WorldTribune.com exposed (WashTimes side project)

[Newsjock]

http://newyorker.com/talk/content/?030908ta_talk_mcgrath

Aficionados of the Drudge Report may have noticed several striking headlines recently linking to stories from the World Tribune, an enterprise with a title as grand and ambitious as it is unfamiliar. One such story last week began, “U.S. intelligence suspects Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have finally been located.” The apparent scoop -- of stop-the-presses significance -- was unsigned, and billed as a “special to World Tribune.com.” The Times, the Journal, and the Washington Post, meanwhile, not only got beat but failed even to acknowledge the news in the days that followed. What gives?

... In fact, the World Tribune is not published in the United Kingdom, nor is it, to be precise, a newspaper. It is a Web site produced, more or less as a hobby, in Falls Church, Virginia, and is dedicated to the notion, as its mission statement explains, that “there is a market for news of the world and not just news of the weird.”

... Its editor and publisher, Robert Morton, is an assistant managing editor at the Washington Times and a former “corporate editor” for News World Communications, the Times’ owner and the publishing arm of the Unification Church, led by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

... World Tribune.com more fairly qualifies as something between a newspaper and a rumor-mongering blog. Call it “blews.” In this sense, it is part of a loose network of mostly conservative sites -- WorldNetDaily, Dr. Koontz’s National Security Message Board, debka File (produced by a pair of Jerusalem-based journalists thought to have moles in Israeli intelligence) -- whose dispatches sometimes serve as the journalistic equivalent of trial balloons ...

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[Ohio Dem]

1. "the journalistic equivalent of trial balloons"

What a great line. That's how I would describe Fox News, too. They report things and then repeat it enough that it eventually becomes news. Even lies.

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. This is despicable.

You would think that the conservative newsrags would lose credibility and get the reputation of being propaganda machines, but no sign in sight that the Republican voters care if their newsources are garbage.

[Turbulence]

3. they are mostly propagandists themselves.