Media top headlines July 16
A journalist ripping how the Steele dossier was covered, the White House saying it would work with Facebook to flag 'misinformation' on COVID-19, and Rep. Jim Clyburn getting Four Pinocchios for his voter ID claim round out today's media headlines.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger continued his criticism this week of the online encyclopedia that he helped create, citing the page on President Biden as an example of its leftist bias.
"You can trust it to give a reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything. Can you trust it always to give you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think the truth is," Sanger said Wednesday on LockdownTV with Freddie Sayers.
Sanger feels Wikipedia has changed considerably since he founded it alongside Jimmy Wales in 2001 and has been a critic for more than a decade. He said the site is no longer committed to neutrality and doesn't feature different points of view.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger feels the site is now biased. (Getty Images)
"Wikipedia is known, now, by everyone to have a lot of influence in the world … so there is a very big, nasty, complex game being played behind the scenes to make the articles say what somebody wants them to say," Sanger said, adding the site has a liberal bias.
"The Biden article, if you look at it, has very little by way of the concerns that Republicans have had about him," Sanger said. "So if you want to have anything remotely resembling the Republican point of view about Biden, you’re not going to get it from the article."
INSIDE WIKIPEDIA'S LEFTIST BIAS: SOCIALISM PAGES WHITEWASHED, COMMUNIST ATROCITIES BURIED
Sanger, who left the site in 2002, pointed to a short paragraph about concerns related to Biden and Ukraine on his lengthy Wikipedia entry.
"What little can be found is extremely biased and reads like a defense counsel’s brief, really," Sanger said.
Wikipedia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sanger has made similar comments in the past and penned a 2020 blog post declaring that the site is "badly biased," "no longer has an effective neutrality policy" and clearly favors left-wing politics. He wrote it has long forgotten its original policy of aiming to neutrally present information, and nowadays the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia reliably covers politics from a liberal point of view.
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"There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard of journalistic ‘false balance,’ which is directly contradictory to the original neutrality policy. As a result, even as journalists turn to opinion and activism, Wikipedia now touts controversial points of view on politics, religion, and science," Sanger wrote. "Examples have become embarrassingly easy to find."
The Wikipedia co-founder expanded on that notion during his chat with Sayers.
"The word for it is propaganda," he said.