The offensive against eligibility questions ~ By Joseph Farah

By Joseph Farah Posted: July 25, 2009 1:00 am Eastern © 2009 What a difference a day makes. It seemed like only yesterday WND was all alone hammering away on Barack Obama's eligibility issue. Today, it ranks right up there with the imminent nationalization of the health care industry and the biggest tax increase in the history of the world as one of the top stories. There isn't a news agency left in America not covering the story – or, more precisely, covering it up. The Associated Press begins its stories by explaining that the controversy has already been debunked. How? By whom? The largest newsgathering agency in the world doesn't specify. It has just been debunked. That's all you need to know. CNN interviews two prominent "birthers," but, before allowing them to say a word, the piece is set up with 10 minutes of explanation by an anchor that the story you are about to hear is not really a story at all. It has all been explained before. How? By whom? You don't need to know. Take CNN's word for it. They've got their sources. Then there are the activists at Media Matters and the Huffington Post, ready to smear me and Jerome Corsi and WND reporters at the drop of a hat. The noise is getting louder. It makes me think we're really on to something here. Why would Obama acolytes be so upset by the old questions if they weren't threatening? This all came home to me yesterday when I got the shock of my life. Dozens of readers brought to my attention that within a 24-hour period, most of the major search engines had systematically scrubbed WND content from their rankings. In 12 years of directing WND, I have never had complaints about WND's position in search engine ranks. That's not to say we are search engine optimized. It just means that you could find WND content through all major search engines. Yesterday that all changed – in the blink of an eye. We may not have been search engine optimized like the Huffington Post, which accounts for virtually all of its traffic. But we had been the victims of something I have dubbed intentional "search engine minimization." This happened not just with my old adversary Google, but with Bing, Yahoo and others. This is especially true of our content dealing with Barack Obama's eligibility – a story WND singlehandedly as a media agency propelled to the top of the news charts. [CONTINUE READING]