WorldNetDaily has been on a wild anti-Barack Obama rampage for months now, but the only victim thus far is WND's credibility.
WND regularly spreads false and misleading claims about Democrats -- as John Kerry found out in 2004 -- and just as regularly refuses to correct those falsehoods unless threatened with a lawsuit, and sometimes not even then. For seven years WND fought a libel suit filed against it by Clark Jones, a Tennessee businessman targeted for his support of Al Gore, before finally admitting as the case was to go to trial its claims about Jones were false -- resulting in the expenditure of untold thousands in legal costs that could have been spared had WND retracted and apologized for its claims about Jones at the outset.
WND appears to be taking refuge in the fact that the bar for which it can be found guilty of libeling a public figure like Barack Obama is much higher than for the average American. The standard established by the Supreme Court is that a public figure cannot collect libel damages without proving that "actual malice" was involved in the publishing of inaccurate and defamatory material; the false information must have been published with knowledge that a statement is false or with "reckless disregard" of whether it is false or not.
Given the sheer number of falsehoods about Obama published by WND, one can easily make the argument that such a lengthy series of lies while demonstrating no genuine interest in telling the truth can be interpreted as "actual malice" because it demonstrates a deliberate pattern of "reckless disregard" -- and could, thus, be actionable under libel laws.
ConWebWatch has compiled a list of 23 falsehoods about Obama or topics related to him published in WND news articles and columns. Columnists are included because opinion pieces should be held to the same standard of factual accuracy as "news" stories. ConWebWatch attempted to find all instances in WND's article in which a falsehood was uncritically repeated, though information debunking it or putting it into proper context was available or could have been found had the writer chosen to seek it out, and for which no correction, clarification or retraction was subsequently published.
Look at the list -- admittedly incomplete -- and decide for yourself: Can a "news" organization that has published so many falsehoods about a single person have any credibility whatsoever? If WND can't be bothered to get its facts straight about a single man, why trust it to tell the truth about anything else?
WND has more than amply demonstrated that it cannot be trusted, especially in its coverage of Obama.