Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily is rarely more ridiculous than when it's hypocritically ranting about fake news. Take, for instance, Chelsea Schilling's smear-filled screed personally attacking a college professor for putting WND on a list of unreliable fake-news purveyors.
Take also WND managing editor David Kupelian's March 16 article. He begins it by uncritically taking the side of Fox News and Sean Hannity, prlclaiming as "fake news" a CNN report that Hannity pulled a gun on Fox contributor Juan Williams.
Kupelian also takes refuge in his soul-selling to back Donald Trump, refuting the claim in the CNN report by Dylan Byers that Hannity is acting "conspiratorial" by obsessing about a "deep state" of federal officials working to undermine Trump: "Pause-button, please: The last several months of news have comprised a non-stop prosecutorial case demonstrating precisely such efforts by entrenched, anti-Trump federal employees to sabotage the new president, including through naked violations of the Espionage Act."
Kupelian then hopped to another subject:
More from CNN’s Byers: “Earlier this month, Hannity conducted an interview with Monica Crowley, the conservative commentator who would have become Trump’s deputy national security adviser were it not for her rampant plagiarism, which was uncovered by CNN’s KFile. Hannity announced that anyone who had questions about Crowley’s plagiarism – which, again, had been well documented – could ‘go to hell.'”
However, as the respected former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy explained in National Review, Crowley’s actual errors were minor and the plagiarism allegations – surfacing just as she was about to become President Trump’s senior director of communications at the National Security Council – were wildly overblown as a means of discrediting her and knocking her out of the Trump administration.
In fact, McCarthy quoted well-respected copyright attorney Lynn Chu, who conducted a careful study of the plagiarism allegations against Crowley, and not only “found CNN’s splashy ‘plagiarism’ accusation to be ill-supported – a heavily exaggerated, political hit job” – but even found that CNN omitted Crowley’s end notes in its reporting so as to make it appear she was failing to credit her sources.
McCarthy's column -- which did concede that Crowley made "missteps" -- is mostly a rehash of Chu's Facebook post defending Crowley, in which Chu curiously states that "I was engaged to conduct a detailed review" of the CNN report on Crowley but fails to state by whom she was "engaged."
But as Business Insider details, CNN did in fact address the footnotes in Crowley's dissertation, saying that she "often failed to include citations or to properly cite sources in sections where she copied their wording verbatim or closely paraphrased it." Politico similarly reported that Crowley "lifted passages from her footnoted texts, occasionally making slight wording changes but rarely using quotation marks. Sometimes she didn't footnote at all." Crowley also sometimes initially cited sources but then failed to do so on subsequent references that appeared to be taken wholesale from or were extremely close to the original text.
Further, the fact remains that the publisher of Crowley's book "What The (Bleep) Just Happened" pulled it from the marketplace amid the plagiarism allegations, and it remains off the market.
Kupelian concludes: "Sounds like it’s CNN, not Hannity, that has the problem with reckless behavior and not only threatening – but hurting – innocent people. But that’s what happens when you’re really, really angry." You mean like WND behaved all through the Obama administration?
