Wickedpedia

Saw John Seigenthaler, Sr. on C-Span's Washington Journal discussing allegations in his biography on Wikipedia, to-wit: "For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." He considered the remarks slanderous and contacted the founder of Wikipedia and got the offending material taken down, but the biography kept being edited to include insults and scurrilous allegations.

I've never really understood what Wikipedia was supposed to be. To allow anybody using the internet to edit biographies and history, and to do so anonymously, seems reckless in the extreme, because once you understand how material gets posted on this site, you have to consider Wikipedia a suspect source. Why would this be a better source of accurate information than someone's blog?

Several callers admonished him that he's a public figure and as a founder of USA Today is in a better position to get this material to be removed and have his biography locked. He acknowledged that and generally seemed to support freedom of the internet, and I got the impression that his main concern was to warn people about the unreliability of much that is posted on the internet.

Several callers chided him for his own newspaper's slant and publication of biased reports about President Bush and other issues. I don't read USA Today very often so I can't really say how it compares to the NYTimes and the WaPo, but it seems to be a typical MSM paper.

I think that most conservative callers felt that the media in general are pretty hypocritical about the internet, criticizing it and belittling blogs while refusing to admit their own bias.

I see the internet today as being much more like the press at the time the Constitution was drafted--a wide range of opinion and points of view, which was the intent of the First Amendment, but with the rise of journalism schools the media have become homogenized to the point of that most news organizations are superfluous. There is little difference among them, which defeats the intent of having a free press, which is debate and argument and disparate opinion. You'll only see that in a few fairly conservative newspapers and magazines. I don't know of any libertarian newspapers. The blogosphere, on the other hand is opinionated, partisan, etc. but it doesn't profess to be professional, objective and fair, but it does debate and argue vigorously. Too bad newspapers have lost that.