It’s a big sign of the sad state of things at WorldNetDaily that it has to rely on what few close friends it has to generate any sort of buzz about it — and even then, it’s all about editor Joseph Farah, not WND itself as it was a few years back when it latched onto a dubious “independent news organization” calling WND trustworthy (it was actually run by a cultish church for the main purpose of attacking the prosecution of its pastor on child sexual assault charges).
WND having Chuck Norris tout a book by Farah that won’t be published for another six months is just one example. Another is the award given Farah by the Western Conservative Conference. It’s the conference’s second attempt at giving Farah an award; the first try, in 2016, was scuttled when the entire conference was canceled due to an “unfortunate medical issue.”
Buyt the conference actually went forward as planned this year, and Farah got his award; originally called the “Hero of Freedom Award” in 2016, it somehow morphed into the “W. Stanton Evans Lifetime Achievement Award.”
But the Western Conservative Conference was put on by the Western Journalism Center, which was founded by Farah in 1991 as a right-wing journalism-y thing that, like a lot of right-wing journalism-y things in the 1990s, got funding from Richard Mellon Scaife. In the mid-2000s, Farah turned it over to friend Floyd Brown, who turned into a right-wing-fringe conspiracy-monger; Brown has since tried to recreate the core of the organization as a trainer of right-wing bloggers. Farah is listed as a “trainer.”
In other words, this is all a big, steaming pile of logrolling and dealing between buddies.
Farah hints at it — but, of course, does not admit it, or that he founded the organization giving him the award — in his March 25 column made up of his speech upon reeiving the award, in which he recounts his long relationship with Brown:
Floyd Brown, the president of the Western Center for Journalism, and I were trying to figure out yesterday how long we have been conspiring together. Neither one of us is entirely sure, but I know it goes back at least to my days in Los Angeles in the late 1980s when I was still a part of what we euphemistically call the “mainstream media.”
[…]But, I digress. When I first got to know Floyd Brown in the 1980s, I was either running the news department of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, then the flagship of the Hearst newspapers, or I was running another Southern California daily newspaper as editor in chief and about to be recruited to run the historic Sacramento Union, then the oldest daily West of the Mississippi.
The rest of Farah’s speech was a victimhood rant blaming Google and Facebook for not promoting WND links (in fact, WND’s own lack of credibility is much more to blame), railing against the Southern Poverty Law Center for (accurately) pointing out WND’s extremism and unironically praying to God for forgiveness “for the way we try to wage war in the spiritual realm without calling on you first for the marching orders.”
The conference itself, by the way, was so unremarkable that even WND didn’t cover it. Beyond Joe Arpaio once again proclaiming himself to be a birther (and, thus, utterly without credibility), the only news came from peripheral events — an unproven claim about an employee at a coffee stand at the convention center where the conference took place who “threatened to slip estrogen hormone pills into the coffee of attendees,” and conference speaker and Muslim-hating philanderer John Guandolo for calling an employee of the airline he flew to the conference a “jihadi” for no apparent reason.