Joe Farah explains “news”

The WND chief bitchslaps all the idiot Americans who don’t grasp the concept:

For 24 hours, I have been deluged with e-mail – about 6,000 more than usual – that essentially fall into three categories:

Thank you for getting the goods on Barack Obama – I knew he was born in Kenya.

You really stepped in it this time, Farah. That document is bogus and it’s going to take the whole “birther” movement down once it is revealed as such.

Don’t you investigate the facts before you publish something? That document cannot be real because of X, Y and Z.

Because so many Americans have been educated in government schools, it is probably necessary for me to explain that reporting a news story is different than making an assertion.

No one at WND – not me, not Jerome Corsi, not any columnists, not any reporters – have defended the authenticity of the Kenyan birth certificate. No one here has made a judgment that it is real. What we did was report a fact – that California attorney Orly Taitz has filed a motion in federal court to determine its authenticity.

And yet people ask from time to time why I like writing for WND. I particularly liked the way Farah drew attention to the fact that there has been no evidence provided to demonstrate that the alleged CERTIFICATION of Live Birth document released by the Obama camp is legitimate despite similar questions about its authenticity.

Furthermore, I’m amused to note that some of the same people who claim that documentary evidence is not evidence are now claiming that a computer-generated piece of paper of unknown provenance “proves” Obama’s place of birth. Gentlemen, please! Where is the scientific evidence that Obama was born in Honolulu? Because, as we have been informed, if there is not scientific evidence to support a given assertion, it must be assumed to be false until proved otherwise. So, where are the peer-reviewed publications, the laboratory studies? What is the all-important scientific consensus? Because no scientific evidence to support Obama’s birth in Honolulu has been provided to date, every good scientific rationalist must assume that he was NOT born in Hawaii until conclusive scientific evidence to the contrary is provided. QED.