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In an age of seemingly limitless access to information, there is a strange paradox: The “gatekeepers” at major tech companies and platforms routinely censor almost any point of view that is out of sync with their own. One of the most recent examples of that — and one near to the heart of this magazine — involves biased editing of Wikipedia to remove damning information about Hunter Biden because of citations of The New American magazine.
In an article that was as self-serving as it was ironic, the Washington Post recently reported on an anonymous “36-year-old physicist” (one must accept his credentials as a physicist on faith, since he is anonymous) who took on the task of editing “the Wikipedia page for Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son suddenly at the center of a national political crisis.” As the Post article put it:
The page was littered with insinuations about the 49-year-old’s business dealings in Ukraine and his father’s motivations for going after a prosecutor in the former Soviet republic. The dubious claims were spun from citations to the Epoch Times, a conservative news outlet recently blocked from advertising on Facebook, and the New American, a far-right magazine owned by the John Birch Society, the secretive anti-Communist organization.
The obviousness of the Post’s ad hominem attack on both the Epoch Times and The New American should serve to illustrate the reason this writer referred to the Post piece as ironic. Because immediately after dismissing both the Epoch Times and The New American as “a conservative news outlet recently blocked from advertising on Facebook” and “a far-right magazine owned by the John Birch Society” (respectively) — “crimes” to which either readily admits — the article expresses the consternation of the anonymous Wikipedia editor in finding a Wikipedia page that disagreed with his bias. In fact, it so disagreed with his bias, that he — in his obvious hubris — declared that the Wikipedia page on Hunter Biden must itself be biased. So, he fixed it. The article states:
“I said, ‘This was definitely written by someone who had a slant in mind,’ ” said the 36-year-old physicist, who goes by the name XOR’easter on the online encyclopedia and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid harassment. “I had to get in there and clean it out like a garbage disposal. Sometimes you just have to muck around.”
The idiocy of dismissing a well-articulated point, backed by facts laid out in a well-researched article, simply because one does not like the particular publication that published the article, is astounding. After all, that is what Wikipedia is: All of the pages on Wikipedia are summaries of facts cited from a variety of sources.
This writer understands that and uses Wikipedia extensively in his research for writing. Here is the caveat, though: Wikipedia should never be treated as a primary source, since it is not. This writer uses it a a starting point or for definitions of terms with which his readers may not be familiar (as the above ironic definition of ad hominem). When using it as a starting point, this writer backtracks the citations to their sources and then uses those sources to dig deeper — closer to the original, or primary, source. It can fairly be said that anyone who has read only the Wikipedia page for any given topic knows virtually nothing about that topic except what the (probably liberal) editor of that page wants him to know.
This case in point should be sufficient evidence of that.
But along with the attempted character assassination of the Epoch Times and The New American — with a dishonorable mention for The John Birch Society (which, by the way, is not a secretive organization — after all, we even publish the names of our writers and editors) — the article goes on to gloss over the facts surrounding the original claims of the Wikipedia page concerning Hunter Biden. It is beyond the scope of this article to cover that material — which can be found by searching elsewhere on this site — but the point is that removing those references from the Wikipedia page is tantamount to censorship on a platform that claims otherwise.
In an accidental admission that is very telling (and also illustrates why this writer referred to the Post piece as self-serving), the article states:
In place of the pro-Trump citations, he [the anonymous Wikipedia editor] added PolitiFact, Bloomberg and The Washington Post. Then he contacted an administrator and urged him to keep an eye on the Hunter Biden page in case it became a magnet for trolling.
Two points stand out here: First, that anything that may be deemed to damage Biden (even if it is true and can be backed by the data) is considered “pro-Trump” and must be removed. Second, that only “anti-Trump” sources with sufficient liberal bona fides (including the Post) are considered reliable sources for citation in a Wikipedia article that touches anything remotely political.
Not only is it self-serving of the Post to point out that conservative viewpoints were replaced by citations to the Post and other liberal publications, it is self-defeating. For, when the Wikipedia editing process is shown to be that nakedly skewed, why would anyone trust a citation by the Post?
But, as the late-night informercial announcer says, “Wait, there’s more.” Not content merely to purge the Wikipedia page of anything that shines a negative light on anyone whose last name is Biden, the anonymous Wikipedia editor took action to assure it would stay that way. As the Post article said:
He saw that a lengthy quote from Peter Schweizer, a senior editor-at-large at Breitbart News, had been restored after another user had removed it, so he axed it a second time. Nothing stops partisans from making new changes after someone like XOR’easter [the anonymous editor] has gone through an entry.
In case anyone suffers under the delusion that accuracy (and not political PR) was the goal, the article praises the anonymous editor for his arduous efforts and diligence, stating, “Over several days, the academic physicist said, he helped take the page from a D-plus to a B-minus. ‘It’s hard because we’re tracking a moving target in some ways,’ he said.”
The “grade” of the article went up as its conservative content went down. The point is apparent. Unaccountable, Left-leaning editors will stop at nothing to purge any viewpoint outside of that which is approved by the liberal establishment. And then, they will hide behind anonymity “to avoid harassment.”
Photo: juststock/iStock/Getty Images Plus
