An April 24 WorldNetDaily article by Alyssa Farah creatively reinterprets a debate over Internet content filters on public-access computers in Sacramento, Calif., libraries.
How creative? The term “content filter” doesn’t appear anywhere in her article. Instead, Farah has unilaterally decided that the issue is pornography and only pornography. According to her lead paragraph: “Are public library restrictions against pornography access unconstitutional?”
As per the usual WND bias, Farah quotes only opponents of “pornography in libraries” — that is, supporters of content filters. The other side of the story is represented by a single sentence fragment: “the American Civil Liberties Union maintained the position that restricting public access to pornography in libraries would be unconstitutional.”
But Farah offers no evidence that the ACLU said “restricting public access to pornography in libraries would be unconstitutional” in those exact words. That’s because it didn’t. Farah is lying to her readers.
In fact, a Feb. 25 letter from the ACLU of Northern California contains no such statement or any other explicit endorsement of “pornography in libraries.” Rather, the ACLU expressed its opposition to the use of “blocking software” on public Internet computers, pointing out that of the more than 3 million Internet sessions recorded on Sacramento library computers, only 24 complaints were filed regarding Internet content. The ACLU also pointed out that content filters inevitably block legitimate research materials.
None of this information appears in Farah’s article.
WND has misled about Sacramento library content filters before, as we’ve noted; a January 2007 article claimed as fact without supporting evidence: “While pornography itself doesn’t ‘shoot the bullet’ for sex crimes, it does ‘cock the trigger,’ and Sacramento officials who supervise their public library system have told porn addicts to go ahead and get loaded.”
Alyssa Farah is the daughter of WND editor Joseph Farah. Sadly, it appears that she’s picking up some of dad’s more mendacious qualities.