Topic: WorldNetDaily
The monthly appeal from WorldNetDaily managing editor David Kupelian to try and get WND readers to send him money for free content carries the headline "1 simple way to kill fake news and drain the swamp." In it, he makes this claim:
Do you remember hearing recently about a Washington, D.C.-based alternative news organization that had actually been the original funder of Fusion GPS, the notorious “oppo-research” outfit that later produced the infamously fraudulent, Democrat-funded “Trump dossier”? Or, what do you suppose happens (another actual example) when a journalism organization’s billionaire funder is overall a good, solid Republican – except he has a gay son who “married” his homosexual partner, and now the father is intensely focused on getting the Republican Party to embrace the entire LGBT agenda? Do you think a news organization funded by him, however conservative and reasonable and right-thinking it might otherwise be, will spend much time exposing the LGBT juggernaut that is currently turning American society, culture and law upside-down?
This is what can and does happen when you are basically a good news organization with good people, but funded by a billionaire with an agenda.
WND founder and Editor Joseph Farah puts it this way: “Even much of the alternative media has an agenda beyond the truth. And since most of it is controlled by the views of its billionaire owners, literally, there are problems with it. The one notable exception is WND. We’re not controlled by a billionaire, a group of billionaires or even millionaires. From the beginning, we simply operate from an independent truth-seeking drive with a God-centered worldview. We don’t make any apologies for it. But it keeps us independent of everything except our one bias – that we serve a Creator God who revealed His love for us through the Bible.”
This independence is one of the biggest factors that distinguishes WND from all of our journalistic colleagues both in the Big Media and the alternative media: We don’t rely on a billionaire funder whose agenda controls us.
We rely on you.
The first example Kupelian cites, the Fusion GPS funder, is the Washington Free Beacon. The second example is apparently a reference to Peter Singer, who is a major funder of the Free Beacon.
But is the Free Beacon's paying Fusion GPS for oppo research any different from WND's claimed hiring of private investigators to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton, or using its lawyers to draft an affidavit to bolster its Obama birther conspiracy theories? Not really.
Interestingly, Kupelian inserts a bit of fake news here by claiming the "Trump dossier is "infamously fraudulent." In fact, a lot of it has been corroborated elsewhere. That doesn't bode well for Kupelian's quoting of Farah's instenc that WND is on "an independent truth-seeking drive with a God-centered worldview."
Of course, WND's lengthy history of publishing fake news puts the lie to its claim that it's "truth-seeking" (just ask Clark Jones). And what "God-centered worldview" caused Kupelian to sell out his sense of morality to back an thrice-married adulterer and misogynist as his preferred presidential candidate? Indeed, Kupelian uses his column to tout "the stunning election of Donald Trump, sparing [Americans] the unthinkable horrors of a Hillary Clinton presidency."
If Kupelian is really looking for "1 simple way to kill fake news," he might want to try not publishing so much of it.
