Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has not been shy about casting blame for his website's financial problems -- except when it comes to admitting WND's long legacy of publishing fake news, that is. Farah went on another victimization rant in his March 6 column, blaming President Obama for the heinous offense of wanting news to be based on actual facts:
It was a presidential election year, and Obama was not happy with what was happening. Perhaps he sensed, before many of his allies, that the 2016 campaign was not going quite like he expected.
By the way, if the Russians were turning the tide in this election, who was in charge? That’s right. Barack Obama was in charge. Obama wasn’t blaming the Russians for anything. He was blaming the independent media. Something had to be done about the fact that more than one “reality” was getting out there. The media were no longer in lockstep as they were when he was a child – with three news presentations to choose from.
If you doubt what I am saying, consider the way Agence France Presse explained the backdrop for what Obama was saying: “His remarks came amid an election campaign that has seen Republican candidate Donald Trump repeat ideas and take on key staff from right-wing media outlets.”
What Obama was calling for, and what even I couldn’t have imagined in my worst nightmare, would be the case 16 months later; he got his way. He had given the cue to his friends in the Digital Cabal: It’s time to unlevel the playing field.
That’s what we saw happen in the aftermath of the swearing in of Donald Trump as president. In the euphoria of that victory, we in the independent media could not perceived what was underway – a kind of media coup was taking place. The Googles and the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world took control of the digital domain. They began throwing their monetary and corporate power around to deliver Obama’s legacy – the end of the free press in America.
These powerful, all-knowing, all-powerful ideological thugs began a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners war on the independent media.Perhaps the most important way they did that was by embedding left-wing extremists as rule-makers and gatekeepers, the speech-code cops of the Southern Poverty Law Center, to determine what is real news and what is fake news. It is nothing short of political censorship come to America.
What Obama was calling for, according to the article Farah quotes at the top of his column, was "some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world." And that's where Farah and WND fail.
WND's birther crusade was nothing but an eight-year, fake-news-based hate campaign. And we've caught WND in numerous examples of publishing fake news in just the past two years alone. One does not have to be a "left-wing extremist" to demand that news outlets stop running fake news -- or to know that WND has nobody to blame but itself for destroying any reputation it had as a legitimate news operation by publishing so much of it.
But Farah is too busy playing victim to take responsibility for his own actions:
The goal is nothing short of driving the independent media into extinction. This was what Obama was talking about. As we laughed about the kind of tyranny he disguised in the name of “democracy,” he was serious. And those who had the power to institute this diabolical plan to end freedom of the press in America without a constitutional amendment – the Digital Cabal – went about the business of doing so.
I won’t go into all the ways they have done it. But they did it. And all of my colleagues in the independent media know this, though they are not yet all admitting it. They are certainly not taking the sage advice of Benjamin Franklin who said famously: “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
Is it too late to save free speech and the free press in America?
No, it is not. But the hour is late. Time is short.
Here's a tip for Mr. Farah: If he and WND want to be taken seriously ever again, he needs to correct the record, apologize for all the fake news he has published, and then take some concrete steps to demonstrate he won't do it again and that he will turn WND into a serious news outlet. Otherwise, he and WND will continue to be dismissed as the fringe right-wing conspiracy-mongers they are.
Put up or shut up, Joe.
