Joseph Farah, who’s edited the conservative WorldNetDaily.com since its founding in 1997, is swinging backat an ad hoc campaign led byconservative blogger Jon Henke(“this fellow I have never known nor associated with nor even heard of before”) to get “decent” conservatives to boycott the site. “„Am I scared? No, folks. I’m not. I didn’t found WorldNetDaily to be esteemed by my colleagues. I didn’t found it to make People for the American Way or Media Matters happy. I didn’t found it because I wanted to be part of the “conservative” movement. I founded it because there was a crying need for an independent brand of journalism beholden only to the truth.
The important thing here is that Farah is not some gadfly political blogger.
He runs a Website that came online at the start of President Bill Clinton’s second term and currently has many, many, many more readers than The Next Right or even National Review. Conservatives differ from liberals* in that their Web 1.0 sites like WND and FreeRepublic survived and kept their readers in the George W. Bush era, whereas liberals mostly “shop” at interactive blogs like Daily Kos and news sites like the Huffington Post. The conspiracist on the right has had stomping grounds at FreeRepublic and WND, while the radical on the far left is banned from sites like Daily Kos if he/she posts a conspiracy theory.
*I originally attributed this thought to Henke, but it’s more accurately a summary of a back-and-forth between us.
–