Topic: WorldNetDaily
We haven't heard much from WorldNetDaily on the existential-issues front -- and almost nothing beyond rote pleas for money since editor Joseph Farah became incapacitated by a stroke. But on April 24, Farah's wife, Elizabeth -- who is also the WND's chief operating officer -- sent out an email that added a few details about Farah's stroke on top of the usual fundraising plea:
This is Elizabeth Farah, Joseph's wife.
You don't hear from me much as Joseph traditionally speaks for the two of us . . . but today he cannot.
Several weeks ago, Joseph suffered a serious stroke. He was out for his morning walk with our dog, Cooper, and it struck.
Joseph being the strong man that he is, didn't want to tell me at first. I know he was scared, but he didn't want to see that fear in the eyes of his wife.
Once I realized that something was wrong, I rushed him to the hospital and doctors confirmed that Joseph had been hit by a significant stroke that impairs his thoughts.
I thank God that it is treatable and we're in the process of learning and deciding at this point.
But along with my duties as Joseph's wife, I have a duty to our combined passion, and that's WorldNetDaily.
Elizabeth Farah then attached an email message she said her husband had been working on. It's a variation on his usual themes about the "cartel" of Facebook and Google purportedly running WND out of business (and not, you know, WND's long history of fake news and conspiracy theories). At one point he writes that Generation Z readers "could scroll all day and NEVER come across a single article that notes the accomplishments of the Trump Administration and they certainly would not see this string of letters . . . J E S U S," adding that "Facebook and Twitter users are shielded from anything that doesn't fit a liberal narrative, while honest publications that serve truly independent news, are elbowed out of the room."
Perhaps those Generation Z readers should ask Clark Jones or Seth Rich's parents about how "honest" WND is.
Farah then touted the newly created WND News Center, which is "now responsible for the fiercely independent articles that we publish each day." As we've previously noted, WND is following the Daily Caller model of outsourcing labor-intensive reporting to a nonprofit organization that would then give the work to WND for free (which technically offering it to others on the same terms). However, we've seen no evidence that the WND News Center is up and running; as has been the case since jettisoning its reporting staff, most original articles are still unbylined rewrites of news that originally appeared elsewhere.
Elizabeth Farah signed off by begging for money and writing that "I'll do my best to keep you up to date on the operations of the WND News Center" -- never mind that transparency about its operations has never been anything WND has cared about in the past. There still hasn't been a public accounting of the money Joseph Farah raised over the past year or so from readers or where it all went. (The WND News Center is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, so it has to make its donors public.)
She added, sounding a lot like her husband:
Now that you've read Joseph's email, you can only imagine the stress this had placed on him.
But to make matters worse, following his stroke, one of the members of what Joseph refers to as the "Tower of Babel" (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter), went on the attack and, through the Washington Post, published a hit piece on WND that they thought would put us down for the count.
With your help, it won't.
In fact, WND has not refuted any claim in the devastating Post piece, which made it clear that years of financial mismanagement that -- along with all the fake news and conspiracy theories -- are a lot more responsible for WND's current state of affairs than anything Google and Facebook may have done (and that Farah's stroke wasn't publicly disclosed until after the Post contacted WND for comment on the article's allegations).
In other words, things are still pretty shaky on the WND front.
