They're baaaaack. Democratic President smear center, Western Journalism Center, suddenly reappears

[ck4829]

How is Barack Obama's birth certificate like Vince Foster?

To answer that, we must go back to the very beginning. After leaving the Sacramento Union in 1991, Joseph Farah and former Union publisher James Smith founded the Western Journalism Center -- under whose aegis Farah later founded WorldNetDaily. (After WND was spun off as a for-profit subsidiary in 1998, the WJC's share of of it was gradually transferred over the years to Farah.)

Farah likes to peddle the story that the WJC was founded "to fill a growing void in my industry's commitment to investigative reporting" and that its "mission was not ideological." In fact, the WJC didn't do all that much actual investigating; its main function was to attack the Clinton administration by promoting conspiracy theories surrounding the death of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster -- it accepted $330,000 in donations from then-Clinton-hater Richard Mellon Scaife toward that end, and other conservative foundations contributed as well -- and it went dormant as soon as Clinton left office.

Now that there's a Democrat in the Oval Office again, guess who's back?

The first hint of the WJC's resurrection came last August with a WorldNetDaily commentary by Andrea Shea King touting Jerome Corsi's factually dubious anti-Obama book, asserting that the book contains "legitimate questions about Obama that the author meticulously documents in the book's nearly 700 footnotes." The article contained the tagline, "This column was commissioned by the Western Journalism Center."

Unmentioned is the fact that numerous investigations by people who weren't rabid Clinton-haters (and even a few who arguably were, like Kenneth Starr) discredited Ruddy's conclusions by repeatedly and inconveniently ruling that Foster committed suicide. Also unmentioned is the Scaife double-dealing: For much of the time he wrote about Foster, Ruddy worked for the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, meaning that Scaife was essentially paying the WJC to promote one of his own reporters. (Ruddy then went on to found Newsmax with Scaife's financial assistance.) Even Ann Coulter has dismissed Ruddy's reporting on Foster, calling his 1997 book on it, "The Strange Death of Vincent Foster," a "conservative hoax book."

And their own words:

"Today the Center is lead (sic) by columnist and veteran broadcaster Floyd Brown. The Western Center for Journalism is a vigorous watchdog that keeps a check on government abuse and the media. The Center believes strongly in open public debate. It also believes that informed public debate requires quality journalism and reporting."

Yes, that Floyd Brown, who does indeed identify himself as WJC chairman on his own website. He's a longtime right-wing hitman -- the guy behind the notorious Willie Horton ad in 1988 -- who last year was peddling smears of Barack Obama and falsely suggesting that Obama is a Muslim.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-krepel/the-return-of-the-western_b_181270.html

[gratuitous]

1. Floyd Brown is back?

My goodness, it's like a never-ending gravy train, isn't it? I knew Floyd very briefly in college many years ago, he was a couple of years behind me. Apparently he couldn't cut it at West Point. I don't know that he's ever held an actual job. But money just falls out of the sky and into his pocket because he says things that amuse his wealthy patrons. For decades I've called him "the lazy journalist's friend."