Fox News caught altering Franken Wikipedia entries; Diebold & others edit Wiki to advance PR ‘reality’

Wired magazine reported yesterday that CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith matched every one of the millions of ‘anonymous edits’ on the popular reference website Wikipedia to the organizations where the edits originated. Every anonymous Wiki edit created an IP address record, and he simply matched those IP addresses to available lists of who controls them. He quickly discovered that everyone from the Central Intelligence Agency to the New York Times and the Church of Scientology have anonymously changed entries, generally to quietly promote their respective organizations’ agendas and PR interests, or else delete embarrassing material. (You can try Griffith’s lookup system yourself!)

The Minnesota angle is that someone on the Fox News Channel computer network (working from IP 12.167.224.228) changed several entries about U.S. Senate candidate Al Franken, back when he was hosting a show on the Air America network. Staff at the Franken campaign told PIM, “We are beginning to suspect the Fox News Channel has something of a bias when it comes to Al.”

Originally, Franken’s entry said:

Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the [[National Public Radio]] program ”[[Fresh Air]]” on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox’s case against him was “literally laughed out of court” and that “wholly (holy) without merit” is a good characterization of Fox News itself.

The Fox staffer changed it (here’s the exact revision):

Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the liberal [[National Public Radio]] program ”[[Fresh Air]]” on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox’s case against him was the best thing to happen to his book sales.

The Brit Hume Wiki entry once contained:

Many groups and commentators, including [[Media Matters for America]], and liberal broadcasters [[Al Franken]], and [[Keith Olbermann]], have claimed that Hume distorted Roosevelt’s views.

but the same Fox terminal changed it to

Many groups and commentators, including [[Media Matters for America]], and liberal broadcasters [[Al Franken]], and [[Keith Olbermann]], have claimed that Hume distorted Roosevelt’s views in an attempt to ride Mr. Hume’s coat tails in the ratings race as Mr. Hume hosts the highest rated political program on cable television.

More fun stuff below the fold…

The anonymous (and busy!) Fox editor also liked to label people (and NPR) ‘Liberal’ and deflate Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC ratings, among other subtle moves, such as striking the word “some” from “Some conservatives feel that Olbermann’s reporting carries a liberal bias.” Still letting their audience decide?

Also someone from the Israel Policy Forum anonymously added a City Pages link to U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s page, about his political history.

The whole thing is really amusing: everyone got caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Everyone at Wired.com is voting for their favorite shady hacks. Diebold scrubbed all the negative material about their horrible, hackable voting machines; someone in the GOP spoiled the ending to a Harry Potter book; MySpace (another Rupert Murdoch property) removed material about how their service has censorship and spyware issues. Someone in the DC Justice Department said Wikipedia’s entry on President Bush “IS TAINTED BY POLITICAL BIAS THAT HAS NO PLACE IN WIKIPEDIA;” A NY Times employee said President Bush was a “jerk jerk jerk jerk“; Disney suppressed the “digital rights management” criticism of Cory Doctorow, adding instead, “In general, consumers knowingly enter into the arrangement where they are granted limited use of the content,” I.E. the cutoff of fair use rights. Sony also took out DRM material. ExxonMobil whitewashed the Exxon Valdez; ChevronTexaco deleted Biodiesel; someone at FEMA vandalized a Joe Lieberman opponent; the Scientologists deleted stuff about Xenu, their mythical galactic warlord; Walmart removed “Wages at Wal-Mart are about 20% less than at other retail stores”, replacing that with “The average wage at Wal-Mart is almost double the federal minimum wage.” The venerable Wall Street house Brown Brothers Harriman deleted all the material about how they helped finance Nazi Germany while President Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, worked there. Someone at the National Security Agency “Removed ECHELON link, irrelevant to article,” as they explained in the log, and added “National Softball Association” to the ‘NSA’ disambiguation page. And naturally, on the Baath Party entry someone at the Republican Party changed the frame of American action from “occupying” to “liberating.”

It’s a really excellent view into how so many in the establishment get annoyed by Wikipedia and manipulate it. Everyone who thinks they can count on Wikipedia for accurate material should keep in mind that major corporate PR firms and intelligence agencies have just been caught spinning and erasing data en masse. Liberals, conservatives, and conspiracy theorists in the alternative media all feel vindicated after previously accusing Wikipedia of bias and suppression.