Wikipedia Editors Paid to Protect Political, Tech, and Media Figures

A report in Huffington Post recently revealed the case of Wikipedia editor Ed Sussman, who was paid by media clients such as NBC and Axios to help diminish critical material. Paid editors operating in a similar manner to Sussman have worked on behalf of CNN contributor Hilary Rosen and the CEOs of Reddit and Intel, among other clients.

Other conduct by Sussman not covered by the Huffington Post shows him authoring fluff pieces for NBC executives and getting his proposed changes approved by another paid Wikipedia editor.

The report by Ashley Feinberg detailed former journalist Ed Sussman’s work as a paid Wikipedia fixer for clients such as Axios, NBC, and Facebook. Sussman did this work through the firm WhiteHatWiki, which he argues follows Wikipedia policies. Sussman disclosed his paid editing on Wikipedia and ostensibly worked within the rules by having other editors approve proposed changes.
 
However, Feinberg’s article noted several of Sussman’s requests involved removing or watering down potentially damaging material about clients, even when citing sources considered reliable on the site. Such removals would appear to violate Wikipedia’s neutrality policy, which states:

All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.

In one example Feinberg cited, Sussman requested changes to the page of Axios journalist Jonathan Swan regarding a false report he made last September claiming Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was resigning. A line noting the incident in Swan’s article was replaced with a paragraph hyping that Swan was “the first to report” Rosenstein’s offer to resign, despite the offer being refused. Sussman backed this spin with a...

Here Are 4 Egregious Ways the Left Wants to Transform American Politics

“When you can’t win the game, change the rules.”

That seems to be the motto of the far left these days. Not content to play by the rules, it hopes to tilt the playing field to its own advantage and in the process transform American politics.

Here are four ways it has proposed doing that.

1. Packing the Supreme Court

A number of Democratic presidential hopefuls have floated the idea of adding new seats on the Supreme Court.

To begin with, this is something the Constitution gives Congress the power to determine. But this isn’t the first time the political branches have played politics with the Supreme Court by trying to tinker with the number of seats.

Congress initially set the number at six justices (including the chief justice) when it passed the Judiciary Act of 1789. Then, in the waning days of President John Adams’ presidency, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1801, known as the “Midnight Judges Act,” which reduced the number of Supreme Court justices to five and created a number of new circuit court judgeships to be filled by Adams before his rival, Thomas Jefferson, took office.

For the next 60 years, Congress periodically added new seats, and the Supreme Court reached its high-water mark with 10 justices in 1863. Following the Civil War, Congress reduced the number of seats to seven amid its battle with President Andrew Johnson over Reconstruction. Then in 1869, Congress set the number of justices at nine, where it has remained since.

The last major attempt to alter the Supreme Court’s composition was in the late 1930s. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, upset with the conservative “Four Horsemen” of the Supreme Court thwarting parts of his New Deal agenda, tried to persuade Congress to allow him to appoint a “junior justice” for every sitting justice who remained on the Supreme Court beyond age 70.

That measure failed in the Democrat-controlled Senate. But Roosevelt got the last laugh—he got to “pack” the court the old-fashioned way, and ended up appointing eight justices throughout his time in office.

So while it’s not unprecedented to alter the number of seats on the Supreme Court, proponents of “court packing” should explain why they want to do so and what kind of justices they would appoint.

Odds are, they would favor activist judges who don’t understand the proper, limited role the judiciary is supposed to play in our government. That would end up compounding the problem of an activist Supreme Court that inserts itself into matters that should be handled at the ballet box and in Congress or statehouses across the country.

2. Granting Statehood to Washington, D.C.

Morning Mistress

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #573

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside? 

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific, 

from the beautiful to the repugnant, 

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed, 

you could be inspired, you could be appalled. 

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended. 

You have been warned.

Hot Pick Of The Late Night

USC Students React to Mueller's Trump-Russia Conclusions

Girls With Guns

Foresight is 2020..

The Difference Between Murder And Suicide...

How To Know When Your Nation Is DOOMED!

More Ayn Rand:

Collectivism Requires Brute Force..

Any Alleged Right Of One Man, Which Necessitates The Violation Of...

Ayn Rand Wisdom...

Ayn Rand Predicting The Enrichment Of Obama Donors With Doomed To Fail Green Companies

Ayn Rand Quotes

A Government Is The Most Dangerous Threat To Man's Rights...

Life Lessons from Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand Quotes

Ayn Rand on Collectivism

Happy Birthday Ayn Rand!

Ayn Rand Warns Of Those Who Seek To Be Your Master...

Minority Haterz..

Liberal Tears Result In Flash Flooding...

Saving Humanity...

Apologies to President Trump

With the conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe now known to a significant degree, it seems apologies are in order.

However, judging by the recent past, apologies are not likely forthcoming from the responsible parties.

In this context, it matters not whether one is a supporter or a critic of President Trump.

Whatever his supposed flaws, the rampant accusations and speculation that shrouded Trump’s presidency, even before it began, ultimately have proven unfounded. Just as Trump said all along.

Yet, each time Trump said so, some of us in the media lampooned him. We treated any words he spoke in his own defense as if they were automatically to be disbelieved because he had uttered them. Some even declared his words to be “lies,” although they had no evidence to back up their claims.

We in the media allowed unproven charges and false accusations to dominate the news landscape for more than two years, in a way that was wildly unbalanced and disproportionate to the evidence.

We did a poor job of tracking down leaks of false information. We failed to reasonably weigh the motives of anonymous sources and those claiming to have secret, special evidence of Trump’s “treason.”

As such, we reported a tremendous amount of false information, always to Trump’s detriment.

And when we corrected our mistakes, we often doubled down more than we apologized. We may have been technically wrong on that tiny point, we would acknowledge. But, in the same breath, we would insist that Trump was so obviously guilty of being Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet that the technical details hardly mattered.

So, a round of apologies seem in order.

Apologies to Trump on behalf of those in the U.S. intelligence community, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, which allowed the weaponization of sensitive, intrusive intelligence tools against innocent citizens such as Carter Page, an adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign.

Apologies also to Page himself, to Jerome Corsi, Donald Trump Jr., and other citizens whose rights were violated or who were unfairly caught up in surveillance or the heated pursuit of charges based on little more than false, unproven opposition research paid for by Democrats and the Hillary Clintoncampaign.

Apologies for the stress on their jobs and to their families, the damage to their reputations, the money they had to spend to hire legal representation and defend themselves from charges for crimes they did not commit.

Apologies on behalf of those in the intelligence community who leaked true information out of context to make Trump look guilty, and who sometimes leaked false information to try to implicate or frame him.

Apologies from those in the chain of command at the FBI and the Department of Justice who were supposed to make sure all information presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is verified but did not do so.

Apologies from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court judges who are supposed to serve as one of the few checks and balances to prevent the FBI from wiretapping innocent Americans. Whether because of blind trust in the FBI or out of ignorance or even malfeasance, they failed at this important job.

Apologies to the American people who did not receive the full attention of their government while political points were being scored; who were not told about some important world events because they were crowded out of the news by the persistent insistence that Trump was working for Russia.

Apologies all the way around.

And now, with those apologies handled — are more than apologies due?

Should we try to learn more about those supposed Russian sources who provided false “intel” contained in the “dossier” against Trump, Page and others? Should we learn how these sources came to the attention of ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who built the dossier and claimed that some of the sources were close to Putin?

When and where did Steele meet with these high-level Russian sources who provided the apparently false information?

Are these the people who actually took proven, concrete steps to interfere in the 2016 election and sabotage Trump’s presidency, beginning in its earliest days?

Just who conspired to put the “dossier” into the hands of the FBI? Who, within our intel community, dropped the ball on verifying the information and, instead, leaked it to the press and presented it to the FISC as if legitimate?

“Sorry” hardly seems to be enough.

Will anyone be held accountable?

Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) is an Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist, author of...