We’ve documented WorldNetDaily’s descent into fake news that played a key role in its near-death experience earlier this year — and more examples keep piling up.
Buzzfeed detailed how anti-Muslim propaganda travels from Europe to the U.S., citing WND as a conduit. For example, an August 2017 article by the anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute carried the headline “”Muslims Tell Europe: ‘One Day This Will All Be Ours'”– but the article quotes no Muslim saying that (it game from a French Catholic bishop who was purporting to quote unnamed Muslims). WND republished part of the Gatestone article, complete with false headline.
WND has gotten burned by fake news from Gatestone before; we’ve documented how it promoted an alarmist Gatestone article about how more mosques than churches were being built in France, ignnoring that Christianity had a centuries-long head start over Islam in the country and has far more churches than Islam has mosques. Gatestone has since deleted its false article, but WND’s article, by Alicia Powe (see below), remains live and uncorrected.
Meanwhile, Media Matters reported on the closeness between American conservatives and Macedonian-based fake news operations, noting that one figure in the operations, Trajche Arsov, had recruited Alicia Powe to write for one of those fake-news sites during the 2016 election, and that Powe also shared numerous fake-news stories on her personal Facebook page. Powe joined WND as a reporter in February 2017 — where one of her beats was perpetuating Seth Rich conspiracy theories — and stayed for approximately a year; she now writes for the even less credible Gateway Pundit.
Meanwhile, WND still won’t admit its dubious editorial policies played a role in leading it to near-death, continuing to whine about Google and Facebook prioritizing other (read: more credible) content. Until Joseph Farah and crew admit they have a problem and apologize to its readers for essentially lying to them, they can’t even begin to fix it, let alone regain the credibility it needs to stay alive.