WorldNetDaily managing editor David Kupelian has another complaint about Google — and it seems oddly familiar.
Last month, Kupelian falsely whined that a column he wrote couldn’t be found via the Google search he cited, though we found it immediately sing that very same search, demonstrating that he apparently doesn’t understand how Google works. His latest anti-Google column, published Oct. 4, takes the form of his previous one — he lazily recycles its opening and closing sections nearly verbatim.
The middle section has changed, though, this time complaining that doing a search for “WorldNetDaily” on Google brings up a lot of websites critical of WND:
Today, you can get a quick, personalized snapshot of what has become of the internet by doing a simple Google search for “WorldNetDaily.” Of the top ten returns, seven are brutally condemning of the internet’s oldest independent journalism website.
First – even before WND’s website itself! – comes the ridiculous Wikipedia article, written by rabid anti-WND folks who lead off by describing us this way: “WorldNetDaily (WND) is an American news and opinion website and online news aggregator which has been described as ‘fringe’ and far right as well as politically conservative. The website is known for promoting falsehoods and conspiracy theories.”
Thanks a lot. Next there’s the page profiling WND by the discredited hate-group Southern Poverty Law Center, which leads with this: “WorldNetDaily is an online publication founded and run by Joseph Farah that claims to pursue truth, justice and liberty. But in fact, its pages are devoted to manipulative fear-mongering and outright fabrications designed to further the paranoid, gay-hating, conspiratorial and apocalyptic visions of Farah and his hand-picked contributors from the fringes of the far-right and fundamentalist worlds.”
Uh huh. Next comes an apocalyptic article about WND by the leftwing Salon website, headlined “Shed a tear for WorldNetDaily – or maybe don’t. But the downfall of a far-right site is instructive.” Hey Salon people, we’re still here.
Next comes the Seattle Times with this headline: “Inside the spectacular fall of WorldNetDaily, the granddaddy of right-wing conspiracy sites.”
The next search result is something call Rational Wiki, which sizes up WND this way: “WND (originally an initialism for WorldNetDaily, or as it was affectionately known to its fans as WingNutDaily or WhirledNutDaily) is a far-right website founded by the impressively mustachioed Joseph Farah in 1997 as a project of his Western Center for Journalism. The site espouses a fundamentalist, Christian, creationist worldview with a healthy dose of jingoism. … WND makes Fox News look positively moonbatty in comparison. … The scary thing is, this bilge is actually slightly influential, with its made-up bulls**t making its way out the mouths of wingnut congressmen and cable TV pundits far too often.”
Whatever.
Then there’s the Washington Post with its vicious, lengthy smear article on WND’s “downfall” – published immediately after the Post’s reporter learned from Elizabeth Farah that her husband and WND CEO Joseph Farah had just suffered a devastating stroke. Nice, huh?
Then, to round out the first page of “top Google search results” for WorldNetDaily, there’s the ridiculous RightWingWatch, a project of the super-duper-leftwing group People for the American Way. RightWingWatch – which has honored me personally with more than two dozen different articles highlighting my supposed wingnut antics – has this to say about WND: “Since California-based conservative writer Joseph Farah founded it in 1997, WorldNetDaily, now simply known as WND, has emerged as a leading online platform for conspiracy theorists, Tea Party activists and End Times prophets.”
Kupelian is actually correct this time — we got those same results on our Google search. But note that Kupelian doesn’t dispute the accuracy of any of those “brutally condemning” articles and websites; all he does is harrumph “uh-huh” or “whatever.” That’s likely because he knows the key parts are true; WND is indisputably “a leading online platform for conspiracy theorists, Tea Party activists and End Times prophets.”
Kupelian also can’t stop whining about that Washington Post article on WND earlier this year; he doesn’t refute that one either, only complains that it was “published immediately after the Post’s reporter learned from Elizabeth Farah that her husband and WND CEO Joseph Farah had just suffered a devastating stroke.” But as the article pointed out, WND didn’t disclose that Farah had suffered a stroke until after it knew the article was coming out — literally two hours after the Post reporter contacted WND for a response. As we noted, Kupelian used Farah’s stroke as a excuse not to respond to the article’s claims, which includes a litany of bad business decisions (i.e. bitcoin giveaways) and financial mismanagement — never mind that he and Farah’s wife, Elizabeth, are the top two company officials behind Farah and surely have some knowledge of said financial shenanigans.
(He also apparently hasn’t figured out that the Seattle Times article is a reprint of the Post article.)
Kupelian then tried to make his case for WND:
OK. Back to reality – and to the gigantic if mostly invisible role Google and the rest of Big Tech plays in “fundamentally transforming” America. Along with reporting honestly on the rest of the news and exposing the “fake” variety, we at WorldNetDaily are sounding the warning trumpets day after day, month after month, about Big Tech’s campaign to replace Judeo-Christian America with another country. As such, we’re doing our job as “real news” journalists.
He’s blatantly lying here. Obama birtherism — arguably WND’s signature story — was always fake news. So was Seth Rich, and WND knew it all along, or should have known it. WND is still pushing fake news about vaccines.
Kupelian’s definition of “real news” involves only stories that advance his right-wing Christian agenda, even if they’re false. If they don’t conform to his worldview, they can’t possibly be true.
That’s why Kupelian can’t refuse all those stories about WND — he knows they’re true, and admitting that would reflect weakness in his eyes, and to do so would mean he would also have to admit he’s been living a lie for the past 20 years. Being viewed as a discredited zealot is apparently preferable to admitting fault.
Kupelian’s desperate griip on narrative over facts is yet another reason WND hasn’t shown it deserves to live.