It was twenty years ago today
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play
They’ve been going in and out of style
But they’re guaranteed to raise a smile(Opening verses of the title track of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”)
Do you remember that song?
Back in 1967, when the Beatles released the transcendent Sgt. Pepper album, I was 13.
Twenty years seemed like a very long time back then. But the song is now 50 years old, and sounds as fresh to me as the day I first heard it. In fact, the entire album does.
I’m thinking about this today as my company, the first independent online news source, the trailblazer, the pioneer, the vanguard of the new media revolution, will be observing its 20th anniversary this Thursday, May 4, 2017.
I’m hoping WorldNetDaily.com, or WND as we know it today, is still as satisfying, challenging, worthwhile and valuable to those who visit as it was when it literally took the world by storm two decades ago.
The fact that we’re still here and so many other Internet businesses are not suggests we’re doing something right.
Back when we launched, MSNBC.com was the No. 1 most visited website in the world. I vowed we would overtake them some day. I assumed that meant supplanting it as No. 1. While we eclipsed it in traffic more than 15 years ago, WND never became No. 1. That distinction today is held by Google.com, which didn’t exist in 1997 when WND first went live.
Nor did the other top four web properties exist when we launched: YouTube, Facebook, Baidu.com (the leading Chinese search engine) or Wikipedia.org.
I guess it was unrealistic to think one news site could ever be the top web property in the world. But we’ve done all right for ourselves, competing with news agencies whose assets are counted in the billions and whose investors ponied up hundreds of millions.
WND made it thus far with capital investments totaling less than $5 million. And, with that, the site ranks consistently among the top 500 in traffic among all websites of any kind in the U.S. It also ranks among the top 20 news websites.
Why? What’s the distinction? What sets it apart from the tens thousands of news properties in the world?
As the proud papa of this 20-year-old news phenomenon, I like to think it has something to do with the tools with which God equipped me and my colleagues. I can honestly say I think God was watching over me for decades, leading me to the creation of this enterprise – through more than 20 years of experience in what we today euphemistically call the “mainstream media.”
Today, the old media are in retreat. The alternative media are on the ascendancy. This is what I expected more than 20 years ago, but it is just now coming to fruition.
Why did I leave the old “mainstream media” to start something fresh? Because I saw that we had lost our way, we had abandoned our mission, we had betrayed our sacred trust in practitioners of the “free press.”
How?
Because, as everyone in the press once understood, the central role of the free press in a free society is to serve as a watchdog on government and other powerful institutions. That’s why America’s founders uniquely guarded in the First Amendment the practices of the free press as a guardian of liberty and another check and balance on government power.
I took that seriously 20 years ago. And I saw most of the establishment press did not. In fact, I saw a cozy, symbiotic and unhealthy relationship developing between the corporate press and state power. I vowed WND would never fall prey or be seduced by that temptation.
We stayed true. And now a great awakening is taking place all across America and even around the world. People are recognizing that they are being systematically lied to – not just by powerful forces in government but by those who are supposed to be their watchdogs in the press.
It’s about time.
Let me ask you one small favor as we kick off anniversary week here at WND. If you appreciate what we have done and what we still do here, would you take a minute to thank our team by doing something very meaningful to us? As a way to encourage my great team here, please sign up for WND’s free news alerts so we can remind you daily of what’s really going on in our world.
Blessings.
Media wishing to interview Joseph Farah, please contact [email protected].
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