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Joseph Farah worked for a number of daily newspapers prior to the creation of WorldNetDaily -- he was editor of the now-defunct Sacramento (Calif.) Union, owned for several years by Richard Mellon Scaife, though he did not start work there after Scaife sold the paper to two Sacramento real estate developers, Daniel Benvenuti Jr. and David Kassis. They along with Farah were accused of taking the paper in an even more conservative direction than it had been under Scaife and skewing stories to reflect conservative ideas. Farah has also served as executive news editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner (now defunct) and served as editor-in-chief of a group of California dailies and weeklies.
Farah is the co-author, with U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo, of "This Land is Our Land," and in 1994 he collaborated with Rush Limbaugh on his book "See, I Told You So."
Farah co-founded the Western Journalism Center with James H. Smith, former publisher of the Sacramento Union. The center provided Christopher Ruddy with "additional expense money, funding for Freedom of Information Act requests, legal support and publicity" during his investigation of the death of Vince Foster while working as a reporter for the New York Post and the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. This included buying full-page ads in major newspapers reproducing Ruddy's work and co-producing a video about the Foster investigation with Ruddy. The center accepted $330,000 in donations from Scaife-connected foundations in 1994-95. The center has been involved in an ongoing lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over a tax audit it alleges was politically motivated. Farah is, like L. Brent Bozell (chairman of the board of the Media Research Center), also a member of the secretive Council for National Policy.
WorldNetDaily started in May 1997 as a project of the Western Journalism Center. WorldNetDaily describes itself as "a fiercely independent newssite committed to hard-hitting investigative reporting of government waste, fraud and abuse." WorldNetDaily.com, Inc., headquartered in Selma, Ore., but incorporated in Delaware, was spun off in 1999 as a for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit Western Journalism Center with the backing of $4.5 million from investors. Farah and the Western Journalism Center own a majority of WND, according to Farah; the rest of the stock is owned by about 75 private investors. As of late 2001, WorldNetDaily employed 25 people. Farah says that about 80 percent of WND's revenue comes from the sale of books and videos through the site; WND has a book publishing division in a partnership with Thomas Nelson Publishers, a prominent Christian publisher; authors include Katherine Harris and Michael Savage. The company expected to turn a profit in 2002.
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