WND Scoops

Picture this.

On July 26, WorldNetDaily published an exclusive, copyrighted,
breaking news story,

"FBI fishes Senate e-mail for Trulock."

No other media organization had the story.

Two days later, the Washington Post published a remarkably similar story,

"Probe of Ex-Official Extends to Hill." The Post's top national security writer, Walter Pincus, reportedly had been e-mailed copies of WND's story on July 27 by sources on Capitol Hill.

TRENDING: Madison Cawthorn introduces bill to protect border wall by declaring it a national monument

When WorldNetDaily confronted the Post, the news giant readily admitted it had failed to credit WND with the story, apologized, and ran a correction crediting WorldNetDaily.com.

(See "The Post's uncredited
WND rewrite")

In this tumultuous era for the press -- which has changed in one generation from having been dominated by the Washington Post, New York Times and "the big three" networks to offering today a multitude of news choices -- the so-called "Old Media" are having a little trouble accepting the "New Media." Competition makes them uncomfortable, especially from the revolutionary new Internet world.

The Post episode is not unique. In fact, it's a frequent occurrence, and not only with the Post. Stories that first appear on this site are subsequently picked up by the rest of the press -- sometimes with credit, but more often -- especially when picked up by big media -- without credit.

When

WorldNetDaily broke the story of President Clinton's
Executive Order 13083 -- which totally re-defined federalism and threatened to gut the 10th Amendment -- it was a month before the Post finally got around to covering the story in a July 17, 1998, piece by Post staff writer David Broder. No credit to WorldNetDaily.

On Feb. 27 of this year, Post staffer Marc Fisher interviewed WND Editor Joseph Farah about another WorldNetDaily scoop -- Jane Fonda's conversion to Christianity. In his story, "When Barbarella Met Jesus," Fisher writes: "This is one of those Internet specials, a report that originated on a wacky Web site and found its way onto page one of the Washington Times before flying all over the infotainment universe."

And when WND first brought the brutal rape-murder of 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising to national attention, the ensuing controversy over the virtual media blackout on the case led to the Washington Post's ombudsman, E.R. Shipp, writing

this:

"There is an explanation for the absence of coverage of the brutal rape and asphyxiation death of 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising, but those who are inclined to believe the David Dukes, Joseph Farahs and Tim Grahams of the world -- who have asserted that the story has been suppressed so that homosexuals won't be portrayed negatively -- will not be satisfied."

So, while the Post has no problem in attempting to marginalize or trivialize WorldNetDaily by calling it names like "wacky Web site," or comparing veteran journalist and CEO Joseph Farah with Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, it also has no problem picking up WND's stories and packaging them as its own.

For the sake of new readers who may not be familiar with the three-year track record of WorldNetDaily.com, a new feature is hereby introduced: "WND Scoops: You read it here first!"

Although by no means an exhaustive listing of original stories, "Scoops" features some of the high-profile stories that have had the greatest impact on Americans over the last three years. "Know Your Customer," the National ID card, CNN-Time's "Tailwind" fraud and many others are described and linked.

The list will be updated, of course, as new breaking stories are reported right here in WorldNetDaily, and subsequently picked up by other media -- who may or may not let on as to who reported the story first.

The following are just some of the big news scoops broken right here:

• The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's
  
  "Know Your
  Customer" plan would have required banks to report "unusual" customer activity -- including simple deposits and withdrawals -- to the government. Exposure of the plan in WorldNetDaily led privacy activists to bombard the FDIC with more emails and faxes than the agency had ever previously received. Ultimately, the U.S. Senate voted 88-0 to stop the proposal.

• Executive Order 13083 was President Clinton's total re-definition of federalism.
  
  After exposure in WorldNetDaily and subsequent protests from local and state officials across the country, the White House ultimately suspended the order and issued a rewritten version.

• WorldNetDaily was first to expose fundamental journalistic flaws in CNN-Time's
  
  "Tailwind" story, which alleged American soldiers had used chemical weapons during the Vietnam war. Ultimately, CNN and Time apologized for the documentary and fired the producers.

• WorldNetDaily first reported actress
  
  Jane Fonda's conversion
  to
  Christianity, a story subsequently picked up with attribution by virtually the rest of the establishment media, including Associated Press.

• WorldNetDaily broke the international story of
  
  the betrayal of
  Laos' Hmong
  tribesmen, recruited as CIA Special Forces soldiers to fight side-by-side with Americans during the Vietnam war. The reports showed how the Hmong have been persecuted not only by the governments of Laos and Vietnam, but also betrayed by the United States government and the United Nations.

• WorldNetDaily was first to report
  
  the efforts of Congress to
  authorize a national identification card.

• WorldNetDaily was first to provide national exposure to the story of the homosexual rape-murder of 13-year-old
  
  Jesse
  Dirkhising. Subsequently, the Associated Press acknowledged its error in failing to cover the gruesome Arkansas case.

• WorldNetDaily was first to report that President Clinton signed off on the
  
  installation of eavesdropping devices on the phones of
  White House
  staffers. In addition, WorldNetDaily Washington bureau chief Paul Sperry found Clinton
  
  paid AT&T to change phone software in order to disguise
  long-distance caller traffic.

• WorldNetDaily first reported that the
  
  stash of unrecorded
  White House e-mails totals close to 1 million, and includes messages from the Democratic National Committee during the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign. In addition, the newssite broke the story of how the
  
  supposedly independent contractor hired to "restore" White
  House e-mail records employs two senior Clinton officials. Sperry also first reported that the contractor that previously handled White House e-mail operations hotly disputes claims that
  
  it caused a
  computer "error" that led to a two-year hole in records of e-mail sent
  to West Wing officials.

• WorldNetDaily first reported that despite Vice President Al Gore's tough talk, the U.S.
  
  throttled defense of Taiwan in 1996 --
  deliberately stationing only one carrier near Taiwan waters to avoid
  "antagonizing" China.

• WorldNetDaily first reported
  
  the Washington Post's astounding
  $100 million loss in developing its Internet component,
  Washingtonpost.com.

• WorldNetDaily broke the story of how
  
  Citibank stopped serving
  "businesses that deal in weapons" -- a policy that was reversed shortly
  after exposure.

• WorldNetDaily broke the story of the plan for
  
  transceivers to
  be implanted in humans and monitored by GPS satellites. The new technology, currently used to locate lost pets, has been adapted for use in humans, allowing implant wearers to emit a homing beacon, have vital bodily functions monitored and confirm identity when making e-commerce transactions.

• A declassified U.S. military report obtained by WorldNetDaily confirmed
  
  that communist China is indeed a threat to the Panama
  Canal -- an assessment directly contradicting the public testimony given to the Senate by the U.S. military.

• WorldNetDaily first reported that
  
  Motorola and former Clinton
  national security adviser Richard Barth obtained the export of advanced
  encrypted radios to the Chinese police.

• The wildfire that burned over 16,000 acres in Lincoln National Forest in southern New Mexico -- destroying homes and forcing residents to evacuate -- would never have occurred had the U.S. Forest Service not stopped maintenance crews from doing their job, according to the director of the local electric cooperative,
  
  WorldNetDaily
  reported.

• WorldNetDaily first reported how a federal judge had ruled
  
  the
  Census Bureau has no automatic right to ask questions felt to be
  personal or intrusive and that it cannot threaten or prosecute citizens
  who refuse to answer such
  questions.

• WorldNetDaily first reported how White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster death was
  
  characterized as a professional "hit" in a
  511-page court document charging obstruction of justice.

• WorldNetDaily was first to report on a
  
  former Internal Revenue
  Service special agent who determined his agency was illegal.

• WorldNetDaily first reported
  
  White House operative Terry
  Lenzner's long-time CIA connection.

• WorldNetDaily first reported on evidence the
  
  White House was
  using the Internal Revenue Service as a political attack dog.

• WorldNetDaily first reported on
  
  the militarization of the
  federal government.

• WorldNetDaily first reported on the
  
  dangers and hazards of the
  gasoline additive MTBE.

• WorldNetDaily first reported that
  
  China was aiding Pakistan on
  the development of long-range missiles. The New York Times followed up
  the story days later.

• Beating other media by three weeks, WND revealed that Indonesian billionaire James Riady, the shadowy Clinton-Gore fund-raiser, was
  
  about to be investigated by the Justice Department.

• Two days before the Washington Post ran an almost identical story, WND's Paul Sperry reported that the
  
  FBI was pressuring Senate
  committee staffers to search their computers for e-mail messages
  relating to Energy Department whistleblower Notra Trulock. The Post later confirmed that it had gotten the story from WND, apologized and ran a correction crediting WND for first having reported the story.

• WorldNetDaily first reported on allegations that
  
  unauthorized
  foreign nationals were granted access to government supercomputers at the Army Research Labs in Aberdeen, Md. Reporter David Bresnahan also revealed long-standing
  
  charges of widespread plagiarism at the Army
  lab.

• WorldNetDaily's Paul Sperry was first to uncover and report on the
  
  Internet pornography scandal in the Clinton White House, involving the downloading by White House staffers of massive amounts of hard-core porn video files. The story was subsequently picked by virtually all other major news media, including the Washington Post, Associated Press, MSNBC, USA Today and many others -- all crediting WorldNetDaily with breaking the story on the latest White House scandal.

• In
  
  "Gore dashes for kid cash," WND's Patrick Poole first reported that Vice President Al Gore's plan to expand a federal health insurance program for children (the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP) by $42 billion would cost $42,000 per child.

• In
  
  U.S. helps Russia build better missile WND was first to report that the Clinton administration has been helping Russia to improve a deadly new missile -- the Kh-31 "Krypton" anti-radar missile, which is designed to destroy American Patriot and Aegis radar systems.

• In one of the more controversial WND stories of the year, Geoff Metcalf was first (by at least two weeks) to report that
  
  President Clinton planned to make a trip to communist Vietnam before the end of his presidency. At first denied by all, the trip was later confirmed and widely reported in the news media. Another allegation, based on interviews with high-ranking U.S. Navy officials, that Clinton wanted to avoid offending Vietnam by lowering the American flag on a Navy ship to below the level of the communist nation's flag while in Vietnam's territorial waters, was refuted by the Navy. However, WND has multiple high-level Navy sources who confirm that lowering the American flag was indeed discussed -- although intense publicity after WND's four articles likely caused the plan to be abandoned, they say.

• In
  
  "Foster planned date with wife," WND reported for the first time that, according to previously unreviewed files on the computer hard drive of a deceased White House attorney, Vincent Foster and his wife had plans for the night of July 20, 1993 -- the day he was found dead. "One of the files referred to an engagement to go out that evening with his wife," said former White House computer expert and whistleblower Sheryl Hall.

• In
  
  "Cyberporn scandal hits Commerce Department," Washington bureau chief Paul Sperry disclosed that the White House porn scandal (first revealed by WND) had spread to the Commerce Department, where the security official in charge of investigating the private backgrounds of Commerce employees was suspended for downloading and storing pornography on his government computer.

• In her report entitled
  
  "Scientists: Relic authenticates Shroud of Turin," Mary Jo Anderson, reporting from Oviedo, Spain, revealed how scientists and forensic specialists gathered in the Spanish city to examine the "Sudarium of Oveido" (widely believed to be the linen facial covering of Jesus Christ), have determined that the Sudarium in turn authenticates the Shroud of Turin -- believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus. The Sudarium is reportedly the other linen cloth found in the tomb of Christ, as described in the Gospel of John.

• In an amazing and previously unreported story filed from Copenhagen, Denmark, WND international correspondent Anthony LoBaido revealed that
  
  Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has sent hordes of female assassins to Denmark as well as other European destinations to wipe out Kurdish refugees and defectors fleeing Iraq, and even has installed spies on the Danish Refugee Council, according to the Danish Red Cross.

• In an exclusive WND radio interview with reporter Geoff Metcalf and subsequent
  
  news story, U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Jack Daly, a victim of a 1997 laser assault from a Russian merchant ship -- the Kapitan Man -- charged several government officials with treason for their role in a cover-up of the attack and related espionage activity.

• In his Nov. 6 column,
  
  "Voter fraud, again!" WND Editor Joseph Farah revealed that election mailers sent out by the California Democratic Party and signed by President Bill Clinton, urging newly registered Hispanic voters to vote for Democrats, was apparently intended for a target group that included non-registered non-citizens. Furthermore, as detailed in Farah's column and subsequent
  
  news stories by reporter Julie Foster, the mailers contained an unofficial "voter identification card" -- the "Clinton card" -- which the president urged recipients to take to the polls. It is believed that with California's lax election laws (which prohibit poll workers from checking voters' ID), non-registered non-citizens presenting such a card at a California polling place could have voted in the Nov. 7 election.

• One of the defining issues -- and perhaps the most strongly felt -- in the 2000 presidential election was first brought to light by WorldNetDaily. Three days before the Nov. 7 election, Jon Dougherty reported that many members of the United States
  
  military were unable to vote for their next commander in chief. After the election, Dougherty continued to probe allegations from service personnel and their families that they either
  
  never received asked-for absentee ballots, or got them too late to vote.

• WND news editor Diana Lynn's exclusive, entitled
  
  "'Condo commandos' caused ballot snafu," revealed how Palm Beach County's "condo commandos" -- leaders at condominium complexes for those 55 and older -- and other Gore operatives created the perceived need for a recount by giving the wrong instructions to loyal voters about how to cast their ballots in the Nov. 7 election. The bad information, in turn, created confusion that ultimately contributed to more than 19,000 ballots being thrown out.

• Between early September and election day, Nov. 7, 2000, WorldNetDaily published an exhaustive series of investigative reports by native Tennessee reporters Charles Thompson and Tony Hays on Vice President Al Gore and his Tennessee past -- including his vast
  
  connections to Soviet operative Armand Hammer, his alleged
  
  interference with various criminal investigations involving family and friends, and even documented reports of the environmental champion being a
  
  notorious polluter in his home state. As a result of these reports,
  
  claim radio, newspaper and law enforcement representatives in Tennessee, Gore lost his home state -- and its 11 electoral votes -- and lost the presidency.

• A pair of Russian warplanes that made at least three high-speed passes over a U.S. aircraft carrier stationed in the Sea of Japan in October constituted a much more serious threat than the Pentagon has admitted and were easily in a position to destroy the ship if the planes had hostile intentions,
  
  WND's Jon Dougherty was first to report.

• WorldNetDaily Managing Editor David Kupelian filed an exclusive report on the surprising results of the Israeli military's investigation into the high-profile shooting death of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, an event that helped to spur on the bloody 2000 "intifada" (or uprising) in Israel.
  
  "Who killed Mohammed al-Dura?" also revealed the widespread recruitment of "martyrs" among Palestinian children, who are promised heavenly rewards (or divine punishment if they don't cooperate) for sacrificing their lives in the pursuit of their leaders' nationalist and religious goal of expelling Jews from Israel, which they consider their historic homeland of Palestine.

• In
  
  "Judge orders Florida's military votes counted," WND was first among the American media to report the judicial reinstatement of many previously disqualified military absentee ballots in Florida.

• In
  
  "Why Iraq's buying up Sony Playstations 2s," WND editor Joseph Farah broke the surreal Christmas story of Saddam Hussein's clandestine purchase of thousands of Sony Playstation 2s in order to bundle them together to form a crude supercomputer for military applications. At the same time, a week before Christmas, one of America's most popular gifts was almost impossible to buy, thanks to the "Butcher of Baghdad."

  Is this a complete list? Hardly. For three years WorldNetDaily reporters and editors have been on the cutting edge of breaking a wide variety of stories -- from executive power abuse to the federalization of local police to invasions of privacy rights.

  Sometimes we get credit for our work, and sometimes we don't. But it always has impact.