The inglorious, uncurious media ~ By Joseph Farah

Commentary from WorldNetDaily.

For my friend Joseph Farah: This is the reason I go to this site first for most of the stories shown on "Blogging in Our Time 2 Escape!

Make no mistake about it, WND is under siege – from the left and what I call "the soft right."


Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade what we do for all the accolades and awards in the world. For us, the rewards are in the impact we have, the results we get and the appreciative audience we build.

By Joseph Farah

Posted: February 18, 2010 ~ 1:00 am Eastern

© 2010

Once upon a time, I aspired to work within a great institution – the American free press.

Inspired by the Watergate scandals of the early 1970s and, more importantly, the coverage provided by two reporters from the Washington

Post, I set out to become a newspaperman.

While still in college, I began practicing the craft – exposing a series of scandals that forced the president of the institution to resign.

In my first professional tours, my passion for newspapering was noticed by my employers. I quickly rose through the ranks and got the plum assignments I wanted.

I studied at the feet of one of the great newspapermen of the 20th century, Jim Bellows, late of the New York Herald Tribune, Washington Star, Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

And, eventually, I got to run my own daily newspapers, fulfilling my lifetime dream – all long before my 40th birthday.

It was a lifetime of journalistic experience crammed into less than 20 years.

But it was a momentous 20 years.

During those two decades, I watched my beloved news industry lose its moorings. I witnessed it lose its sense of mission. I saw it lose its ethics and morality. I observed in horror as it was taken over by people completely out of touch with their audience, their country's values and the central role of a free press in a free society.

Today I am 55 years old and have been running the world's first independent Internet news source for 13 years.

When I started WND back in 1997, I had hoped that it would lead to a renaissance of good journalism on and off the Net. Just the opposite has happened. Traditional American journalism has all but collapsed. What stands in its place today, whether it's the New York Times, MSNBC or the Huffington Puffington Post, quite resembles the institutions known as Pravda and Izvestia back in the Cold War days – without the official government control. It isn't needed with the denizens of today's excuse for journalism. They eagerly serve not as a watchdog on government, which was the calling of journalists for the first 200 years of American history, but as shills for government power.

After 13 years, I really believed WND would have inspired all kinds of competition doing what we are doing – returning to the old-fashioned American roots of journalism, and prospering as a result.

Yet today there is still nothing like WND anywhere else – on the Internet, on TV, in print or in any other venue.

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