Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh complained in a May 17 WorldNetDaily article:
The Washington Post, the personal newspaper of Amazon billionaire and noted Democrat donor Jeff Bezos, says it is standing by its Trump-Russia stories, and the Pulitzer Prize they won.
That's even though a 300-page report from Special Counsel John Durham this week confirmed what President Trump has argued all along, that the reporting essentially was a "witch hunt," about a conspiracy theory based on zero evidence.
The now-debunked claims were begun and funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and contended that Trump, somehow, was obligated to Russia for his campaign. Actually, those on Clinton's payroll to create the allegations, to divert the public's attention from her own decision to post national secrets on an unsecure email system, used their own Russian sources to fabricate their claims.
The trouble is that the New York Times and the Washington Post both were given Pulitzers for their reporting on what now is known to be fiction.
Only the Pulitzers weren't in the "fiction" category.
Unruh's report is essentially a rewrite of a right-wing Daily Mail article making the same claim. But Unruh offered no evidence of anything in the Post's reporting that was proven wrong by Durham's report -- not even anything claimed in the Daily Mail story. Further, Unruh is falsely claiming that the investigation into Trump was "begun and funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign." As Washington Post writer Philip Bump documented, a timeline of events shows that there were plenty of shady events -- Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort giving campaign data to a Russian operative, Trump saying surprisingly nice things about Vladimir Putin -- that didn't involve the Clinton campaign at all, and Bump argued that the Durham report actually undermines right-wing efforts to blame Clinton for the investigation. But Unruh continued to whine anyway:
Durham's conclusion was blunt: "Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation."
Yet the prize-winning reports were based on the false assumption there was evidence.
Unruh offered no proof of this.
Unruh also noted that "A Post spokesman claimed a Pulitzer board review claimed no elements of the stories 'were discredited by facts' at that time," but said nothing more about it. In fact, Unruh misled about who the Pulitzer board review said. Here's a fuller quote as reported by the Post:
In an unusual move, it authorized two independent reviews of the articles submitted by the newspapers — and essentially recertified the results.
“The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes,” it said in a statement.
Unruh also claimed that "Not not ago, the Columbia Journalism Review released a scathing report that specifically targeted the Times for its reporting." But as critics have pointed out, that report was little more than revisionism that ignored inconvenient facts while advancing Trump's self-serving criticism of the investigation.
We know that WND these days is little more than a content mill and that Unruh just rewrites stuff and doesn't do any actually reporting, but this is a serious hack job even for him -- he just repeats partisan assertions and provides no evidence to back them up. Is this laziness what WND News Center donors are paying for?
