Intro by John R.
Houk, Blog Editor
WND story by David
Kupelian
April 5, 2019
The online publication WND has been around a long time
founded in 1997. WND’s own press asserts it is the oldest online publication of
its kind.
With that said, I’m on the WND email alert list providing
timely news articles. This is how I discovered the unfortunate news the WND
founder Joseph Farah has suffered a stroke. Below are some brief details posted
on WND 3/28/19:
Recently,
adversity hit hard when our company’s founder and CEO, Joseph Farah, suffered a
serious stroke. After spending several days in the hospital undergoing
extensive testing and evaluation, he is now home, resting comfortably and
recovering.
Although
no one can say with certainty how long he will be away from WND, what I can say
with certainty is that Joseph and his family are extremely appreciative of your
prayers, as are all of us at WND.
Joseph’s
medical crisis, in addition to being a difficult trial for the Farah family, is
likewise tough for those of us staffing the news organization he founded and
has led for 22 years. I’ve known Joseph Farah for three decades, and for 20
years have worked closely with this pioneering journalist as a colleague, good
friend and fellow Christian. I know him as a man of enormous talents, integrity
and genuine faith.
For me, even more disturbing, the formerly great Washington
Post recently published a hit piece against WND mere days after
Farah’s stroke was announced. It’s a sad day in the media industry when a media
giant rips into another media company whose founder has had a severe medical event.
But I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised since WaPo has
become one of the chief purveyors of Left-Wing Fake News.
David Kupelian writing for WND chastises WaPo and provides
reassurances about WND’s intentions to keep providing Conservative news with a Christian
and pro-Israel slant.
God bless Joseph Farah and God bless WND.
JRH 4/5/19
Your generosity is always appreciated:
***********************
AFTER FARAH SUFFERS
STROKE, WASHINGTON POST LAUNCHES MAJOR ATTACK ON WND
America's 1st online journalism organization responds to attempted
takedown by D.C. behemoth
April 4, 2019
Just five days after WND went public with the news that its
founder, editor and CEO, veteran journalist Joseph Farah had suffered a devastating
stroke, the Washington Post has published a lengthy article
attacking Farah, his wife Elizabeth, and WND, America’s first online journalism
organization.
The story, sensationally headlined “Inside the spectacular
fall of the granddaddy of right-wing conspiracy sites,” cites mostly unnamed
former employees and others. The Post also mysteriously managed to get a hold
of the contents of WND’s private email server, referencing and picking apart
numerous internal emails going as far back as 12 years.
So, what does the Washington Post story actually allege?
Against a backdrop of ongoing financial struggles at the
company, the article rolls out numerous examples of unpaid bills, unhappy
authors, supposedly bad judgment, failure to adequately communicate with board
members, and “reckless and undisciplined” spending by the company’s founders.
Evidently the Post considers it shocking and newsworthy that
over its 22-year history, a small, influential though undercapitalized company
in a highly competitive business, rocked regularly by seismic changes – the
dot-com crash, the Google-Facebook-Amazon disruption of the internet and so on
– might experience its share of failures, difficulties and embarrassments.
Nowhere in the Post’s article is anything remotely illegal
alleged. More to the point, nor does the Post acknowledge the important and
highly regarded reporting generated day in and day out, year after year, by
WND’s journalists – most of whom, remarkably, have been with WND for virtually
all of its two decades of existence.
Most interestingly, nowhere in his massive 2,700-word
article does Post reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia ever get down to what has
actually caused the precipitous drop in annual revenue at WND
over the last couple of years, which has led to the company’s current
struggles.
Irony alert: One of WND’s most critical revenue streams over
the past two decades has been its robust e-commerce operation featuring
thousands of products: the WND Superstore. But WND’s
store revenues have dropped dramatically, just as sales have tanked at countless other retailers both online and
brick-and-mortar, from Barnes & Noble to Macy’s, thanks to one company –
Amazon – whose founder, CEO and president Jeff Bezos is the
owner of the Washington Post, having purchased it in 2013 for $250 million.
Seeing as Bezos is the world’s wealthiest human being, the
Post fortunately suffers no financial problems like WND and others do.
But there’s more: Besides Amazon, other internet
mega-monopolies including Google and Facebook have all but destroyed the other
major revenue stream for online news: advertising.
“Journalism, sustained by traditional advertising, is
dying,” says the respected Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy
Information Center, whose written testimony to Congress’s Subcommittee on
Digital Commerce & Consumer Protection explained starkly
that “the revenue model that sustained journalism is broken.”
These developments on the internet – along with the now
well-documented progressive-left bias, censorship, skewed search algorithms,
demonetizing, shadow-banning, outright banning and multiple other modes of
suppressing non-leftwing thought – have severely impacted many independent
journalism organizations, including WND.
There is so much in the Post’s article that is unfair,
misleading and just wrong. But rather than refute every allegation and innuendo
in this one-sided, unsympathetic portrayal of a vastly smaller but influential
news competitor, maybe it’s fair game – since the Post casts aspersions not
just on the actions, but the motivations, of WND co-founders Joseph and
Elizabeth Farah – to examine the Post’s own motivations and agenda.
The Washington Post was once a great newspaper (I grew up in
Washington and the Post was delivered to our door daily), best known for its
fabled Watergate coverage, with Woodward and Bernstein inspiring a generation
of young people to follow in their journalistic footsteps – including Joseph
Farah. Those days are long gone. Critics today refer to the Washington Post as
“Jeff Bezos’ vanity paper,” the Amazon founder’s chief lobbying-propaganda arm
in the nation’s capital.
For the past two-plus years, the Post has been in the
forefront of the fake news coverage of the phony Trump-Russia-collusion hoax.
Let’s be clear: Month after month after month, the Washington Post feverishly
promoted the worst hoax in American history.
Even before Trump’s election and the Russia hysteria, the
Post frequently compared the New York businessman to Adolf Hitler. That’s
right. As this writer documented in 2016, during that historic year the
Washington Post’s election coverage included no fewer than five different Post writers explicitly
comparing Trump to the Nazi monster who murdered 11 million people.
Enough said. As Tucker Carlson puts it, “The Washington Post
is not a serious newspaper. It’s a joke.”
Although Joseph Farah is the only person situated to respond
to many of the Post’s allegations, the paper chose to publish its takedown
article right after Farah suffered a major stroke rendering him totally unable
to defend himself, his wife and his news organization.
I don’t know why the Post chose to do such a thing. But I’ll
close by simply saying for the record, as WND’s vice president and managing
editor for 20 years, that I have nothing but the highest respect and love for
this amazing news organization, for its founders Joseph and Elizabeth Farah,
and for the dedicated journalists who work here.
Finally, regarding that Post headline gloating over “the
spectacular fall” of WND: To paraphrase Mark Twain, “Reports of our death have
been greatly exaggerated.” WND is still here. And we’re committed to doing what
we’ve been doing since before Amazon, Google, Facebook and others even existed
– to boldly report without fear or favor on all the corruption, lies, fraud,
abuse, attacks on the Constitution, and outright delusions that increasingly
dominate our great country. As the 2020 election nears, count on us to focus on
underreported but life-and-death issues like voter fraud in all its forms, the
left’s disastrous and flat-out insane agenda, Big Tech’s intended election
rigging and much more – oh yes, and exposing fake news.
NOTE: If you would like to support WND, you can do so
either directly at the Support WND Donation
page, or by making a tax-deductible donation to the newly
formed 501c3 nonprofit WND News Center. Thank
you.
________________________
David Kupelian is an award-winning journalist, vice president and
managing editor of WND, editor of Whistleblower magazine and widely read
columnist. He is also the best-selling author of "The Marketing of Evil" (2005), "How Evil Works"
(2010) and most recently, “The Snapping of the American Mind” (2015). Follow
him on Facebook.
About WND
WND, formerly WorldNetDaily, can best be explained by its
mission statement: “WND is an independent news company dedicated to
uncompromising journalism, seeking truth and justice and revitalizing the role
of the free press as a guardian of liberty. We remain faithful to the
traditional and central role of a free press in a free society – as a light
exposing wrongdoing, corruption and abuse of power.
“We also seek to stimulate a free-and-open debate about
the great moral and political ideas facing the world and to promote freedom and
self-government by encouraging personal virtue and good character.”
Indeed, WND is a fiercely independent news site committed
to hard-hitting investigative reporting of government waste, fraud and abuse.
Founded by Joseph and Elizabeth Farah in May 1997, it is
now a leading Internet news site in both traffic and influence.
WND has broken some of the biggest, most significant and
most notable investigative and enterprising stories in recent years. See “WND
Scoops” for a comprehensive list of major WND exclusive reports that first saw
the light of day in these pages.
WND’s unique and aggressive reporting style has captured
a large and growing audience on the Internet:
WND was voted the most popular website on the Internet
every week for nearly two years running between 1999 and 2001 on the
independent, European-based Global100.com.
WND consistently ranks as the “stickiest” news site on
the Internet, meaning readers spent more time on it than on any other –
including giants CNN, MSNBC and ESPN.
