WorldNetDaily

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WorldNetDaily (affectionately known by its fans as "WorldNutDaily") is an extremely conservative website run by Joseph Farah. Its political leanings are right-wing, pro-"Christian right", and supposedly pro-United States; it pretends to give multiple sides of an issue, which, to an extent, it does: the conservative viewpoint and the ultra-conservative viewpoint. They are best known for distributing Ann Coulter's insipid, poisonous "articles", as well as articles written by noted political pundits [sic] Chuck Norris and Pat Boone.

WorldNetDaily consistently provides a fundamentalist Christian, creationist view of the world, with strongly libertarian economic leanings. Their publishing standards are quite low, and they have printed stories from extremely questionable sources on several occasions.[1][2]

For the record: If you use WND as a source for your arguments in your college class, your professor will look at you like you are crazy (a notable exception is the argument for the existence of idiots). If you then proceed to brandish a response from them backing you up as proof, your professor will start to spasm wildly. Don't do this.

Contents

[edit] Webshite contents

WorldNetDaily's directory of contents. The most important part of a news website? The crap it sells.

[edit] Advertising

While criticizing WND purely because it takes advertising is unfair, since the website has to pay its costs somehow, advertising is done in a particularly tacky way. Adverts for products sold through the website store are inserted into news articles as a few lines of hyper-linked text — a method they also use for linking to previous articles — giving no indication that it is advertising. In addition, adverts are placed on the front page using the same fonts and formatting as article headlines, making it difficult to differentiate between advertising and news content.

Banner advertising on the site falls into two broad categories: passive weight-loss techniques and survivalism-related products. Basically, advertisers think WND's readers are fat slobs who want to lose weight without effort and/or are paranoid nut jobs who think large corporations/the US government/One World government are about to plunge America into a second dark age, and the only way to survive is to preserve your own food and generate your own power. The power generation issue is especially ironic, given that WND criticizes Google for solar-powering their premises (except for the server cluster), but flog kits to build your own system for $100.

[edit] E-mails to the editor

This section is also called "Letters to the Editor", but this is an online newspaper. The E-mail to the editor (complete with the hyphen in what is now a standard word) is basically a chance for the readers to tell Farah how right he is. On the rare occasions they do post letters disagreeing with their editorial stance, it is usually threatening and offensive, reflecting poorly on the letter writer. They post five a day, and it is not hard to believe they receive a lot more than that, so they are obviously choosing only the ones they want. Unfortunately, there is no archive or permanent links to the emails so we can't show you any highlights, however, to give you an idea on the well-informed views you are missing out on, one day we had: a long, ranty, birther letter; a comparison of the health care reforms to Soylent Green; a letter saying all socialists are Nazis; a letter complaining that Robert Gibbs starts sentences with "The American people want ..." despite the fact Tony Snow also used that phrase;[3] and a person fawning over how great their columnist Burt Prelutsky is.

[edit] Forums

The best batshit craziness is to be found on the "forums". However they are only called forums because that is the name they have given them. They are basically a comments thread on a blog, without a blog piece to comment on. They are started by the site admins rarely and there is no ability to link to posts. Annoyingly the newest post goes first and to follow any conversation you have to work backwards trying to connect the blue quote text to the original post. Forum moderators are easy to spot as they are the only ones with a signature and it is about 15 lines long trying to explain how their convoluted forum system works. There are actually only 15 threads on the forums currently available for commenting, not counting the polls - which are a lot more fun.

[edit] Polls

WorldNetDaily runs polls daily. The polls typically never have less than eight options to pick from, running the full gamut of the political spectrum from far-left to far-right, as well a few wingnut options that lie nowhere in the spectrum — or reality. Occasionally the truth sneaks in with options such as: "No, this is all just sour grapes from right-wingers", but they receive few votes.

Polls are mildly restrictive, since you have to register before you can participate. However, you may view the embarrassing results without registering.

[edit] Previous poll results

[edit] Obama birth certificate controversy

See the main article: Barack Obama's birth certificate
Not for lulz. This is an actual picture of Robert Gibbs laughing at WorldNetDaily's "Washington reporter"'s question about Obama's birth-certificate.

The Obama birth certificate controversy is a long running pet gripe of Joseph Farah and receives excessive coverage on WorldNetDaily.[5] On most days, the vast majority, if not all, of its headlines will be about the so-called "controversy". The headlines that are not about the birth-certificate or eligibility are their "special offers" or other advertisements (which, as mentioned above, are almost indistinguishable from otherwise "legitimate" content). The website will instantly host any article, which contains any opinion, that could possibly point to the fact that Obama is ineligible to be President of the United States. Despite there being a very high quality picture of his birth certificate on the internet,[6] they still believe he is ineligible because:

  1. He was born in Kenya, his Grandma said so.[7]
  2. He was born in an unnamed hospital in Hawaii, which does not claim credit.[8]
  3. They only showed his birth certificate to a "select few media outlets", not to us, so it could still be fake.[9]
  4. Even if it is real, that certificate is a "Certificate of Live Birth" not a "Birth Certificate", so it proves nothing.[10]
  5. Even if he has a "long-form" birth certificate, he lived in Indonesia for some years and gave up his American citizenship.[11]
  6. Even if he lived in Indonesia without giving up his US citizenship, his father was Kenyan and so does not meet our the constitution's definition of "natural born citizen", because both parents have to be US citizens.[12]

Just to show how crazy determined they are to get that black Democrat out of the White House uphold the Constitution, they claim to have raised more than $65,000 to erect billboards around the country with the message "Where's the Birth Certificate?" Interestingly, WND seems to be completely silent[13] on the eligibility of John McCain, who caused a slight stir due to being born in the Panama Canal Zone.[14][15]

In an attempt to further cash in, Farah has whipped together a short and shoddy fast-paced hatchet job documentary for $19.99 $17.99.[16][17]

[edit] Difficulties with the truth

WorldNetDaily has also had some difficulties telling the truth over the birth certificate controversy. On the 2nd of August when Orly Taitz presented them a photograph of a birth certificate that was reportedly Obama's Kenyan birth certificate, they clearly stated in their article:

“ WND was able to obtain other birth certificates from Kenya for purposes of comparison, and the form of the documents appear to be identical.[18][19] ”

However the birth certificate turned out to be a fake based on an Australian birth certificate.[20] They were caught doing what is commonly called lying,[21] and were not helped by the fact they defended glaring errors, such as Kenya not being a republic at the time, that were pointed out in the document before the hoax was exposed.[22]

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ↑ http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp
  2. ↑ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/thunderer/article659904.ece
  3. ↑ http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/07/20070717-9.html
  4. ↑ Actually even a person who considers evolution as the best explanation for the biodiversity present on Earth would answer no to this question: in evolutionary biology there is no such idea as "higher" and "lower" species.
  5. ↑ Farah responding to claims he is obsessed about this, only giving himself another excuses to go over it again.
  6. ↑ That could belong to anyone named Barack Hussein Obama II born to a Caucasian women and African man on the 4th of August 1961 in Honolulu
  7. ↑ This is what we were told she said based on a translation. Even if the translation was true, the question she was reportedly asked was "Which city in Kenya was Barack born"? This is begging the question. Also, her son's name was Barack Obama, so once asked about the Kenyan-born Barack Obama she may have assumed they were talking about her son, not grandson.
  8. ↑ Here is a typical WND article on this topic. This of course ignores the fact that he was born at Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children, which Obama says so in a congratulatory message to them. There was some confusion with people claiming he was born at Queen's Medical Center, but seeing as Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children is named after Queen Kapi'olani this maybe the source of this confusion. Two days after this was posted here, WorldNetDaily ran an article on the letter, as per usual, WND used the fact that it is against federal law to release private information to insinuate Obama is hiding his place of birth. Eventually the issue of this letter descended into a farce. When the letter was removed from the website WND accused them of participating in a cover up and of course they ran a poll on it. They were eventually satisfied of the existence of this when they got to see it, although they insisted on saying it was "allegedly" written by Obama.
  9. ↑ This is irrelevant, the website chosen was due to its neutrality and professionalism.
  10. ↑ Birth Certificates and Certificate of Live Birth are the same thing. A longer version of the one on the net is on record, but even his short one says he was born in Hawaii.
  11. ↑ This topic does not receive much coverage on WND. This is difficult to rebuttal as we have prove a negative, we need to find evidence that Obama did not become an Indonesian citizen. The absence of such a record will not be satisfying to WND as the don't believe in a certificate that does exist, never mind the one that doesn't exist.
  12. ↑ In point of fact the nationality of one, or for that matter both, of Obama's parents is simply irrelevant. Anybody who is born on US soil is automatically a US citizen.[See Snopes on Obama's birth]. The only mention of what constitutes a citizen in the constitution is in the 14th amendment: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." Given that Obama's mother was a natural-born US citizen, and he was born in the US, this would cover most, if not all, legal definitions of "natural born" with various legislatures in the US.
  13. ↑ I searched for John McCain's eligibility, not Obama's, stupid liberal search engine...
  14. ↑ In reality, they are both equally eligible, and it has been proven, but you don't see them making a mountain out of a molehill for the white guy... hey, just sayin', that's all.
  15. ↑ In fact Obama co-sponsored a bill to ensure that the legal definition of natural born citizen would cover McCain. "Those who serve and sacrifice for their country, like John McCain and his father, deserve every honor and privilege that our nation can possibly provide, and that includes the ability to run for the highest office in the land" - Obama
  16. ↑ Main page announcement of documentary.
  17. ↑ The shop with the already falling price.
  18. ↑ WND - Is this really smoking gun of Obama's Kenyan birth? (retrieved 18th of August 2009)
  19. ↑ Picture in case anything happens to it.
  20. ↑ http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/08/04/australia_certificate/
  21. ↑ ConWebWatch - WorldNetDaily Does Not Do Journalism (retrieved 18th of August 2009)
  22. ↑ http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=106016
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