Thursday, April 4, 2019

UNPRECEDENTED ACTION: MIL-ED editorial staff endorses WND site as  a”well-regarded" information source and repudiates Washington Post "underhanded and unfounded attack on WMD”.

Note that MIL-ED is a nonpartisan organization , approved by the Defense Department for military officer discussion/education.. In this matter, one of our senior  staff was a key advisor to Mrs. Graham when she was publisher of the Washington Post. His comment was that the very unsavory actions of Jeff Bezos  has come to our attention, not through Saudi Arabia as claimed by several Washington Post writers, but rather through various sources close to Mr. Bezos

The  WND editorial response to the Washington Post is carried in its entirety [with our endorsement] below:

AFTER FARAH SUFFERS STROKE
 WASHINGTON POST LAUNCHES MAJOR ATTACK ON WND
America's 1st online journalism organization responds to attempted takedown by D.C. behemoth

David Kupelian 

https://www.wnd.com/2019/04/after-farah-suffers-stroke-washington-post-launches-major-attack-on-wnd/

Just five days after WND went public with the news that its founder, editor and CEO, veteran journalist Joseph Farah had suffered a devastating stroke, the Washington Post has published a lengthy article attacking Farah, his wife Elizabeth, and WND, America’s first online journalism organization.

The story, sensationally headlined “Inside the spectacular fall of the granddaddy of right-wing conspiracy sites,” cites mostly unnamed former employees and others. The Post also mysteriously managed to get a hold of the contents of WND’s private email server, referencing and picking apart numerous internal emails going as far back as 12 years.

So, what does the Washington Post story actually allege?

Against a backdrop of ongoing financial struggles at the company, the article rolls out numerous examples of unpaid bills, unhappy authors, supposedly bad judgment, failure to adequately communicate with board members, and “reckless and undisciplined” spending by the company’s founders.

Evidently the Post considers it shocking and newsworthy that over its 22-year history, a small, influential though undercapitalized company in a highly competitive business, rocked regularly by seismic changes – the dot-com crash, the Google-Facebook-Amazon disruption of the internet and so on – might experience its share of failures, difficulties and embarrassments.

Nowhere in the Post’s article is anything remotely illegal alleged. More to the point, nor does the Post acknowledge the important and highly regarded reporting generated day in and day out, year after year, by WND’s journalists – most of whom, remarkably, have been with WND for virtually all of its two decades of existence.

Most interestingly, nowhere in his massive 2,700-word article does Post reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia ever get down to what has actually caused the precipitous drop in annual revenue at WND over the last couple of years, which has led to the company’s current struggles.

Irony alert: One of WND’s most critical revenue streams over the past two decades has been its robust e-commerce operation featuring thousands of products: the WND Superstore. But WND’s store revenues have dropped dramatically, just as sales have tanked at countless other retailers both online and brick-and-mortar, from Barnes & Noble to Macy’s, thanks to one company – Amazon – whose founder, CEO and president Jeff Bezos is the owner of the Washington Post, having purchased it in 2013 for $250 million.

Seeing as Bezos is the world’s wealthiest human being, the Post fortunately suffers no financial problems like WND and others do.

But there’s more: Besides Amazon, other internet mega-monopolies including Google and Facebook have all but destroyed the other major revenue stream for online news: advertising.

“Journalism, sustained by traditional advertising, is dying,” says the respected Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, whose written testimony to Congress’s Subcommittee on Digital Commerce & Consumer Protection explained starkly that “the revenue model that sustained journalism is broken.”

These developments on the internet – along with the now well-documented progressive-left bias, censorship, skewed search algorithms, demonetizing, shadow-banning, outright banning and multiple other modes of suppressing non-leftwing thought – have severely impacted many independent journalism organizations, including WND.

There is so much in the Post’s article that is unfair, misleading and just wrong. But rather than refute every allegation and innuendo in this one-sided, unsympathetic portrayal of a vastly smaller but influential news competitor, maybe it’s fair game – since the Post casts aspersions not just on the actions, but the motivations, of WND co-founders Joseph and Elizabeth Farah – to examine the Post’s own motivations and agenda.

The Washington Post was once a great newspaper (I grew up in Washington and the Post was delivered to our door daily), best known for its fabled Watergate coverage, with Woodward and Bernstein inspiring a generation of young people to follow in their journalistic footsteps – including Joseph Farah. Those days are long gone. Critics today refer to the Washington Post as “Jeff Bezos’ vanity paper,” the Amazon founder’s chief lobbying-propaganda arm in the nation’s capital.

For the past two-plus years, the Post has been in the forefront of the fake news coverage of the phony Trump-Russia-collusion hoax. Let’s be clear: Month after month after month, the Washington Post feverishly promoted the worst hoax in American history.

Even before Trump’s election and the Russia hysteria, the Post frequently compared the New York businessman to Adolf Hitler. That’s right. As this writer documented in 2016, during that historic year the Washington Post’s election coverage included no fewer than five different Post writers explicitly comparing Trump to the Nazi monster who murdered 11 million people.

Enough said. As Tucker Carlson puts it, “The Washington Post is not a serious newspaper. It’s a joke.”

Although Joseph Farah is the only person situated to respond to many of the Post’s allegations, the paper chose to publish its takedown article right after Farah suffered a major stroke rendering him totally unable to defend himself, his wife and his news organization.

I don’t know why the Post chose to do such a thing. But I’ll close by simply saying for the record, as WND’s vice president and managing editor for 20 years, that I have nothing but the highest respect and love for this amazing news organization, for its founders Joseph and Elizabeth Farah, and for the dedicated journalists who work here.

Finally, regarding that Post headline gloating over “the spectacular fall” of WND: To paraphrase Mark Twain, “Reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.” WND is still here. And we’re committed to doing what we’ve been doing since before Amazon, Google, Facebook and others even existed – to boldly report without fear or favor on all the corruption, lies, fraud, abuse, attacks on the Constitution, and outright delusions that increasingly dominate our great country. As the 2020 election nears, count on us to focus on underreported but life-and-death issues like voter fraud in all its forms, the left’s disastrous and flat-out insane agenda, Big Tech’s intended election rigging and much more – oh yes, and exposing fake news.

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