WND (formerly
WorldNetDaily or, as it was affectionately known to its fans,
WingNutDaily or
WhirledNutDaily) is an
extremist conservative website founded by
Joseph Farah in 1997 as a project of his
Western Center for Journalism.
[1] It espouses a
fundamentalist Christian,
creationist view of the world, and regularly engages in
racist attacks against
African-Americans. Its
political leanings are
right-wing, pro-"
Christian right," and supposedly pro-
United States, with strongly
libertarian economic views. Its coverage provides
multiple sides of the issues: the conservative viewpoint and the ultra-conservative viewpoint. It is far to the right of
Fox News.
While they present themselves as news, WND is essentially a
tabloid for radical right-wingers. Their publishing standards are rock-bottom, and they have run stories from extremely questionable sources on many,
many occasions.
[2][3] They are best known for distributing
Ann Coulter's insipid columns, as well as articles written by noted political analysts
Chuck Norris and
Pat Boone. They recently added disgraced baseball bigot John Rocker as well, indicating they've decided to drop the
dog whistles and go with overt
racism.
The scary thing is that this bilge is actually slightly influential, with made-up
bullshit from WND making its way out the mouths of wingnut congressmen and cable TV pundits far too often.
[4]
[edit] Corporate structure
Although its website lists
Washington, D.C. as the location of its corporate and marketing headquarters and Medford,
Oregon, as the location of its accounting office, it is actually headquartered in Medford. For decades Medford has been a Mecca for survivalists, conspiracy theorists, and others of the paranoid-unhinged persuasion; it is also candidate to become the capital of the
State of Jefferson, should that state ever become a
reality. The other offices listed are an "operations" office in Long Beach,
California, and a "customer service" office in the Kansas City suburb of Blue Springs,
Missouri. In 1999, it was incorporated in the
tax haven state of
Delaware.
[edit] Website contents
[edit] Advertising
While the website obviously has to pay its costs somehow, advertising is done in a particularly tacky way. Advertisements for products sold through the website store are
inserted into news articles as a few lines of hyper-linked text — in the same style for linking to previous articles — giving no indication that it is advertising. Ads 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. One of the best examples of this was in November 2011 when under the banner of "WND Exclusive" was an article titled "Obama hasn’t destroyed ‘that time of year,’ at least not yet ..."; clicking on this apparent shocking headline led you to an article plugging WND Superstore's Christmas selection.
[5]
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 or paranoid nut jobs who think America is going 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 flogs kits to build your own system for $100.
[edit] Columnists
Farah writes daily on his three favorite topics: how
the media is liberal, how the media is ignoring his latest venture because they are liberal, and defending his latest venture from the media's attacks, because they are liberal. Mostly he talks about how he has been in the media thirty years and that when he started out the media "just reported the truth" and similar fantasies.
However, the election of Barack Obama to the office of the President of the United States in 2008 really brought Farah and his cronies over the edge. During the 2008 election season,
Worldnet Daily became one of the most vocal promoters of the birther conspiracy theory crusaders to expose the
truth that
Barack Obama was supposedly born in Kenya instead of Hawaii, and that the actual birth certificate registered in Hawaii is a forgery. In spite of vast amounts of evidence that these theories are nothing but hot air and that the entire world is laughing at them, they continue to push this twaddle in the face of the public as the truth, in the hope that if they repeat the lie often enough, someone will believe it and it will become the truth. While they don't come right out and admit that Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ, the writers at
WND have done everything they can to convince themselves (and tomorrow the world…ha ha ha!) that Obama is EVIL.
Without exception, every visit to
WND will treat you to two running themes: Obama is evil, and the Satanic cult of Islam is launching a holy war against the entire world. Needless to say, anything in the media that hints at the idea of Obama as a Muslim will show up in SCREAMING HEADLINES here.