How Wikipedia Puts The Existence Of A Free Press At Risk, And A Free Press Will Die, Not With A Bang, But A Wiki Options Rating

[Jon Awbrey]

How Wikipedia Is Putting The Existence Of A Free Press At Risk

Wikipedia has shown us that a mass medium can be rendered so plastic and so well-leveraged that any part of it can be manipulated by a relatively small number of people, in ways that defy a free society's usual means to guard against it, so long as the special interests in question have a moderate amount of resources and the will to do so. If there are portions of the content that remain untouched, it is for two reasons only: (1) no one has conceived a stake in them yet, (2) virgin forest makes for good cover.

If you're thinking that Wikipedia is the Latest Thing in Blows Against The Empire, then you have a DoubleThink coming.

Jon Awbrey, Comment in The Guardian, 30 Jan 2009, 2:02am

[Jon Awbrey]

Good Grief, it's like Wikipediots can't comprehend anything anymore that doesn't come in the form of animated cartoons.

APCO was hatched in 1984 as a subsidiary of the Washington, D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter � best known for its years of representing the giant tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris. APCO set up fake “grassroots� organizations around the country to do the bidding of Big Tobacco. All of a sudden, “normal, everyday, in-no-way-employed-by-Philip Morris Americans� were popping up everywhere. And it turned out they were outraged � outraged! � by exactly the things APCO's clients hated (such as, the government telling tobacco companies what to do). In particular, they were “furious� that regular people had the right to sue big corporations … you know, like Philip Morris. (For details, see the 2000 report “The CALA Files� (PDF) by my friends and colleagues Carl Deal and Joanne Doroshow.)

� Michael Moore, “How Corporate America Is Pushing Us All Off a Cliff�, 19 Nov 2010

[MZMcBride]

Good Grief, it's like Wikipediots can't comprehend anything anymore that doesn't come in the form of animated cartoons.

APCO was hatched in 1984 as a subsidiary of the Washington, D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter � best known for its years of representing the giant tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris. APCO set up fake “grassroots� organizations around the country to do the bidding of Big Tobacco. All of a sudden, “normal, everyday, in-no-way-employed-by-Philip Morris Americans� were popping up everywhere. And it turned out they were outraged � outraged! � by exactly the things APCO's clients hated (such as, the government telling tobacco companies what to do). In particular, they were “furious� that regular people had the right to sue big corporations … you know, like Philip Morris. (For details, see the 2000 report “The CALA Files� (PDF) by my friends and colleagues Carl Deal and Joanne Doroshow.)

� Michael Moore, “How Corporate America Is Pushing Us All Off a Cliff�, 19 Nov 2010

Call me dense, call me a �†ool, call me whatever you'd like, but I still don't understand what argument you're making. A "free press" has never been free. It's confined by legal constructs, it's confined by financial constructs, it's confined by social constructs. Anyone who thinks, for example, that the contents of the newspaper aren't or haven't been affected by the ads that run alongside the stories is absolutely crazy. That's the nature of the "free press," then and now (perhaps even more so now given the financial struggles that the newspaper industry is facing).

I think you make a convincing argument that Wikipedia is not an exception when it comes to the possibility for abuse or manipulation. And I don't think many people disagree with you on that point. But where you lose me (and likely others) is when you say that Wikipedia is putting the existence of a free press at risk. That argument I still don't understand or see any convincing evidence to support, but perhaps it's just One Of Those Things (OOTT) and I should simply move on.