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   From: you.suckers@fellforit.org   
      
   Inside the spectacular fall of the granddaddy of right-wing conspiracy   
   sites   
   By Manuel Roig-Franzia   
   April 2, 2019 at 1:26 p.m. EDT   
   (Peter Strain/For The Washington Post)   
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   In the feverish heyday of the “birther movement,” conspiracy-hungry readers   
   swarmed to a website called WorldNetDaily for the latest on the specious   
   yet viral theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United   
   States.   
   The site’s founder, Joseph Farah — a former newspaperman with a dense, jet-   
   black mustache and a cloak-and-dagger mystique — boasted in 2010 that he   
   was well on the way to generating $10 million a year in revenue. His   
   Northern Virginia-headquartered news site, known by the acronym WND, was   
   having its moment by stoking rumors about Obama.   
   But Farah — a conservative Internet pioneer who’d once been labeled by the   
   Clinton White House as part of a right-wing media conspiracy and was known   
   to sport a pistol on his hip in the office—saw bigger things. Years earlier   
   he’d launched one of the first large-scale digital newsgathering   
   operations; now he wanted to be a player in Christian-themed movies and   
   book publishing, churning out titles by big-name conservatives, such as   
   anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly and future House Intelligence Committee   
   chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).   
   He was building an empire.   
   A decade later, that realm is being sucked into a tornado of unpaid bills,   
   pink-slipped employees, chaotic accounting, declining revenue and   
   diminishing readership, according to interviews with more than 25 former   
   employees, shareholders, company insiders and authors associated with the   
   firm's flailing publishing units, as well as a review of hundreds of   
   internal documents, including emails and financial statements obtained by   
   The Washington Post.   
   Even though Farah claimed in WND columns and emails to supporters last year   
   to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations —including tax-   
   deductible contributions — some former employees and contractors have been   
   laid off or had their deals canceled without being paid money they say they   
   were owed. Many authors who signed on with the site’s publishing arm,   
   including former Republican senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, are fuming   
   about allegedly not receiving royalties owed to them.   
   Coburn recalled in an interview that he had a “very frank and disturbing”   
   conversation last year with Farah about unpaid royalties for his 2017 book,   
   “Smashing the D.C. Monopoly.”   
   “I accused him of not being honest,” Coburn said. “He doesn’t keep his   
   commitments. He doesn’t keep his word.”   
   Other authors, initially attracted to WND by the image Farah crafted for   
   himself as a devout evangelical Christian, have groused that they paid   
   WND’s pay-to-publish division thousands of dollars to have their books   
   printed but haven’t received the royalties they were promised or other   
   items, such as audio versions of their works. Their complaints, requests   
   for basic accounting statements and pleas for help were largely ignored,   
   according to emails and interviews with more than a dozen authors.   
   Reached by phone last week, Farah’s wife, Elizabeth — the site’s co-founder   
   with her husband — declined to discuss the accusations in detail, but added   
   that “the angst of a former employee does not impress me as to the   
   legitimacy of complaints.”   
   Joseph Farah, publisher WorldNetDaily, in a 2007 photo taken at the   
   Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). (WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy   
   Stock Photo)   
   “It’s a he-said, she-said,” Elizabeth Farah said.   
   Less than two hours after she was contacted by The Washington Post, WND   
   posted a story saying Joseph Farah had recently suffered a serious,   
   previously undisclosed stroke.   
   Once a niche juggernaut with a devoted following and dozens of employees,   
   WND has undergone a dramatic transformation. The site has left behind its   
   upscale offices in Chantilly, Va., and now operates remotely via a small   
   group of staffers scattered around the country. Farah wrote in a WND column   
   in January that most of his staff is gone.   
   “We are struggling to survive,” he wrote.   
   For months, Farah has blamed his site’s troubles on a supposed cabal of   
   powerful technology companies that he believes are suppressing traffic to   
   WND and other conservative sites. He recently wrote that his company has   
   lost 80 percent of its revenue since 2017 and has stopped publishing new   
   books and making movies.   
   “There has never been a force like the combined power of Google, Facebook,   
   YouTube, Twitter, Amazon and Apple in the world before — at least not since   
   the Tower of Babel,” Farah wrote in a column earlier this year. “I’m   
   talking about real ‘collusion’ — and having nothing to do with Russia.”   
   (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)   
   But interviews and documents show an organization that existed in almost   
   constant crisis mode, chronically late in paying its employees and vendors,   
   and wrestling with internal allegations about questionable spending by its   
   founders and claims they were withholding information from the company’s   
   board and using company funds to support a comfortable lifestyle in the   
   Washington suburbs.   
   “Where did the hundreds of thousands of dollars raised by WND in 2018 from   
   readers and other donors go?” said Felicia Dionisio, a longtime WND news   
   writer and editor who ran the books division before being laid off last   
   year. “It didn’t go toward author royalties, it didn’t go toward rehiring   
   any of the many loyal employees who were laid off, it didn’t go toward   
   providing accurate and timely paychecks, and it didn’t go toward making   
   those who suffered due to cutbacks at WND whole.”   
   Founding 'the compound'   
   In the pre-Internet era, Joseph Farah was a mainstream newsman, serving as   
   executive news editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, a major daily   
   that competed with the much larger Los Angeles Times before shuttering in   
   1989.   
   Later, as editor of the conservative Sacramento Union, he irked some   
   staffers by taking a pointedly antiabortion stance. He made headlines by   
   defending a decision by the paper’s publisher to ban advertisements for   
   movies rated NC-17.   
   “NC-17 films are nothing more than X-rated films with a polite new name,”   
   Farah told United Press International in 1990.   
   Farah’s tenure at the Union was less than two years. Unmoored from the   
   executive suite, he had a fallback. He wrote punchy columns — a chain-   
   smoking dynamo whose colleagues marveled at how fast he could spin out   
   prose.   
   Farah was known for his promotion of the theory that deputy White House   
   counsel Vincent Foster might have been the victim of foul play rather than   
   suicide. He founded a nonprofit called the Western Journalism Center, then   
   a for-profit venture, WorldNetDaily.   
      
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