I have been a fan of WorldNetDaily for a long time, and have even posted favorably about some of its reportage in the past. But no more. Never again. Not after WND defamed Fox--without real proof--and endangered the lives of Americans and reporters around the world.
WND has crossed a big fat red line with its allegation that Fox News--maybe--paid a ransom to the terrorists who kidnaped FNC newsmen Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig. WND has given aid and comfort to our ideological opposites inside the US, and, beyond our shores, has given aid and comfort to our mortal enemies.
I read the November 14 story, written by one Aaron Klein, and the precise wording is weasely in the extreme: maybe, the story alleges, FNC paid the ransom, maybe the US government paid the ransom. Maybe the Man on the Moon paid the ransom, because there's not a scintilla of evidence, let alone proof, anywhere in the story!
For its part, Fox says, flatly, it didn't happen. Roger Ailes and John Moody have both said that "no no News Corp entity, including Fox News, nor the families of the kidapped journalists, paid any money for their release." Now of course, plenty people have denied things that strongly in the past, and of course, sometimes, they are proved to be lying.
But WND has offered no such proof. Instead the site merely spun a web of allegations and blind quotes, leading one to wonder: is a) WND just corrupt, insofar as it allows fantasist "reporters" to have access to its pages, or is it b) somehow in cahoots with the terrorists so as to get this sort of access to them? We've seen CNN playing that snaky game in Iraq, surely WND doesn't want to make the same moral mistake in the Palestinian territories.
And now WND is digging in its heels, sort of: WND editor Joseph Farah said on Wednesday, "We stand 100 percent behind Aaron Klein's story today about the release of kidnap victims Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig."
But then, intererestingly enough, Farah added, "The statement by Roger Ailes completely distorts what our story carefully reported. Nowhere in our story did we ever allege, as Ailes' statement said, that Fox News paid $2 million for release of the terrorist hostages."
That's funny of Farah to say that, to try to climb back down off the ledge WND climbed on to. But the only way to do such climb-downing would be retracting the story altogether. In the meantime, Farah's tricky statement does not explain the headline on the original November 14 piece--still posted on the web--which reads "Terrorists: Fox News reporters freed for $2 million."
Here's the real issue, and it's not the fate of Fox News, it's the fate of individual reporters operating in dangerous zones--it's those journalists whom Fox put at risk. Fox is a big boy, as it were. FNC's reputation as a pro-American, terrorist-fighting, morally clear news operation will survive this incident intact, because everyone knows what Fox stands for.
But when WND insinuates that FNC paid a ransom, that puts every reporter at risk. Why? Because now, thanks to this bit of dishonest reporting, every Fox reporter--and by extension, every Western reporter--has a figurative price tag on his or head, a tag which reads, "Kidnap me and collect $2 million!" It's not true, of course, but the terrorists don't necessarily know that. And what do you suppose those reporter-kidnaping terrorists will do when they figure out that they can't collect a ransom out of some poor journo? It won't be pretty, that's for sure, and the ugliness--and maybe the blood--will be on WND's hands.
In the meantime, WND has simply opened up a division in the media that the far-left blogosphere is is going to exploit. In fact, it's already happening. The lefty outfit Alternet.org showed how much damage has already been done by the WND story when it crowed: "There's simply too much Fox fun to be had these days." Yeah, ha ha. And I am sure that Al-Jazeera is making the most of this item, too. WND, Alternet, and Al-Jazeera: there's a motley crew of possible unlikely allies.
Once again, if WND has proof, as opposed to just blind quotes that could have come to them a la Jayson Blair, then WND should offer such proof up to the world (although even if they do have proof, which I don't believe for a second, one could still ask why they thought it was necessary to run with this story). But if WND doesn't have proof, and I am sure that that's the case, then WND is acting terribly irresponsibly, hurting not only Fox, but also, hurting all Western/foreign reporters who might be operating anywhere in the Middle East, or, for that matter, elsewhere in the world, by making them seem like tempting and enriching targets.
To repeat: WND should be ashamed of itself.
