WorldNetDaily pretends to be the responsible birther it never actually was in a March 10 article by Bob Unruh:
It raised quite a stir when Barack Obama’s half-brother, Malik Obama, tweeted on Friday an image purporting to be the former president’s birth certificate – and supposedly revealing a Kenyan birth.
However, as WND demonstrated back in 2009, the alleged Kenyan birth certificate Malik Obama tweeted is the same fraudulent document that had been offered for sale by eBay seller Lucas Smith and which the seller had displayed on YouTube.
But, as WND’s investigation revealed at the time, it is not a valid document.As WND reported in 2009, administrators at Coast Provincial Hospital in Mombasa, the hospital named as President Obama’s supposed birth hospital in the document, refused to authenticate the record when contacted by WND sources in Kenya.
What Unruh doesn’t tell you: WND spent nearly two months portraying Smith’s certificate as real before the “investigation” it allegedly conducted debunking it.
WND first wrote about the certificate Smith tried to sell in a June 27, 2009, article by Unruh breathlessly presenting it as real:
With dozens of lawsuits filed over access to Barack Obama’s certified long-form birth certificate, many more lawyers working on his behalf to keep it secret and the validity of the U.S. Constitution hanging in the balance, guess where a “certified copy” of the original Mombasa “document” has been found?
[…]
On eBay.
Item No. 160344928067, at least as of today, is described as “a certified copy of President Barack Obama’s Kenyan Birth Certificate.”The suspicion that Coast Provincial is, in fact, Obama’s birth hospital is not new, with the subject having been discussed on both Internet blogs and forums already.
But the seller, who according to the eBay rankings has completed dozens of transactions on the behemoth auction site without difficulties, said this is the real deal.
The seller, who did not respond to a WND request for an interview, said online he was traveling in Kenya and repeatedly heard stories that Obama actually was born in Kenya.
The next day, WND framed an article on the certificate by asking “How much would a genuine copy of President Obama’s birth certificate – from a hospital in Mombasa, Kenya – be worth on the open market?” But it also quoted Jerome Corsi exhibiting some skepticism about the certificate, stating that “Corsi wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the eBay seller may have somehow obtained a genuine document, but stated only that his efforts in Kenya proved fruitless” then adding, “WND has continued to attempt to contact the seller through several channels.”
On June 30, WND complained that “A notice from eBay administrators is now warning people who have contacted the seller of an allegedly genuine copy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate – from Mombasa, Kenya – not to contact the seller again” and that “the sale page offering a dissertation on “the truth” about Obama’s birth – with bids reported by WND readers to have exceeded $1 million – has been pulled from the auction website for the fifth time.” It repeated the Corsi skepticism.
On July 1, Unruh touted how “The eBay auction seller who has tried multiple times to sell an allegedly genuine copy of Barack Obama’s “Kenyan birth certificate” now is offering for sale a photograph of individuals who reportedly contributed to the strategy through which the still-unproven document was obtained.” Unruh quoted the seller stating that “After the YouTube video I will be heading over to WorldNetDaily to talk with Joseph Farah. I will disclose everything to them,” adding, “Contact between the seller and WND has so far been limited to an exchange of e-mails.”
The next day, Unruh reported that a sixth eBay listing for the certificate was “scrubbed” by eBay and that “doubts have begun to flourish as a promised YouTube video about the issue also failed to appear.”
Around this time, we reported that a blogger had identified the poster of the eBay certificate as Lucas Smith.
It was not until Aug. 25 — nearly two months after WND first started reporting on the Smith certificate — that Corsi declared it to be “not a valid document.”
Yet a couple weeks later, on Sept. 11, WND touted how Smith “filed court papers insisting – under threat of perjury – that the Obama birth certificate in his possession is the genuine article,” curiously failing to mention Corsi’s declaration.The article did link to another WND article about a separate purported Kenyan birth certificate that was not the one Smith was peddling. (That one was also fake.)
So, no, WND has not been a responsible birther — it debunked the Smith certificate only after it had gotten all the publicity mileage out if it that it could.
And it’s funny how WND can talk about birther stuff again after Donald Trump’s election, after suppressing it during the presidential campaign. Ant it certainly hasn’t told its readers about all the other birther stuff that has been discredited.