O.K. So I haven't been very diligent adding to this blog lately. Mea culpa. No great excuses, except that I've been busy getting my courses at Queen's University off to a good start.
You may have heard about the attacks on Wikipedia lately - corporations hiring PR firms to change the entries about them for the better. You can find out more at the links below. Just another reminder that words can mis inform and mislead as well.
Be A Citizen Journalist
a project of the Center for Media & Democracy
Featured Participatory Project: Help Expose the Attempts to Spin Wikipedia (Week 2)
Source: SourceWatch Project on Tracking Attempts to Spin Wikipedia
Last week we started a new participatory project to expose the government agencies, corporations and lobbying groups that have been censoring, whitewashing or otherwise spinning Wikipedia. (See CMD Senior Researcher Diane Farsetta's great blog post for some background on this sordid tale.) So far we've logged several attempts at spin into the respective SourceWatch profiles, including:
- Chevron deleting the article on "Biodiesel";
- Military contractor Raytheon deleting information on them spying on their competitors and the U.S. Air Force;
- Republican-friendly broadcaster Clear Channel adding allegations of plagiarism to Democratic Senate Candidate Al Franken's profile;
- PR firm Hill & Knowlton removing descriptions of the political repression by the government of the
- Amway parent company Alticor removing descriptions of the company's use of "Google bombing" to drive down the search engine rankings of Web sites critical of the company;
- Electronic voting machine company Diebold removing descriptions of the controversies surrounding their machines' failures and glitches;
- Conservative news network Fox News changing Keith Olbermann's profile (and not in a good way - see Olbermann's reaction on this video);
The information here is obviously very important and, thanks to SourceWatch's high rankings in Google searches, easily accessible to citizens, journalists and policymakers checking out the record of these politically active and high social-impact organizations. There are many dastardly edits left, however, and we need your help to make sure they aren't lost to history. There's no need for technical expertise, just head over to the SourceWatch page for the project, where there are complete instructions, examples and an email hotline for support.
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