Category: propaganda

Is Wikipedia distorted by ideology and propaganda?

September 18, 2024 • 11:30 am

Well, the Free Press article by Ashley Rindsborg below argues that yes, Wikipedia definitely leans towards the Left, favoring Left-wing over Right-wing sources as more reliable, and giving more favorable coverage to Democrats than Republicans (see the figures in the article). Click to read:

You’ve probably noticed some bias in some articles, and it gets worse if you go to the “talk” page on Wikipedia articles and see the editors fight out the contents of a given article.  The debates and biases mentioned in the Free Piece press piece involve whether Kamala Harris was really the “border czar”, whether the Hunter Biden laptop issue was a Russian fabrication, whether the idea that Covid might have resulted from a Wuhan lab leak was a “conspiracy theory”, and, as you see below, the material on Zionism.

I won’t go into those controversies, as you can read the article yourself, but I do want to highlight several assertions in the piece. The crux of the matter is that what goes into Wikipedia depends on whether there are not only sources for assertions, but reliable sources. It turns out that the list of “reliable” sources seems biased and, to my mind, dubious, and the policy on what’s reliable was in fact confected by a single man, the anonymous “MrX”. An excerpt:

Wikipedia articles present their subject matter with a casually authoritative, almost stolid tone. But beneath the surface lies endless argumentation played out in rounds of procedural maneuvering that would shame the most deft legislative hand. User bans, discretionary sanctions, requests for comment, arbitration cases, topic bans, page bans, deprecated sources—all encoded in a shorthand jargon—lie behind the “consensus” displayed in an article’s seemingly ripple-free surface. In a way, this arcana of behind-the-scenes conceptual machinery is Wikipedia’s most impressive feature. It’s what keeps it from grinding to a halt on infighting and intransigence.

The problem is—like with the Harris border czar reference, which is still omitted from the czar article (and will almost certainly stay that way)—the consensus it achieves often lines up with the prerogatives of the Democratic Party and the media establishment that supports it.

One of the reasons for this cuts to the very heart of how Wikipedia works. The encyclopedia is governed by a raft of policies like Wikipedia:Notability (subjects of articles should meet a threshold of notability), Wikipedia:Recentism (overdue emphasis must not be placed on recent events), and Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View (self-explanatory). None, however, play even close to the outsize role that Wikipedia:Verifiability plays, with its insistence that claims “must be attributable to reliable, published sources.” The obvious question this standard raises is which sources are considered reliable. While some Wikipedia policies invite ambiguity, on this the site is clear. The Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources page filters media sources into categories of “Generally reliable,” coded in a green-filled cell on the page’s table, yellow for those on which there is “No consensus,” and red for “Generally unreliable.”

The breakdown of sites filtered into each respective category is telling. The cadre of news outlets that collectively make up the mainstream media—ABC, CBS, and NBC News, Associated Press, Vanity Fair, Vogue, The Atlantic, Axios, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Wired, CNN, AFP—are classified green for reliable. Strongly left-leaning outlets like Vox, Mother Jones, The Guardian, HuffPost, and The Intercept are as well. But so are outright leftist or socialist outlets, including Jacobin, The Nation, and The Independent, as is civil rights advocacy NGO Southern Poverty Law Center.

Conservative outlets like Fox News (on politics and science), The Federalist, The Post Millennial, and The Washington Free Beacon are red for generally unreliable. A lower ring of “deprecated sources,” whose use is outright prohibited, includes the Daily Mail, The Daily Caller, The Sun, NewsMax, and The Epoch Times. The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal (the latter of whose news pages are known for tilting more leftward than its right-of-center opinion page) are the only American conservative outlets with a green rating. Right-leaning tabloid New York Post is red; left-leaning tabloid New York Daily News is green.

While conservative American media is almost uniformly red, the same cannot be said of foreign outlets with dubious agendas. State-owned networks China Daily and Xinhua—whose purpose is to spread Chinese government propaganda to the English-speaking world—get a yellow for “no consensus.” Al Jazeera, owned by Qatar, an authoritarian state, is blessed with a green reliability rating.

The Post is red and the Daily News is green? And, seriously, the Southern Poverty Law Center is green?–the center that was sued by Maajid Nawaz for classifying him as an anti-Muslim extremist (he’s a Muslim, for crying out loud!), and had to fork over $3 million to Nawaz for defamation. The SPLC is well known as unreliable, but it’s still green. You can judge the list above. The NYT, for example, is certainly biased towards the progressive Left in both its news and op-ed sections.

One more thing before I move on. Who made the decisions about sources? Yep, one anonymous guy:

Given all this, you might think Reliable sources/Perennial sources is a foundational aspect of the site, ratified early on by some vote or community procedure. But you’d be wrong. While the policy of using reliable sources originated in 2005, the Reliable sources/Perennial sources list was created as recently as 2018. Its originator was neither a panel nor a commission of Wikipedia editors. The list was never formally adopted by the community. Rather, it was the creation of a single influential editor who, until his departure from the site in 2020, went by the handle MrX.

MrX created the list during the heady days of Trump-related political controversies when Wikipedia’s Talk pages were marked by as much tumult as the political discourse in the broader culture. His first iteration of the list included only a single source green-coded as generally reliable: The New York Times. The Daily Mail was, already from the list’s inception, classed as red. At the same time, MrX—who, by the time he left the site, was in the top 99.998 percentile of users by number of edits—was engaging in fraught debates on the site, sometimes devolving into what’s known as edit wars, on topics of extreme political sensitivity. He was highly influential in the editing of the article on Donald Trump, which (perhaps unsurprisingly) remains the first result on a Google search for Trump’s name. Between 2015 and 2020, MrX made nearly 600 edits to the Donald Trump article alone, not including edits to Trump-related articles.

I believe Greg Mayer also has his own issues with Wikipedia, but I’ll let him weigh in below, either on this post or in the comments.

At any rate, this article from United With Israel (click below) reports similar distortions of the term “Zionism”:

 

An excerpt from the article above. You can of course check the changes on the “Talk” page for “Zionism.”

A heated debate has erupted on social media over recent changes made to the Wikipedia entry for Zionism, sparking accusations of historical revisionism.

Users on social media have over the past several 24 hours posted a comparison between the 2023 and 2024 versions of the Wikipedia page, with one user, Liv Lovisa, claiming that “history is being rewritten.”

Blake Flayton, a vocal commentator on Jewish and Israeli issues, responded to the post, calling the changes “egregious” and urging someone with expertise to edit the page to reflect what he considers to be a more accurate portrayal.

At the center of the debate are key changes in the language used to describe Zionism, the movement that called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in what is now Israel.

The 2023 version of the page framed Zionism as a nationalist movement born in the 19th century that sought to secure Jewish self-determination. In contrast, the 2024 version of the entry introduces more charged terminology, describing Zionism as an “ethno-cultural nationalist” movement that engaged in “colonization of a land outside of Europe,” with a heightened focus on the resulting conflicts with Palestinian Arabs.

“Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible,” it reads.

. . . . Critics, including Flayton, argue that the new language in the Zionism entry distorts the historical narrative, positioning Zionism in a more negative light by drawing parallels to colonialism and downplaying the movement’s core goal of creating a safe homeland for Jewish people.

The use of the term “colonization,” in particular, has been a flashpoint, as it evokes a political context that some feel misrepresents the motivations behind the establishment of Israel and overlooks the historical persecution faced by Jews that led to the Zionist movement.

Another Twitter pro-Israel voice, Hen Mazzig, wrote: “The new Wikipedia entry on Zionism isn’t just inaccurate, it’s downright antisemitic. It asserts that the origin of Ashkenazi Jews is ‘highly debated and enigmatic,’ echoing Khazar theory, the dangerous lie that Ashkenazi Jews are converts and not descendants of the Jews exiled from the Land of Israel.”

Call me a biased Jew, but to me Zionism is simply the 2023 definition: the view that there should be a Jewish state to serve as a refuge for those subject to the Holocaust, pogroms, or bigotry. But as the war proceeds, the idea that Zionism (which of course created the UN-approved state of Israel) is a nefarious plot has strengthened. This goes along with the current tendency to call Jews “Zionists” (yes, most of them are), but to also say, falsely, that anti-Zionism is NOT anti-Semitism.

To counteract that last trope, here’s Natasha Hausdorff in the Munk debate debating and defending the view that anti-Zionism is indeed anti-Semitism; see especially the bit starting at 3:10, making an analogy which is sheer genius. Hausdorff and her debate partner, Douglas Murray, won that debate. (By the way, i think that Hausdorff, a British barrister who an expert in international law and an officer in the UK Lawyers for Israael, deserves her own Wikipedia page!).

If you have comments on biases or the lack thereof in Wikipedia, please put them in the comments section.

Distortion of slavery in southern history textbooks

February 1, 2024 • 9:15 am

Reader Jim Batterson sent me this illustration from the textbook he used in his seventh-grade “Virginia History” class in Newport News, VA. He was about 13 years old at the time. And this is the kind of stuff that people have, for good reason, tried to purge from secondary-school education. Fortunately, this kind of distortion isn’t found in modern textbooks. But look at the picture below: a fanciful depiction of a slave family meeting “the master.” It implies that slavery was a good thing, and everyone was happy.

Here’s what Jim said:

Here in Newport News, I remember that the VA history we got was much like what is discussed briefly in the link with the drawing of a well-dressed slave family arriving to the warm handshake and greeting of his white master.  I think the illustration says it all.

I ran across the drawing in a book review last week.  Gov Linwood Holton helped get rid of these texts when he was governor in the 70’s; and the introduction of “standards of learning” with broader public input in the late 80’s and 90’s led to vast, though not perfect, improvements in presentations on how non-whites were treated if I recall correctly. Gov Holton, a moderate Republican, was Sen. Tim Kaine’s father in law and sent his kids to  desegregated public schools.  I thought that you would find the drawing to be of interest…it was taught through the 1960’s!

I was in elementary school only in the sixth grade in Arlington, Virginia, and don’t remember taking any Virginia history, and by the time I returned from Germany and went to school in Arlington for the 11th and 12th grades, they no longer taught Virginia history (it was taught in the 4th, 7th, and 11th grades).

But this drawing gives me the willies. Warm handshakes all around, a well-dressed slave with a hat and valise, and a well turned-out family. Now what are the chances that, after an Atlantic crossing in the hold of a ship, an enslaved person would look like that?

Source: Citation: Virginia: History, Government, Geography. F226 .S5 1957. Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
Original Author: Francis Simkins, Sidman Poole, and Spotswood Hunnicutt, authors
Created: 1957

See the text from the Encyclopedia Virginia below the picture.

From the Encyclopedia Virginia:

A well-dressed Black family is cordially greeted by a white man—presumably their enslaver—in this fanciful illustration above the chapter title,”How the Negroes lived under Slavery.” Given that the family was arriving via a sailing ship, the reality is that they had probably been recently sold at auction, forcibly transported by boat while being closely guarded, and then delivered to their new “owner.” This illustrated page is from Virginia: History, Government, Geography (1957), the state-sanctioned seventh-grade history textbook that was written with the express intention of presenting a Lost Cause view of slavery as a benign institution. The accompanying text claims that slave laws were “not strictly enforced” and that slave masters were kindly, since “they knew the best way to control their slaves was to win their confidence and affection.” The text goes on to portray the lives of the enslaved as being carefree and happy, as they were supposedly free to gather for dancing, singing, and celebrating religious events—and even, on occasion, having the right to own “guns and other weapons.” The brutal, de-humanizing institution of slavery was far from this gentle depiction; yet these sanitized textbooks remained in use in some Virginia schools until the late 1970s.

According to The Virginia History and Textbook Commission, which also reproduces this page, these textbooks were removed from schools only in 1972, a year after I graduated from college in Virginia:

The Virginia National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) opposed the textbooks, and the Virginia Teachers Association (VTA), a Black educators organization, successfully promoted an accurate telling of Black history that led to the adoption of Black history courses throughout the commonwealth beginning in the 1960s. By 1965, educators were widely complaining that the textbooks amounted to propaganda. Nonetheless, in 1966 the State Board of Education extended the use of the textbooks for another six years.

By 1972, of course, schools had been desegregated for 18 years, but there was still de facto segregation based on segregated neighborhoods—and no busing. I remember having black classmates in elementary or junior high schools, and only a few in my high school, Washington-Lee (now renamed) in Arlington, Virginia.  And that despite there being plenty of African-Americans in northern Virginia: they simply lived in completely different areas.

As Jim notes, many Virginia kids, weaned on a diet of this kind of segregationist pap, grew up thinking that slavery wasn’t so bad, and, in modern times, that it was natural to have a racial hierarchy, with white people being in positions of power over black people. (I can’t resist adding that Palestinian children grow up with similar kinds of supremacist textbooks, with theirs extolling martyrdom and calling for the death of Jews.)

Russia wishes Europe a miserable Christmas

December 26, 2022 • 9:25 am

The article and video below were published in both Newsweek and the New York Post, so I think you can take the video, put out by RT News, as genuine. And it’s pretty horrible, as it’s a Russian-made video telling Ukrainians (and Europeans in general) what a lousy holiday season they’re going to have after the Russians keep bombing them. It’s really a piece of propagandistic blackmail.

First, what is “RT News”? Wikipedia describes it as

RT (formerly Russia Today or Rossiya Segodnya (Russian: Россия Сегодня) is a Russian state-controlled international news television network funded by the Russian government. It operates pay television and free-to-air channels directed to audiences outside of Russia, as well as providing Internet content in Russian, English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic.

. . . RT has regularly been described as a major propaganda outlet for the Russian government and its foreign policy. Academics, fact-checkers, and news reporters (including some current and former RT reporters) have identified RT as a purveyor of disinformation and conspiracy theories. UK media regulator Ofcom has repeatedly found RT to have breached its rules on impartiality, including multiple instances in which RT broadcast “materially misleading” content.

That, then, is the source. Click below to see the Newsweek report and then the dreadful video.

An excerpt:

Russian state TV released a Christmas message to Europe recently amid Moscow’s faltering invasion of Ukraine.

The video, released by Russia Today (RT), comes as the Russia-Ukraine war enters its 10th month on Christmas Eve. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military has struggled to achieve substantial goals in Ukraine throughout the war, with Ukraine’s spirited defense—bolstered by aid from the West—blunting military gains. Throughout the fall, Ukraine retook thousands of square miles of formerly occupied land.

Most of Europe rallied around the Eastern European country, providing humanitarian and military aid to Kyiv, much to Putin’s dismay. Many European countries have also issued sanctions against Russian businesses, including oil. Russian oil has long been used across Europe, and these sanctions have been attributed to rising energy costs in several European countries.

RT highlighted the rising cost of oil in a new propaganda video, which aimed to illustrate the effects of rising energy prices on Europeans.

The video—first reported by BBC’s Francis Scarr on Twitter on Friday—starts off by showing a scene from Christmas 2021, in which a young girl received a pet hamster wearing a bow for Christmas, while the holiday classic “Silent Night” plays in the background.

One year later, the girl’s father is seen creating a contraption for the hamster to generate electricity for the family, presumably because the cost of powering and heating their home has become too expensive due to sanctions against Russia. The hamster, running on a wheel, creates energy to light the Christmas tree as the family sits on a couch, dressed in coats and earmuffs.

The video then cuts to Christmas 2023, when the family, now appearing to live in poverty, is eating their Christmas dinner when the father finds the hamster’s bow in his soup, implying they were forced to cook the pet for a holiday meal.

“Merry ‘anti-Russian’ Christmas! If your media doesn’t tell you where this is all going, RT is available available by VPN,” text displayed at the end of the video reads, revealing it as an advertisement for the Kremlin-tied news outlet.

The video was met with mockery on social media, where Twitter users largely ridiculed its hyperbole and fear-mongering.

Journalist Dave Keating tweeted on Friday: “Russia not even trying to disguise its energy blackmail any more.”

This is pretty Nineteen Eighty-Four-ish: a mean-spirited holiday message that says, “Give up now or you’ll soon be eating hamsters in the dark.”  I imagine it would only further energize the Ukrainians!

h/t: David

An analysis of the Trump movie shown at the Capitol Rally: An exercise in fascism

February 4, 2021 • 12:45 pm

This is an interesting analysis of the two-minute film shown to the crowd that assembled at the Washington, D.C. pro-Trump rally on January 6, right after Donald Trump, Jr. and Rudy Giuliani spoke. And you know what happened after that! (Thanks to reader Ken for calling this to my attention.) The analysis by Jason Stanley goes through the movie frame by frame, and gives a written discussion of how it fits into the tradition of fascistic propaganda. I recommend watching the movie first (click on the Vimeo site below), then read the article and then re-watch the movie with fresh eyes.

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and an expert in the history and workings of fascism. His piece appears at the site Just Security, described by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU Law School as

“an editorially-independent online forum co-founded by CHRGJ Faculty Co-Chair Professor Ryan Goodman. It provides rigorous analysis of US national security law and policy, aiming to promote principled and pragmatic solutions to national security problems faced by decision-makers. Just Security‘s masthead includes people with substantial government experience, civil society attorneys, academics, and other leading voices.”

This is just to show you that this is no basement-dwelling YouTuber who did the analysis. You should take it seriously.

Okay, first skip the headlines below and watch the short movie. Then go back, click the headlines below and read Stanley’s analysis. I have a few thoughts at the bottom.

 

Stanley appears to know what he’s talking about, and emphasizes the many tropes of fascism that appear in this movie. There’s the father figure (Trump), the emphasis on the nation’s fears, the identifying of an enemy (apparently blacks and Jews), and the reliance on the military. The only thing I’m dubious about is Stanley’s identification of the Jews as the explicit enemy that needs to be overthrown. On the other hand, he does make some good points: this movie was carefully confected, and some of the images seem to make sense only in an anti-Semitic context.

Clearly, Stanley sees the movie as good fascist propaganda, and I can’t say I disagree. But was it really intended to prompt the demonstrators’ assault on the Capitol? I don’t do psychologizing so much, but Stanley seems to say, “yes”:

Each of us can decide what moral responsibility Trump personally has for a video to rouse his supporters at the rally. How much of a role the White House or Trump himself may have played in deciding to show the video and sequencing it immediately after Giuliani’s speech, we don’t know. But it is worth noting that the New York Times recently reported that by early January, “the rally would now effectively become a White House production” and, with his eye ever on media production, Trump micromanaged the details. “The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations. For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office,” the Times reported.

Worldwide, there have been many fascist movements. Not all fascist movements focus on a global Jewish conspiracy as the enemy, and not all of them were genocidal. Early on, Italian fascism was not anti-Semitic in its core, though it later turned that way. British fascism was not genocidal (though it also was never given the opportunity to be). The most influential fascist movement that takes a shadowy Jewish conspiracy as its central target is German fascism, Nazism. Nazism did not start out in genocide. It began with militias and violent troops disrupting democracy. In its early years in power, in the 1930s, it was socialists and communists who were targeted for the Concentration Camps, torture, and murder. But it must never be forgotten where Nazism culminated.

As a secular Jew, I have to take particular care when leveling the charge of anti-Semitism because it feeds into my own biases. So I reserve judgment here, but ask you to watch the movie and read the analysis with a clear head, and then come to your own conclusions. I’d advise you to do both watching and reading, for this kind of authoritarianism, no matter what you call it, is still heavily afoot in America.