It is reported that Fox News, the house-channel of the Republican party, was caught with its pants down sabotaging Wikipedia entries. The Wikipedia is a hugely successful and valuable wordwide resource that relies on the honesty and integrity of its contributers, who can submit and amend entries to the internet encycopaedia . Fox News has allegedly been abusing this to change the Wikipedia entries of their critics and competition (like Al Franken) . A scanning device introduced by Wikipedia was able to trace the changes back to a Fox News IP address.
Here is an example of a Wikipedia entry which originally (and accurately) read :
- The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken’s book and greatly enhanced its sales. 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.
but this is how it was altered by Fox :
- The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken’s book and greatly enhanced its sales. 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.
Walken is not the only one who’s entry suffered in this way. Also targeted by Fox were Keith Olbermann, Chris Wallace, Shepard Smith and Brit Hume.
Many companies use Wikipedia to build their own image, reputation and search rankings, but when it comes to damaging the Wikipedia entries of their competition and changing actual comments this clearly crosses the line. Misrepresenting the sense of what someone says is the direct opposite of what any news channel should be doing, but of course few outside of the US regard Fox news as a legitimate or even serious ‘news channel’. Their daily editorial ‘memos’, directing what the public should see, are alleged to closely mirror the official Republican ‘talking points’ on any given day. Generally speaking Fox news, although popular with some sections of the American public, is notorious around the world for its unbalanced and biased reporting.
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