Given that WorldNetDaily has been utterly dishonest about how it has presented its defamation lawsuit against Esquire magazine to its readers, it’s no surprise that WND’s article about a court proceeding in the case would be similarly dishonest.
Garth Kant does his best in an Oct. 3 article to frame it as a great First Amendment battle:
Federal Judge Stephen F. Williams asked the attorney for Esquire magazine what in the First Amendment permitted his client to accuse someone of making money off of gullible readers?
That question suggested the crux of the matter in the lawsuit brought by WND against Esquire: If a political attack is called satire, is any message permissible, even if it cause damages?
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard oral arguments Thursday in Joseph Farah v. Esquire Magazine. Farah is the founder and CEO of WND.com.
In fact, as Kant concedes later in the article, WND is appealing the dismissal of the lawsuit, which was granted last year. Unsurprisingly, Kant is heavy on telling WND’s side of the case and very light on Esquire’s response to WND’s claims.
Therefore, there’s no mention of the fact that one key reason the lawsuit was dismissed is because, according to the judge, WND editor Joseph Farah had admitted the Esquire blog post was satire before it became “inconvenient” for him to do so.
Kant also repeats failed lawyer Larry Klayman’s claims that “Esquire and Hearst lied to federal courts in their defense of the article” by claiming that the article had been tagged as “humor” on the website. In fact, as we’ve documented, it’s Farah and Klayman who appear to be lying — the screenshots WND submitted to the court cut off the part of the post where the tags normally appear.
Considering that Farah had submitted an affidavit “under penalty of perjury” stating that there were no tags, there may be a case to be made that Farah has committed perjury.
Kant certainly isn’t going to tell his readers that the man who signs his paycheck may be guilty of perjury.
UPDATE: An alert reader caught that Kant referred to Larry Flynt as “the late publisher of Hustler.” Last we checked, Flynt is still very much alive.