WorldNetDaily.com, the right-wing website for which Jerome Corsi works as a staff reporter, decided to look into a claim made by Corsi and made repeatedly in right-wing blogs and on talk radio -- that the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama “has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website” -- and reported that it was false. In an August 23 article, WND reported that “FactChecker.org [sic] says it obtained Obama's actual birth certificate and that the document was indeed real,” and added, “A separate WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic.” Corsi is the author of the debunked and discredited book The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (Threshold Editions, August 2008).
WND stated that the August 21 Factcheck.org report “discredited some of the claims of Internet bloggers, such as that the certificate as viewed in a scanned copy released by Obama's campaign lacked a raised seal,” and that the WND investigation “revealed methods used by some of the bloggers to determine the document was fake involved forgeries, in that a few bloggers added text and images to the certificate scan that weren't originally there.” But WND did not mention that Corsi repeated the charge that Obama's birth certificate was fake on the August 15 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends. Factcheck.org, however, did note in its report that the “charge leaped from the blogosphere to the mainstream media earlier this week when Jerome Corsi ... repeated the claim in an Aug. 15 interview with Steve Doocy on Fox News.”
WND's August 23 article also did not note that the website previously reported allegations that the birth certificate posted to Obama's campaign site was a “fake document.” In an August 8 article, WorldNetDaily reported, “Israel Insider is reporting that analysts working separately have determined the birth certificate posted on the Daily Kos website and later on Sen. Barack Obama's 'Fight the Smears' campaign website is fraudulent, and now two different actions have been launched to try and obtain the truth about the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's birth."
From the August 23 WorldNetDaily.com article:
However, FactChecker.org [sic] says it obtained Obama's actual birth certificate and that the document was indeed real. The site discredited some of the claims of Internet bloggers, such as that the certificate as viewed in a scanned copy released by Obama's campaign lacked a raised seal. FactChecker.org also established that many of the alleged flaws in the document noted by bloggers were caused by the scanning of the document.
A separate WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic. The investigation also revealed methods used by some of the bloggers to determine the document was fake involved forgeries, in that a few bloggers added text and images to the certificate scan that weren't originally there.