Looks like WorldNetDaily’s experiment with employing actual journalists is over.
In 2015, as its credibility lay in tatters, WND hired Cheryl Chumley and Douglas Ernst, who had both previously worked at the Washington Times, which sort of passes for journalistic credentials in the ConWeb. But Ernst left after less than a year to go back to the Times.
And now Chumley has left as well. Her last WND-bylined articles appeared on July 18, and her bio at The Blaze, which publishes some of her op-eds, describes her as “a former news writer with WND.com.” Chumley did not announce her departure from WND on her Twitter account, and she appears not to have immediately gone to another full-time position (though her name still appears on WND’s masthead).
Despite her reporting credentials, Chumley didn’t do much original reporting for WND, instead mostly doing rewrites of stories from other news outlets or being interviewed for other WND articles on matters that touch the subject of her WND-published book “The Devil in D.C.” She had a bad habit of latching onto right-wing conspiracy theories, like the idea that last summer’s Jade Helm military exercise was some sort of secret conspiracy that was tied to the closing of a few Walmart stores in the states where the exercise took place, or that Justice Antonin Scalia died from other than natural causes. Most recently, Chumley was citing a Scientology front group to attack psychiatric drugs, arguing that it was perfectly fine for whites to keep black people from moving into their suburban neighborhoods and using her WND perch to pursue a weird vendetta against conservative reporter Michelle Fields.
So, with these departures, who’s left at WND? It currently has only two listed reporters, Jerome Corsi and Garth Kant, as well as several “news editors,” some of whom also write bylined articles. And then there’s Paul Bremmer, who also writes bylined articles but has the job title of “marketing associate,” which makes sense when you realize most of the articles he writes exist to promote WND’s authors. WND has yet to replace Aaron Klein, who departed months ago, and the Jerusalem bureau he headed is dormant, if not entirely closed.
This reduction by attrition appears to be a function of WND’s financial problems, and no new reporter has been hired since WND editor Joseph Farah declared the immediate “existential threat” to his operation to be over.