Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has long had a thin skin when it comes to criticism of himself or WND. (That's why he pretends we don't exist.) Farah extends that thinskinned petulance to a person who's merely trying to fact-check him in his Dec. 21 column.
Farah rants: "Some new self-appointed media gatekeeper arises from the know-it-all fever swamp of snowflake self-righteousness to judge my life’s work unworthy." Here, he'stargeting his rage at Kendrick McDonald of NewsGuard, a new organization that aims to provide a clearinghouse on the reliability on news operations. Farah played his usual manhood-measuring card, whinign that McDonald's "career as a professional factchecker has spanned two years," adding that "Before he was born, I was running daily newspapers in major metro markets, teaching journalism at UCLA and winning awards for reporting and editing in urban areas in 'progressive' California."
Farah then reproduced the questions that McDonald asked him. It's cldear that McDonald is simply asking basic questions about WND, like whether it has a corrections policy (the answer to that is no, unless the person or organization who was wronged threatens to sue -- hello, Chobani).
McDonald also asked Farah questions about specific stories WND has covered. It appears McDonald has been reading ConWebWatch, for he asked about the conspiracy theories it has promoted about Barack Obama's birth certificate, Seth Rich and Steve Stockman. He also notes Erik Rush's unhinged column positing that right-wing MAGAbomber Cesar Sayoc was some kind of secret "leftist operative." McDonald also included something we haven't written about:
In your Nov. 12 column, “Where did all these voters come from?” you state as fact that Democrats voted illegally in the 2018 midterm elections, which is the cause of high voter turnout statistics. You cite as evidence a video from Project Veritas. However, the Travis County Deputy Clerk has stated that there has been no evidence of illegal voting at that polling station or any others in Travis County. No other authorities have reported any evidence of voter fraud in the 2018 midterm election.
Before the list, Farah said that "I’d like you to consider what you see daily at MSNBC, the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast – not to mention the wall-to-wall conspiracy theorizing at CNN." After it, he made it extremely clear that anyone who questions WND's shaky editorial choices is beneath him:
I’m done engaging. I’m done suffering fools. I’m done persuading. I’m done defending myself against partisan hacks. And, yes, I’m done counting two things:
all the reasons I don’t believe Obama’s phony birth certificate; and
how many dead people the Clintons stumbled over.
Let’s just say “too many.”
As we have seen recently, Farah is aggressively refusing to learn the lessons of the past year and failing to see his own flaws even as he lashes out against the same flaws in others.He has made it clear that he blames everyone else but himself for WND's current life on the edge of extinction, even though his embrace of the above cbogus onspiracy theories are a key reason why nobody believes WND.
Self-reflection is clearly not something Farah is interested in -- he's so hostile to the idea that anyone who tries to get him to do it is a "fool" and a "partisan hack." (Farah, by the way, offered no evidence that McDonald and NewsGuard are "partisan hacks" beyond their asking him questions.) He doesn't seem to understand that asking for conspiracy theories to be justified with solid evidence is not the line of reasoning from a "partisan hack" -- it's what journalists do.
Farah has apparently become so ossified in his conspiracy theories that he will brook no dissent from them. That means he has stopped being a journalist -- and, thus, there's even less of a reason to believe what WND reports.
