It requires a certain amount of craziness, hate and extremism to be a WorldNetDaily columnist — witness those who are already on the rolls such as conspiracy-mongerer Jack Cashill, Putin-loving homophobe Scott Lively and fake-compassionate homophobe Michael Brown. WND recently added a couple new columnists to join this dubious pantheon — and they’re both linked to the Media Research Center.
One is MRC executive Tim Graham — the guy who rages at media outlets for not being as right-wing as Fox News (but gave Fox News a pass for lying to its viewers), pushes right-wing revisionism on events and complains that Republicans get fact-checked.
The other is Terry Jeffrey, formerly editor in chief of the MRC’s highly biased “news” division CNSNews.com, which the MRC abruptly shut down in April 2023 (for reasons the MRC still won’t talk about publicly), fired most people who worked there and converted into a right-wing blog folded into its right-wing hot-take MRCTV operation under the aegis of the one remaining CNS employee still at the MRC, Craig Bannister. These days, Jeffrey is an “investigative editor” at the Daily Caller, which — if his article archive is any indication — appears to mostly involve reprinting Jeffrey’s column and precious little actual investigating.
Both Graham and Jeffrey are syndicated columnists, so anyone can publish them by paying a fee to their syndicator, Creators Syndicate. So it’s interesting that WND is spending what little money it has to publish them. Is it using them to attempt to project an image of being reasonable right-wingers? Or have Graham and Jeffrey slid sufficiently rightward that WND feels comfortable with them being of a piece with its far-right columnist lineup?
This is who WND is associating itself with these days — with nary a peep from the MRC.