Internet
Wikipedia Is Biased In Favor Of Liberals, Study Finds
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger said to Unheard in 2021 that Wikipedia cannot be trusted any longer as a neutral source of information, saying it has become “propaganda.”
“You can’t cite the Daily Mail at all. You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues either. It’s banned,”
Wikipedia entries are more likely to paint public figures on the right in a negative light than the left, a Manhattan Institute study released Thursday found.
The study analyzed the sentiments of 1,628 words that were used in reference to political topics and found that Wikipedia generally uses more negative terms in reference to right-leaning public figures, and less when referencing left-leaning figures. The results would suggest that Wikipedia is contradicting its “neutral-point-of-view” policy, according to the study.
It also found that certain terms associated with right-wing politics are connected with emotions of anger and disgust more than left-wing politics. The same pattern can be seen with left-leaning ideas being more associated with joy related terms than right-leaning ideas.
The study warns that OpenAI language models share similarities with Wikipedia, underscoring the potential for bias in Wikipedia to affect other systems that rely on OpenAI technology.
“There is a degree of overlap in the prevailing sentiment associations of political terms in word embeddings derived from Wikipedia content and word embeddings from the OpenAI GPT series,” the study said. “This is not surprising, given that Wikipedia articles are likely a prominent part of OpenAI’s secret corpus of data used to train ChatGPT.”
OpenAI’s ChatGPT software has been shown to express left-leaning bias in its responses, according to a separate finding from the Manhattan Institute. Other researchers in 2022 have also found bias in its content filtering system.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger said to Unheard in 2021 that Wikipedia cannot be trusted any longer as a neutral source of information, saying it has become “propaganda.”
“You can’t cite the Daily Mail at all. You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues either. It’s banned,” Sanger said. “So, what does that mean? It means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream center-Left media, then it’s not going to appear on Wikipedia.”
Wikimedia Foundation, the parent 501(c)(3) that manages Wikipedia, created the Wikimedia Endowment as a “collective action fund” managed by the left-wring grantmaking titan Tides Foundation, which has donated millions of dollars to left-leaning causes since its inception. In 2019, the Wikimedia foundation hired Amanda Keton as general counsel, who was previously the CEO of Tides Advocacy, the 501(c)(4) arm of Tides that works on the “creation, financing, and consultation of various left-of-center organizations,” according to Influence Watch.
The Wikimedia Foundation did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Catherine Herridge
How X And Joe Rogan Broke The Back of 60 Minutes
TOP LINE: | |||||||||||||||
Super consumers of news are flocking to X and other platforms that support independent journalism, diverse voices and embrace transparency. The post election TV ratings abyss is driven both by technology and by the public’s loss of trust in Mainstream media. | |||||||||||||||
DEEP DIVE: | |||||||||||||||
To buy MSNBC or not to buy? | |||||||||||||||
This week’s headline that Comcast will spin off its cable channels underscores the tectonic shift in the media marketplace and how technology is providing the exit ramp for competing platforms. | |||||||||||||||
When my job as a senior investigative correspondent at CBS News was terminated in February, I took a few months to educate myself about the marketplace because so much had changed since I left Fox in 2019. What I found was genuinely surprising, a little frightening and, oddly, re-assuring for the strength of our democracy. | |||||||||||||||
You can’t argue with the data. It is compelling. On Election Day, according to @Xdata, the platform boasted record usage of 942 million posts worldwide and 2.2 million hours of watch or listen time over approximately 160k live events. The X data crushed engagement numbers for the mainstream media (MSM.) | |||||||||||||||
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By example, a Tucker Carlson interview on X has 35 million engagements. The CBS Evening News has 4.5 million viewers. If I had to choose, I’d take 30 million engagements on X because it represents explosive growth. | |||||||||||||||
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The new super consumers of news are flocking to X and other platforms that support independent journalism, diverse voices, and embrace transparency which can strengthen democracy. This is nothing short of an industrial revolution driven both by technology and by loss of trust in corporate media. | |||||||||||||||
In 2023, Human Rights lawyer Jacob Mchangama wrote about the upheaval and resulting, “elite panic.” | |||||||||||||||
“Elite panic is this recurring phenomenon throughout the history of free speech, where whenever the public sphere is expanded, either through new communications technology, or to segments of the population that were previously marginalized, the traditional gatekeepers, the elites who control access to information, tend to fret about the dangers of allowing the unwashed mob — who are too fickle, too unsophisticated, too unlearned — unmediated access to information. They need information to be filtered through the responsible gatekeepers and it may be even more dangerous to allow them to speak without adult supervision. That’s a phenomenon that we see again and again. And we’re seeing it play out now on social media. … [Elite panic is] one contributing factor to the free speech recession.” | |||||||||||||||
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If you asked me four years ago, if a presidential candidate could skip a 60 Minutes interview, I would have been skeptical. Four years later, candidate Trump bypassed the legacy news magazine and instead, sat down with Joe Rogan. As of this writing, the marathon sit-down viewership reached 51 million views. | |||||||||||||||
There is no doubt Rogan is a skilled interviewer who can draw out his subjects and deliver huge audiences. Compared to heavily edited network TV reports, the raw, unedited format reveals much about the subject. In politics, the podcast is perfectly suited for the “beer question” which measures a candidate’s authenticity and likability. | |||||||||||||||
The progressive Harris campaign took a more traditional media approach and came up short. Neither celebrity endorsements which feel less relevant nor a 60 Minutes interview seemed to move the needle. The combined audience of the 60 Minutes Kamala Harris interview and its views on YouTube landed at about 10 million, far less than what Rogan and X delivered. | |||||||||||||||
The legacy of the Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview is not her responses but the lingering controversy over the CBS’ interview edit. And that is where the public’s loss of trust in the media comes in. I believe this is another driver of the audience exodus. | |||||||||||||||
CBS aired two different answers from the Vice President to the same question from correspondent Bill Whitaker about the Israeli Prime Minister apparently ignoring the Biden Administration. | |||||||||||||||
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Since, a credible complaint has been filed at the FCC alleging “news distortion” at the network with a reasonable demand that the full, unedited Kamala Harris transcript be released. CBS News has said “it fairly presented the interview to inform the viewing audience and not to mislead it.” | |||||||||||||||
In the October newsletter, I explained that releasing the full, unedited transcript would resolve these questions. There is ample precedent. | |||||||||||||||
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As a senior investigative correspondent at CBS News, I interviewed President Trump at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I advocated for and CBS News published the full, unedited transcript. | |||||||||||||||
The CBS News Trump interview was not a special case. The full, unedited transcript from Attorney General Bill Barr’s 2019 interview with CBS chief legal affairs correspondent Jan Crawford was also shared by the network. And more recently, 60 Minutes released the full unedited transcript of its interview with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. | |||||||||||||||
If the current trend continues, in the 2028 election cycle, the broadcast networks will firmly take a back seat to podcasts, town halls, and investigative journalism on X. For independent journalists and small digital newsrooms, the challenge is developing revenue streams that are viable. | |||||||||||||||
In February, I was not comforted by the analogy that losing my corporate reporting job was like getting pushed off the Titanic when there were still seats in the lifeboats. In retrospect, I wonder if it may turn out to be more accurate than I initially thought. | |||||||||||||||
After turning down job offers for which I remain grateful, I began building the Catherine Herridge Reports brand on X and in the newsletter marketplace. These platforms are the new media beachheads. Content is King. | |||||||||||||||
I’ll have more to say about the future of journalism and why journalism is called a profession for a reason. Look for exclusive new content on media accountability in the coming days! | |||||||||||||||
Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter and supporting independent investigative journalism! |
Censorship Industrial Complex
Tucker Carlson: Longtime source says porn sites controlled by intelligence agencies for blackmail
From LifeSiteNews
Journalist Glenn Greenwald replied with a story about how U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson changed his tune on a dime about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows the government to spy on American communications without a warrant. The journalist made the caveat that he is not assuming blackmail was responsible for Johnson’s behavior.
Tucker Carlson shared during an interview released Wednesday that a “longtime intel official” told him that intelligence agencies control the “big pornography sites” for blackmail purposes.
Carlson added that he thinks dating websites are controlled as well, presumably referring at least to casual “hook-up” sites like Tinder, where conversations are often explicitly sexual.
“Once you realize that, once you realize that the most embarrassing details of your personal life are known by people who want to control you, then you’re controlled,” Carlson said.
He went on to suggest that this type of blackmail may explain some of the strange, inconsistent behavior of well-known figures, “particularly” members of Congress.
“We all imagine that it’s just donors” influencing their behavior, Carlson said. “I think it’s more than donors. I’ve seen politicians turn down donors before.”
Journalist Glenn Greenwald replied with a story about how U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson changed his tune on a dime about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows the government to spy on American communications without a warrant. The journalist made the caveat that he is not assuming blackmail was responsible for Johnson’s behavior.
Greenwald told how he had seen Johnson grill FBI Director Christopher Wray about his agency’s spying and “could just tell that he felt passionately about (this),” prompting Greenwald to invite Johnson on his show, before anyone had any idea he might become Speaker of the House.
“One of the things we spent the most time on was (the need for) FISA reform,” Greenwald told Carlson, noting that the expiration of the current iteration of the FISA law was soon approaching. He added that Johnson was “determined” to help reform FISA and that it was in fact “his big issue,” the very reason he was on Greenwald’s show to begin with.
Johnson said regarding FISA, “We cannot allow this to be renewed; it’s a great threat to American democracy; at the very least, we need massive, fundamental reform” according to Greenwald.
Johnson became House Speaker about two months to three months later, and Greenwald was excited about the FISA reform he thought Johnson would surely help bring about.
“Not only did Mike Johnson say, ‘I’m going to allow the FISA renewal to come to the floor with no reforms.’ He himself said, ‘It is urgent that we renew FISA without reforms. This is a crucial tool for our intelligence agencies,’” Greenwald reounted.
He noted that Johnson was already getting access to classified information while in Congress, wondering at Johnson’s explanation for his behavior at the time, which was that he was made aware of highly classified information that illuminated the importance of renewing FISA and the spying capabilities it grants, as is.
Greenwald doesn’t believe one meeting is enough to change the mind of someone who is as invested in a position as Johnson was on FISA reform.
“I can see someone really dumb being affected by that … he’s a very smart guy. I don’t believe he changed his mind. So the question is, why did he?” Greenwald asked.
“I don’t know. I really don’t. But I know that the person that was on my show two months ago no longer exists.”
Theoretically, there are many ways an intelligence agency could coerce a politician or other person of influence into certain behaviors, including personal threats, threats to family, and committing outright acts of aggression against a person.
A former CIA agent has testified during an interview with Candace Owens that his former employer used the latter tactic against him and his family, indirectly through chemicals that made them sick, when he blew the whistle on certain unethical actions the CIA had committed.
“This is why you never hear about CIA whistleblowers. They have a perfected system of career destruction if you talk about anything you see that is criminal or illegal,” former CIA officer Kevin Shipp said.
As a form of coercion, sexual blackmail in particular is nothing new, although porn sites make the possibility much easier. In her book “One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein,” investigative journalist Whitney Webb discusses not only how the intelligence community uses sexual blackmail through people like Jeffrey Epstein but how it was used by organized crime before U.S. intelligence even existed.
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