Arthur Bergman at O’Reilly Radar has the lowdown on some changes Fox News has been making to the Wikipedia entries of their critics and competition (like Al Franken) which were traced back to a Fox News IP address.
Here is an example of an entry which was changed from:
The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken’s book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the [[National Public Radio]] program ”[[Fresh Air]]” on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox’s case against him was “literally laughed out of court” and that “wholly (holy) without merit” is a good characterization of Fox News itself.
into
The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken’s book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the liberal [[National Public Radio]] program ”[[Fresh Air]]” on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox’s case against him was the best thing to happen to his book sales.
Many companies use Wikipedia to build their own image, reputation and search rankings, but when it comes to damaging the Wikipedia entries of their competition, this crosses the line.
In the search engine world, search sabotage has been a hot topic as it is quite tempting to practice blackhat or obvious search spamming methods ‘on behalf’ of your competition to get them penalized by search engines or even Digg (like submitting all of your competitors’ blog posts to Digg with lots of bad grammar and spammy titles), but to witness a media outlet such as Fox News publicly change the Wikipedia entries of their competitors is quite embarrassing for News Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, Dow Jones and the reputable Wall Street Journal.
Then again, the move is not surprising, as this is also the company behind MySpace, Married With Children and Joe Billionaire 🙂
