WorldNetDaily
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WorldNetDaily, also known as WND, is a socially conservative news and opinion website, founded in 1997. It is currently in the top 2400 websites as listed at Alexa.[1]
Contents
[edit] Foundation
WND was founded in 1997 by Joseph Farah. In 1991, after resigning as editor of the Sacramento Union, Farah co-founded the Western Journalism Center, known for its promotion of conservative causes, with James H. Smith, former publisher of the Sacramento Union.[2] In 1994 and 1995, foundations controlled by conservative financier and former owner of the Union Richard Mellon Scaife gave $330,000 to the Center.[3] By May 1997, Farah set his eyes on the internet and set up WorldNetDaily as a project of the Center. In 1999, WorldNetDaily.com, Inc., with offices in Cave Junction, Oregon, was incorporated in Delaware as a for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit Western Journalism Center with the backing of $4.5 million from investors.[4] As a result, Farah and the Western Journalism Center possess the bulk of the WND stock, but the remainder is owned by about 75 private investors. In August 2001, Business Week cited Farah who claimed WND had begun to turn a profit.[5] Currently the webpage has a staff of approximately 25 people.[6]
[edit] Description
WorldNetDaily is a for-profit website that provides primarily evangelical-conservative-oriented news and editorials, publishes letters to the editor, maintains forums and conducts a daily poll. Besides providing articles authored by its own staff, the site links to news from other publications. Notable staff includes Aaron Klein - Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Lester Kinsolving - White House Correspondent and Staff Writer Jerome Corsi.
The website's Commentary page features editorials from the site's founder, Joseph Farah and other social conservative authors such as Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, David Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Chuck Norris. It also features weekly columns by libertarians Walter Williams, Vox Day, and Ilana Mercer, as well as liberal Bill Press and pro-life moderate Nat Hentoff.[7] The site also offers products for sale, advertising these products alongside related news stories. Typically these are products sold by its related book service, WND Book Service; publishing house, WND Books; or its retail operation, ShopNetDaily. The site also contains advertisements for WND's printed magazine, Whistleblower, and other companies. WND also operates the G2 Bulletin, a subscription-only website described as an "intelligence resource" for "insights into geo-political and geo-strategic developments."
WorldNetDaily says it is the "the largest independent, full-service newssite in the world."[8] WND currently claims eight million visitors a month to its website.[9] As of November 8, 2006, it is listed by Alexa as the most popular website in the "Conservatism > News and Media" category.[10] WorldNetDaily articles are often linked by other websites, including the popular Drudge Report.
From July 2000 to early 2002, WorldNetDaily offered a service called TalkNetDaily, which provided an Internet audio stream of a daily talk show by then-WND columnist Geoff Metcalf.[11]
WND has been criticized as unreliable[12][13] and "far-right."[14] Notably, WND columnist Jerome Corsi was criticized for his publications, and Farah has defended him.[15]
[edit] WND Books
WorldNetDaily also publishes books under the name WND Books. The imprint was launched in 2002 through a partnership with Thomas Nelson Publishers (a prominent Christian publishing house) and released books by politicians and pundits like Katherine Harris, Michael Savage, and Farah himself. The partnership with Thomas Nelson Publishing ended shortly before the 2004 election;[16] Thomas Nelson has continued the division under the Nelson Current imprint.[17] The WND Books imprint was subsequently published under a partnership with Cumberland House Publishing[18] and released books by Jerome Corsi, Tom Tancredo and Ken Blackwell, among other authors. In 2007, Los Angeles-based conservative publisher World Ahead Publishing became the publisher of WND Books.[19] In January 2008, WND announced it had acquired World Ahead Media.[20]
[edit] Congressman Jim Welker controversy
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In March 2006 Republican Colorado State Representative Jim Welker was criticized for forwarding a WorldNetDaily commentary by Jesse Lee Peterson.[21] Congressmen criticized Welker for uncritically sending a copy of the article by email, which included the statements "President Bush is not to blame for the rampant immorality of blacks" and accused "welfare-pampered blacks" of waiting for the federal government to save them from Hurricane Katrina. Welker responded by saying that he did not agree with everything in the article and stated that his reasoning behind sending it was its message "about society victimizing people by making them dependent on government programs."[22]
[edit] Controversial articles
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WND has published many articles that have created controversies and criticism of the site by other media outlets. Some of these include:
[edit] 9/11 attacks
On September 13, 2001, WND published a commentary by Anthony C. LoBaido regarding the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington two days earlier. In his column, LoBaido outlined what he regarded as the moral depravity of America in general and New York in particular, asking whether "God (has) raised up Shiite Islam as a sword against America". [23] Commentators Virginia Postrel of Reason magazine and James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal criticized LoBaido and Joseph Farah for the piece and called for columnists Hugh Hewitt and Bill O'Reilly to sever their ties with WND, prompting Farah to respond with a column of his own denouncing Postrel and Taranto as "political correctness police". [24]
[edit] Valerie Plame leak
WND has also published controversial claims about the Plame leak. A 2005 report by progressive media-watchdog group Media Matters for America includes the following quote from a WND article:
Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely told WorldNetDaily that Wilson mentioned Plame's status as a CIA employee over the course of at least three, possibly five, conversations in 2002 in the Fox News Channel's "green room" in Washington, D.C., as they waited to appear on air as analysts.
... Vallely says, according to his recollection, Wilson mentioned his wife's job in the spring of 2002 -- more than a year before Robert Novak's July 14, 2003, column identified her, citing senior administration officials, as "an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."[25]
As noted above Vallely said he was told once in the spring of 2002, but on November 9, 2005, WND reported:
After recalling further over the weekend his contacts with Wilson, Vallely says now it was on just one occasion – the first of several conversations – that the ambassador revealed his wife's employment with the CIA and that it likely occurred some time in the late summer or early fall of 2002. He is certain, he says, the conversation took place in 2002.[26]
[edit] Middle East reporting
In early 2005, WND hired Aaron Klein to run a Jerusalem bureau.[27] ConWebWatch, a website critical of conservative new media, in early 2006 alleged that Klein's articles promoted the causes of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza who opposed Israel's unilateral disengagement plan from those areas.[28] The group also argued that Klein did not disclose the ties of Israeli activists tied to the far-right Kach and Kahane Chai movement.[29] When Eden Natan-Zada shot and killed four people on a bus in Gaza on August 4, 2005, he was beaten to death afterwards by a crowd that witnessed the shooting. Klein wrote an article for WND claiming that Zada was "murdered" by a "mob of Palestinians" after the shooting, although he also mentioned that police called the shooting a "Jewish terror attack."[30] Klein has also written numerous articles critical of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.[31]
[edit] Litvinenko and terrorism conspiracy
On December 3, 2006 a WND article said that: "Reports that KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko converted to Islam before his mysterious poisoning with radioactive polonium 210 is raising suspicions that he may have been involved in a plot to smuggle the deadly substance to terrorist groups."[32] According to an article in The Times, apparently mentioning the WND article, the evidence for these suspicions was "gossip from his Muslim next-door neighbour."[33]
[edit] Anglo-Saxon identity
A commentary by Canadian evangelical Tristan Emmanuel [34] decried so called "Anglo-Saxon self-hatred" in Canada and the United States, and used "warring factions" of third world immigrants as a base against multiculturalism in order to suggest a whites-only immigration policy for North America.
[edit] Alleged North American Union
During the debate over the failed 2007 Immigration Bill, WND popularized opposition to an alleged "North American Union (NAU)", a dystopian vision of a future America merged with Mexico. [1] WND blames a "shadow government" in the form of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) for the alleged NAU plot. CFR Conspiracy theories are not a new phenomenon. The "North American Union" is considered a conspiracy theory by popular social conservatives such as Michael Medved [2] and Kimberley Strassel [3], and has been disputed in the mainstream media.[35][36][37]
[edit] Libel lawsuit
On September 20, 2000, WND published an article[38] claiming that Clark Jones, a Savannah, Tennessee, car dealer and fund-raiser for then-Vice President Al Gore, had interfered with a criminal investigation, had been a "subject" of a criminal investigation, was listed on law enforcement computers as a "dope dealer," and implied that he had ties to others involved in alleged criminal activity. In 2001, Jones filed a lawsuit[39] against WND; the reporters, Charles C. Thompson II and Tony Hays; the Center for Public Integrity, which had underwritten Thompson and Hays' reporting on the article and related ones[40]; and various Tennessee publications and broadcasters who he accused of repeating the claim, claiming libel and defamation. The lawsuit had been scheduled to go to trial in March 2008[41], but on February 13, 2008, WND announced that a confidential out-of-court settlement had been reached with Jones.[42] A settlement statement jointly drafted by all parties in the lawsuit states in part:
Discovery has revealed to WorldNetDaily.com that no witness verifies the truth of what the witnesses are reported by authors to have stated. Additionally, no document has been discovered that provides any verification that the statements written were true. Factual discovery in the litigation and response from Freedom of Information Act requests to law enforcement agencies confirm Clark Jones' assertion that his name has never been on law enforcement computers, that he has not been the subject of any criminal investigation nor has he interfered with any investigation as stated in the articles. Discovery has also revealed that the sources named in the publications have stated under oath that statements attributed to them in the articles were either not made by them, were misquoted by the authors, were misconstrued, or the statements were taken out of context.[42]
