WorldNetDaily is currently in full-fledged snit mode because the United Nations won't grant WND's Jerome Corsi (remember him?) press credentials to cover the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. According to WND, The U.N. denied the press credentials because “advocacy publications of nongovernmental or nonprofit organizations do not qualify for media accreditation.”
WND editor and CEO Joseph Farah responded by stating that WND is not a part of a nonprofit organization, having been spun off from the Farah-founded nonprofit Western Journalism Center in 1999. We'll take Farah's word on that, even though he has long refused to make the names of WND's investors public. But Farah also claims:
Neither is it an advocacy organization, though, like all news organizations, it does publish a broad spectrum of opinion -- we believe, in fact, the broadest ideological spectrum of any news organization in the world.
In a word, bollocks. WND's “broad spectrum of opinion” is mere window-dressing. Out of the 50 or so regular columnists that WND publishes, only two -- Bill Press and Ellen Ratner -- are genuine liberals. The rest are conservative, libertarian, right-wing Christian, or some combination thereof. On any given day, liberal opinions at WND are outnumbered by conservative opinions at WND by at least 6-to-1.
And Farah's claim that WND is not an “advocacy organization” is simply laughable. Just because WND is a for-profit operation doesn't mean it doesn't advocate -- it does. More to the point, WND advocates against the very organization from which it demands press credentials.
From an October 2007 column by Farah, headlined "Death to the U.N.!":
Today is United Nations Day. How shall we celebrate?
Easy. We ought to be mourning the continued life of this globalist monstrosity, not celebrating it.
I understand I'm wasting my breath. Too many Americans have bought into the lie that only a worldwide body such as the United Nations can really move us closer to peace. Even most of those who don't care for the United Nations don't really consider it to be a threat to their freedom.
[...]
There's just no place for the United States in the United Nations. And there's just no place for the United Nations in the United States.
I wish my fellow Americans had the courage and foresight to stand up tall against the march toward global political and economic unions that afford the American people no accountability, that recognize no inalienable rights and that create supranational governments that can eventually lead only to tyranny on a worldwide scale.
[...]
The United Nations is not just, as many Americans suspect, a group of incompetent busybodies. It is, instead, a global criminal enterprise determined to shift power away from individuals and sovereign nation-states to a small band of unaccountable international elites. Just think oil-for-food scandal. Just think Rwanda genocide. Just think of the incredible human-rights and sexual-abuse scandals by “peacekeeping” forces in Africa and elsewhere.
Now's the time to stand up for our sovereignty and our individual rights by demanding that we withdraw from the United Nations and, most importantly of all, stop funding this madness with U.S. taxpayer dollars.
Even more laughably, Farah suggests in a December 2 column that WND can be an “impartial witness” to the U.N.'s “shenannigans.” Really? What part of “Death to the U.N.!” suggests any capability of impartiality on WND's part?
Farah is trying to frame this as a free-press issue. But at no point does Farah explain why he's submitting to the process of seeking press credentials from an organization whose legitimacy he doesn't recognize and which he wants to see destroyed -- or why the U.N. should grant credentials to a “news” organization that advocates for its destruction.