A Feb. 25 WorldNetDaily article by Jack Minor quotes Todd Tiahrt, “a former congressman from Kansas who now runs an aerospace and aviation consulting company,” attacking President Obama over the Air Force awarding a contract for a new light attack aircraft to a Brazil-based company, Embraer, over the American competitor competing for the contract, Hawker Beechcraft.
Minor failed to mention, however, that Hawker Beechcraft is a client of Tiahrt’s “aerospace and aviation consulting company.”
Minor is so bereft of basic journalistic principles that not only did he refuse to report this clear conflict of interest — granted, WND has a longtime problem with failing to disclose its own conflicts of interest in the stories it publishes — he only tells one side of the story, that of Tiahrt and Hawker Beechcraft, making numerous unsupported claims along the way about the Beechcraft plane’s purported superiority over the Embraer model. At no point does Minor contact Embraer or its American partner, SNC, for a response to Tiahrt’s charges.
Of course, if Minor had done so, he would have had to deal with the idea that there is more than one side to the story, and he and WND are clearly not interested in fair and balanced journalism.