WorldNetDaily Swipes One Too Many PB Articles

WorldNetDaily steals some news from PB--but gets a bit too greedy

WorldNetDaily has rushed to press with "breaking news" that is surprisingly similar to our news story yesterday concerning Ward Churchill's advice to conscientious objectors at a forum in Portland, Oregon Friday. (and a belated thanks to one of our loyal readers, Laurie, for pointing out the preposterous theft; without her eagle eye, we might never have caught WND!)

WND fails to attribute the story to PB, which is fine, since we're merely quoting a readily available MP3 of Churchill's speech at the forum. And it's possible their writer arrived at the same conclusions and excerpted exactly the same quotes (including our own editorially-inserted "[and]" for clarity). Had they listened to the whole speech and the Q&A period (as we did), WND would know Churchill spoke about the fragging of officers several times, not two times, as WND says (oddly enough, our original article only provided two quotes, though we've since updated it to include a third that provides more  context for the "frag line officers" quote).

The problem (for WND) arises in the second part of their news article, where they go for a two-fer and steal another PB story—an obviously satirical "news" story a la scrappleface that had Churchill attributing his "little Eichmanns" comment to a faulty spell-checker that changed it from what he had typed: "little Entenmann's."

Other news sources, such as OrbusMax, properly carry a link to our "frag the officers" story on its main page. And Michelle Malkin also properly links to our story. And Wikiquote (a subidiary of Wikipedia) also attributes the quote to us.

Confidential to WND: If you're going to swipe news, at least make sure the news is, um, news. So, for the fledgling WND reporters among our readership, the "frag the officers" article was, sadly, all too true. The "little Entenmann's" story was satire.



Update: Apparently, we weren't the first to come up with the "little Entenmann's" joke; a poster on ihateapple.net came up with it back in February.

Update: Somebody clued WND to the joke on them; they've removed the "little Entenmann's" portion of their news story. Of course, we know all about "disappearing" things, so we made a copy of their original page, which is the page linked at the top of this post. You can view WND's sanitized version here. And just so you know we're not making this up, both Military.com and FreeRepublic.com carry reprints of the original WND article that include the now-disappeared "little Entenmann's" news. BTW: FreeRepublic readers figured out the satire part of the Entenmann's story within 40 minutes; it took WND at least 12 hours to notice.

Update: Even the boneheads at democraticunderground.com figured out the "Entenmann's" portion of the story was—as one poster rather uncharitably put it—"crap", though they also erroneously extend that definition to the all-too-true "support the fragging of line officers" portion of the WND story. DU has locked the thread, because WND is "biased" (not, apparently, because it plagiarizes stupidly).

Update: We sent an email this morning to WorldNetDaily concerning their unattributed use of our news story, asking that WND at least attribute the story to PB (and, of course, chortling a bit over their gullibility about the "little Entenmann's" satire). So far, we've seen no attribution, nor have we received a response of any kind from WND. We'll keep you posted.

BTW: We helped ourselves to WorldNetDaily's nifty "breaking news" animated GIF to illustrate this story. Sue us.

That has happened before, last year WND carried a story from Arutz Sheva (Israel National News) that was plainly a satire, as real news. After I emailed them, they "disappeared it", no thanks or even acknowledgement, by the way.

  — Yehu Ben Zohar () - 27 June '05 - 09:33

Now that is funny.

  — jgm () (URL) - 27 June '05 - 10:44

FYI Michelle Malkin has a link to the the Portland Indy with another WC interview following his little performance last night. Sadly, none of us are mentioned...



http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/06/320239.shtml

  — AcademicElephant () (URL) - 27 June '05 - 13:37

Good for you. For years Joe Farah has been going on and on about what an incredible, top-knotch news organization WND is, when mainly he recycles wire stories while giving them lurid headlines, and sprinkling propagandistic content amongst them.

  — Stygius (URL) - 27 June '05 - 17:39

Ok, I must admit, when I first saw the Churchill link at Malkin's, I didn't click it, I wasn't in the mood, between the Kelo decision and the female Marines we lost, hearing anything about that tool other than his obituary was more than I could take. But hearing you had been plagiarized, I wanted to know the story. Now PB is a favorite, I love the satire and the highjacked GIF, you rule. I'm sure they will seek legal action. : )

  — Copano_Texian () - 27 June '05 - 22:18

WND? What does this stand for? "Weapons of No Destruction"?

  — whosear () - 21 July '05 - 09:36

Ahem: WND=WorldNetDaily.

  — jwpaine () - 21 July '05 - 10:05

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