Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sent a letter to the nonprofit operator of Wikipedia alleging a pattern of liberal bias in articles on the collaborative encyclopedia.
āI write to request information about ideological bias on the Wikipedia platform and at the Wikimedia Foundation,ā Cruz wrote to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander in aĀ letter dated October 3. āWikipedia began with a noble concept: crowdsource human knowledge using verifiable sources and make it free to the public. Thatās what makes reports of Wikipediaās systemic bias especially troubling.ā
Citing research from the conservativeĀ Manhattan Institute, Cruz wrote that āresearchers have found that articles on the site often reflect a left-wing bias.ā Cruz alleged that ābias is particularly evident in WikipediaāsĀ reliable sources/perennial sourcesĀ listā because it describes āMSNBC and CNN as āgenerally reliableā sources, while listing Fox News as a āgenerally unreliableā source for politics and science. The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center gets a top rating, but the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, is a āblacklistedā and ādeprecatedā source that Wikipediaās editors have determined āpromotes disinformation.āā
Do not treat this as just a tantrum. Itās the rightās playbook of moving the overton window to the right by taking extreme positions and invoking the golden mean fallacy. It certainly has worked on MSM.
Ooh thatās a new one for me.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Argument-to-Moderation
Its been less effective on independent media and journalists. But its also just a rhetorical ploy. The real rightward shift in mass media towards conservative bias has come with mass consolidation of media ownership over the last 40 years.
Where as we once had a plethora of different regionalized perspectives and local coverage pools, now weāre dealing with national syndication of conservative opinion pieces, police-blotter local news (incentivized by far-right broadcast managers), and wave after wave of native advertising used to turn news media into a more profitable revenue stream.
I would say the worst thing about modern American local news isnāt even the naked reactionary Op-Eds and crime stories. It is the daily drum-beat piece about the lottery - who is winning, how much the pot is worth, where you can buy tickets, how many people are excited to participate⦠Fucking horrible. Since I gave up terrestrial TV, these ads stick out like a pus-spewing boil on the face of every single broadcast news feed.