A Sept. 30 WorldNetDaily article dutifully gushes:
WND founder and CEO Joseph Farah is set to receive the first-ever M. Stanton Evans Lifetime Achievement for Excellence in Journalism award at the 2018 Western Conservative Conference.
Farah will receive the award at a dinner gala to be held during the two-day conference, which is scheduled for March 23-24, 2018, at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona.
“I’m thrilled for the honor,” said Farah, who founded both the Western Journalism Center and WND.com. “It looks like I will be in distinguished company for this event. It’s so meaningful when colleagues appreciate your work over a lifetime.”
Farah has previously been honored with awards for integrity in journalism, newspaper design, headline writing and religion coverage – all by different news organizations. He has received other major awards from groups such as Proclaiming Justice to the Nations and the Zionist Organization of America.
“The Western Conservative Conference bills itself as “The premier gathering of conservatives in the western United States.”
The article is mum, however, on the last time this conference was planned, in 2016. Farah was to get an award then too — the “Hero of Freedom Award” from the Western Journalism Center, which, again, he founded, which makes this an exercise in logrolling from the guy who how runs his group, Floyd Brown.The Evans award is also sponsored by the WJC, making this a second attempt at logrolling.
But as we documented, that conference never happened; it was canceled due to an unspecified “unfortunate medical issue.” Of course, it’s unlikely that a conference could be so fragile as to force its cancellation due to a single person getting sick, which tells us the likely real reason was lack of interested attendees.
And while this new article carries the headline “Farah to be honored with Trumps,” that’s by no means the actual case as of now and more than likely will never happen; Donald and Melania Trump are listed only as among the “big names” who have been “invited” to the conference. The fact that it’s more of a wish list than any reality-based endeavor extends to the remainder of the “invited” list, which also includes “White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson, former White House adviser Steve Bannon, actor Jon Voight, director Clint Eastwood, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Sheriff David Clarke, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and radio talk show host Laura Ingraham.”
But, hey, if you’re going to plan a right-wing conference that might not even happen if track record is any indication, why not dream big and invite people who are even less likely to show up?