Maddow's criticism of WND:
- Monckton is not a scientist, has made numerous misleading and incorrect claims about climate change and once falsely claimed to be a Nobel laureate, making him a very dubious "expert."
- The stolen emails do not offer evidence of any sort of conspiracy to perpetuate the false notion of climate change, as Unruh and Monckton suggest.
Unruh quotes Monckton citing one stolen email stating, "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t." But that's taken out of context; as Wired points out, the article accompanying the email states that global warming is continuing, despite random temperature variations that would seem to suggest otherwise, and the scientist in question has responded by saying that the email was noting that "we don’t have an observing system adequate to track it, but there are all other kinds of signs aside from global mean temperatures — including melting of Arctic sea ice and rising sea levels and a lot of other indicators — that global warming is continuing."
Unruh also repeats a claim that "a recent report in the Daily Mail of London said the purported 'consensus' on global warming is disintegrating after new data indicate the planet has not warmed in 15 years." In fact, the Daily Mail distorted the data by picking an arbitrary starting point that obscures the overall warming trend as demonstrated over a longer period of time.
Unruh then wrote that "Maddow launched into another rant about WND’s reporting about of several issues involving Obama," but he makes no effort to rebut anything she said. That's because he can't -- among the things Maddow highlights is WND's discredited claim that Obama's wedding ring contains Arabic characters stating, "There is no god except Allah" and Jerome Corsi's peddling of unsupported claims that Obama is secretly gay.
Unruh concludes by stating that Maddow's "outspokenness occasionally has landed trouble at her doorstep. A lawsuit, now on appeal, alleges that she defamed a Christian minister by maliciously asserting he advocated the execution of homosexuals." That, of course, would be lying preacher Bradlee Dean. Unruh does not mention that Dean's lawyer, Larry Klayman, has done work for WND, making this yet another conflict of interest that WND has failed to disclose as basic journalistic ethics demand.
