FIT TO PRINT?(news coverage at World Tribune.com)

Aficionados of the Drudge Report may have noticed several striking headlines recently linking to stories from the World Tribune, an enterprise with a title as grand and ambitious as it is unfamiliar. One such story last week began, "U.S. intelligence suspects Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have finally been located." The apparent scoop--of stop-the-presses significance--was unsigned, and billed as a "special to World Tribune.com." The Times, the Journal, and the Washington Post, meanwhile, not only got beat but failed even to acknowledge the news in the days that followed. What gives?

Not everyone ignored it: Rush Limbaugh, for instance. "There's a piece in the World Tribune today--one of the papers in the United Kingdom--exactly as theorized on this program early on," he said on his radio show. "It's unconfirmed, but it's a story that many of the weapons of mass destruction are at present buried in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon." Fox News, catering to a similar demographic, enlisted a military analyst that evening to discuss potential ramifications--military intervention in Lebanon?--on "The O'Reilly Factor." According to the story, the weapons were probably delivered to the Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah stronghold, in a caravan of tractor-trailers that was spotted leaving Iraq in January, two months before the war began, as part of a multimillion- dollar storage deal between Saddam Hussein and the Syrian government.

In fact, the World Tribune is not published in the United Kingdom, nor is it, to be precise, a newspaper. It is a Web site produced, more

or less as a hobby, in Falls Church, Virginia, and is dedicated to the notion, as its mission statement explains, that "there is a market for news of the world and not just news of the weird." (Nonetheless, the site includes a prominent feature, Cosmic Tribune, with an extraterrestrial focus, and it links to a Mafia journal called Gang Land News.) Its editor and publisher, Robert Morton, is an assistant managing editor at the Washington Times and a former "corporate editor" for News World Communications, the Times' owner and the publishing arm of the Unification Church, led by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. (Morton and his wife, Choon Boon, are themselves followers of the Reverend Moon.) Among the World Tribune's other recent half-ignored scoops are that Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for last month's blackout and that a North Korean defector stressed, during a meeting in July with White House officials, the need for a preemptive military strike against Kim Jong Il.

Morton said last week via e-mail that he founded the site as an experiment, back in 1998, while ...