Joseph Farah’s March 1 WorldNetDaily column complains that Google is using the Southern Poverty Law Center to help flag extremist content. He goes on to rant:
If Google finds your standards don’t meet those set the SPLC, you fall in search rankings.
Now, that is reason for real concern. In fact, it’s a travesty.
Let me use my own SPLC profile as an illustration. In 1997, I launched the first-ever independent online news service, WorldNetDaily, now known as WND.com, after a distinguished career in what we euphemistically still call the “mainstream media.” Besides working as an investigative reporter, foreign correspondent and senior newsroom executive, I also served as editor-in-chief of two big market daily newspapers. I served as an expert witness on newsroom standards and practices in high-profile defamation cases. I won awards for honesty and integrity in journalism, for writing, for editing and for newspaper design.
I took those standards and practices that I learned in a 20-year career in the so-called “mainstream media” and parlayed it into the first independent online news service in the world – an extremely popular one, I might add.
Would you like to know what the SPLC says about me? I don’t mind. I wear the description as a badge of honor, if you don’t take their outrageous caricatures to heart.
Here it is: “Joseph Farah runs WorldNetDaily, one of the most unhinged far-right ‘news’ sites on the Internet .WND specializes in anti-Obama ‘birtherism,’ wild accusations against LGBT people, anti-Muslim rhetoric and a huge dose of just plain lunacy. …”
Now, I ask you sincerely, with the SPLC serving as part of the media speech code police at Google, how do you suppose that affects the search results at WND.com?
For all of his ranting, though, Farah doesn’t dispute the accuracy of that description of him and WND — or, for that matter, anything else the SPLC about wrote him and WND. He can’t because he knows this description of him and WND is entirely accurate.
Farah ended his column with yet another plea for people to donate money to WND in order to “protect the independent, non-fake news media in this country.” despite the fact that WND is neither.