The Evil of Marketing, Part 2

An April 14 article was WND's first report on the case of Scott Savage, a reference librarian at Ohio State University-Mansfield represented by ADF who was facing a investigation from the school after some professors accused him of "sexual harassment" for suggesting Kupelian's "The Marketing of Evil" and three other right-wing books for a recommended reading list for students. In typical WND fashion, its article ventures little beyond the ADF press release and other ADF-supplied materials -- nobody from the school was contacted to comment for this article. While WND does add a quote from Kupelian on the controversy, he fails to address a major criticism of his book as described in the article -- that his description of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey as a "full-fledged sexual psychopath who encouraged pedophilia" is a "factually untrue characterization of Dr. Kinsey and his work."

The article's claim that Savage was accused of "sexual harassment" -- a claim taken straight from the ADF press release -- is misleading. In fact, according to an April 14 Inside Higher Ed article, Savage was accused of "harassment based on sexual orientation."

Related articles on ConWebWatch: WorldNetDaily's Junk Journalism The Evil of Marketing The Masters of WorldNetDaily So Much to Disclose, Too Dishonest to Do It

The article also calls "The Marketing of Evil" a "best seller" but offers no evidence to support it; prior to this, WND had never promoted such "best seller" status other than at WND's own store. (It later noted that as a result of the controversy, the book briefly held down the top spot in Amazon.com's "Current Events" bestseller list -- again, not exactly what most people think of as "best-seller" qualifications.) This article was followed up on April 18 with an article headlined "University faculty bans WND book." That's false -- even the article itself doesn't claim that the book was "banned." It also created sympathy for Savage by describing him as "a pious Ohio Quaker who owns a horse and buggy instead of a car, and who embraces non-violence and peace in every area of life." An article the next day announcing that the harassment charges had been dropped once again falsely refers to "book-banning" professors.

WND moved on to further attacks on the university in an April 24 article branding its diversity seminar for students as "homosexual indoctrination." WND's only evidence of this are claims by an anonymous student and his father that in the seminar, "the homosexual lifestyle is celebrated, and the students are put on a 'guilt trip' for having negative feelings and/or moral judgments about the behavior of these people." Such diversity seminars, the article claims, use "tactics reminiscent of those of Chinese communist revolutionary leader Mao Tse-Tung."

An April 26 article, using an anonymous Virginia Tech librarian as a source, claims that the "The Marketing of Evil" is in relatively few college libraries because liberal librarians discriminate against "conservative, traditional-values-oriented books." To illustrate the alleged discrimination, the article notes that there are 3,542 copies of "unabashedly liberal author" Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Nickel and Dimed" in libraries nationwide, while "The Marketing of Evil" appears in only 188.

But the article fails to inform readers that "Nickel and Dimed" was released in 2001 and has sold more than 1 million copies. "The Marketing of Evil," meanwhile, was released in the fall of 2005 -- meaning it has been on the market for four fewer years than Ehrenreich's book -- and WND has not publicly disclosed how many copies of the book have been sold. Chances are that it's a lot fewer than 1 million. Additionally, Ehrenreich's book has appeared on the New York Times' best-seller list, a feat "The Marketing of Evil" has yet to achieve despite WND's repeated claims that the book is a "bestseller." Without that sales number for Kupelian's book, the library number is meaningless as a point of comparison; a more accurate way to measure the purported bias claimed in the article would be to compare the number of library copies to total copies sold.

This deceptive technique is similar to the other dishonest rhetorical techniques that WND and Kupelian have engaged in to promote the book, as ConWebWatch has documented.

There are three things worth noting about all of the above WND articles:

• None have a WND writer's byline.
• Nobody at Ohio State University-Mansfield was contacted for comment. While school professors and officials are quoted, those comments come from ADF-supplied materials.
• The sources for the articles that didn't come straight from the ADF are anonymous, meaning that there is a cloud over their veracity. WND editor Joseph Farah himself has previously denounced anonymous sources: They're "usually quotes made up out of whole cloth to help make the story read better."

While WND was covering the heck out of ADF's defense of Savage, an interesting claim surfaced in an April 24 post about the Savage controversy by Christopher Flickinger on the Human Events U blog, operated by the conservative Human Events magazine: "Kupelian said he talked with Scott Savage and his attorney David French of the Alliance Defense Fund several times."

This opens up a very large can of conflict-of-interest worms. Kupelian is, after all, managing editor of WND, as well as the author of the book at the center of the controversy.

	Fascinating factoid: David French, the Alliance Defense Fund attorney in charge of Scott Savage's case, wrote an April 24 column for FrontPageMag.com about the Savage case. Nowhere in the article does it disclose that French is Savage's lead attorney.

Additionally, WND's coverage has indeed been unbalanced to the point that it has relied almost exclusively on ADF-supplied materials for its coverage and made no apparent attempt to contact anyone at the university for its articles, the answer appears to be yes. These contacts were never disclosed to readers; additionally, most of WND's articles on the case have been unbylined, which raises the question of just who wrote them -- and whether Kupelian himself had a hand. If Kupelian wrote those articles or directed how they should be written, that's a big ethical no-no.

And if the point of the conversations between Kupelian and ADF was to devise a strategy on how to promote the case to their mutual benefit, that's an even bigger ethical no-no. Indeed, there is a time-lag issue: The ADF's first press release on the Savage was issued April 13, but it states that "[o]n March 28, ADF sent OSU officials a letter informing them of Savage’s constitutional rights." That's a two-week gap between action and publicity. Meanwhile, for example, an April 27 ADF press release promoted a friend-of-the-court brief filed that day.