Rush Limbaugh got me to thinking real hard about the media I once knew and loved.
He started off saying the press is dead … It has “assumed room temperature,” he would say. It was fini.
You know he’s right. Rush is always right.
I’ve been more or less absent from the scene for a little over 18 months. Some of you know what happened to me. I was working really hard trying to save this journalistic experiment from the plague of the Tech Giants. They destroyed our advertising revenues through underhanded, dishonest and monopolistic means we’ve been documenting for years, which caused our annual revenues to plunge from $15 million to $1 million. Staff had to be cut to a bare minimum. We had to stop publishing books and producing movies – two of our big successes for years.
Then I had to drop out myself from the race because of a series of massive strokes from November 2018 to March 2019.
Call me a casualty of Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which launched this massive “indecency” by giving the Tech Giants a waiver from the lawsuits that tend to plague journalism sites – even though their brazen “editing” and “censoring” of news and viewpoints they don’t like makes them de facto journalists, not simply “neutral platforms” like AT&T and Verizon, as they claim. Their mega-monopoly status has also made Google and Facebook advertising behemoths – landlords to what remains of the press. The Tech Giants promote reporting they like, namely that with a progressive-left slant, while censoring and suppressing independent, honest, hard-hitting reporting like ours.
The carnage started shortly after the arrival of President Trump. My public pleading could not stop it. It was a massacre. Frankly, we’re fortunate anything is left of WND. No one was hit harder.
Before my strokes, I hoped that Donald J. Trump would take on the Tech Giant cartel in time for his reelection bid. He didn’t, but he still outperformed all expectations.
I was one of the first people in the arena in 1997 when the internet was just getting started. Like the early Drudge Report, WorldNetDaily was pretty much a two-man shop – my wife, Elizabeth, and me. But we knew reporters, we knew news judgment, and we knew headlines. Now, almost 24 years later, the press is just as rigged as our elections.
But I have good news for you today.
We’re learning to live in the post-apocalyptic world of Google and Facebook.
What’s that look like? What does it mean to live in a world where advertising can no longer support a robust journalism enterprise?
Allow me to introduce you to the WND News Center – the reader-supported, tax-exempt 501(c)3 nonprofit that is giving birth to an optimistic, credible, fearless and uncompromisingly truth-oriented news entity in a sea of fake news, propaganda and disinformation.
The original vision and hopes we have long had for WorldNetDaily are still intact at your favorite news site, WND.com. But those ideals are now shared by our sister organization, an intrepid new journalism nonprofit called the WND News Center. Approved by the IRS as a public charity, the WND News Center is committed to making its journalistic output freely available for publication by other news organizations. Many believe the nonprofit route is the wave of the future in American journalism, where the traditional advertising-based business model has been largely destroyed by Big Tech.
Freedom’s not going away in America. It’s here to stay. Allow me to make a plea that my selfless partner, David Kupelian, has often written in my absence: Please give generously to the WND News Center and help rejuvenate a truly free press in America!
Thank you and Merry Christmas.
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This article was originally published by the WND News Center.
