World Net Daily occupies the strange twilight zone between journalism and flat-out psychotic propaganda. Unlike its predecessors, the tabloids like "Weekly World News" (BatBoy Lives! Hillary Clinton's Affair with Plod The Alien!), WND has a distinctly nasty political bent. It has about three stories that it regurgitates in different guises at regular intervals. Obama is a Kenyan Muslim who is probably the Antichrist: the United States is about to be invaded/poisoned/zapped with a giant electromagnetic pulse by Osama Bin Laden; and Global Warming is a massive fraud perpetrated by a tiny cabal of fake scientists.
All you really need to know about WND can be deduced from two facts. It's Scenty's favourite "journalistic" source: AND they pay Kathy Shaidle to swallow, digest and excrete a column summarizing what's happening in Right Wing Talk Radio (a gig that that clarifies both WND's standards and the pitiable state of Ms. Shaidle's "career".)
No-one takes birthers seriously anymore, but their dogged seeking out of retired weathermen or former sociology professors to "debunk" IPCC findings ensures they keep popping up on the dimmer conservative blogs.
It was therefore gratifying to note their hilarious coverage of the recent "discovery" of Noah's Ark on Mt. Ararat by a team of Chinese explorers. Their article includes photos of some remarkable fresh looking beams and some cool aerial shots of snow with bumps in it, and little grids. There's lots of sciency stuff too, including the news that "carbon dating suggested it was 4,800 years old."
It's interesting that they cite carbon dating as evidence, since carbon dating has also established that life is many millions of years older than the myth of the Ark would allow. But that point is moot, because the team hasn't actually released the actual data yet, or identified the institution that performed the "verification".
There are few other points WND saw fit to ignore in their coverage of this story.
- The discovery was made by Noah's Ark Ministries International, which runs a Biblical theme park
- They haven 't published any data
- They haven't released the location
- There are NO credible archaeologists endorsing their claim
- There are at least two reports that this nonsense is a deliberate hoax.
Now, if this were the Weekly World News, one would grin and move on. Chinese scam artists provide sensationalist crap to American scam artists, who peddle it to fools.
But of course, this is a "news source" much beloved of Canadian and American teabaggers - the kind of source they rely on and point to as an alternative to that evil MSM. It's also a 'publication' that's tried to dismiss the science behind AGW.
And that's what makes this little episode so cheering - it's a welcome reminder of just how little the AGW "debunkers" actually understand about science, how little the MSM-haters understand about journalism, and how badly the capacity for critical thought has atrophied in those quarters.
