Convicted on Wikipedia « Memory Hole
“Let’s convict the son-of-a-bitch in the press. That’s the way it’s done.”-President Richard Nixon
We are familiar with conviction in the press, one sub-category of the lying and propagandizing featured on a daily basis in the mainstream print and electronic media. But in this age of transparency and equal opportunity, we now find conviction on Wikipedia—and anyone can do it. Especially anyone with a huge government or military or corporate budget and hundreds of paid employees who use pen names to write their Wikipedia articles—and to vigilantly monitor them so that their views will stay posted. And we all use Wikipedia, although we know that we can’t trust it. But we use it anyway, and the things we read there, especially if well articulated and effectively illustrated, stick in our heads and become part of our reality. Most topically, we have wiki-convictions in two recent shootings in Washington, D.C.
