[WikiEN-l] Re: Biased "current events" stories

Fri Sep 17 22:47:05 UTC 2004

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 20:29:03 UTC, Delirium 
<delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> Jens Ropers wrote:
> 
> > Well, then I must have been dreaming when I removed all these "what 
> > would Jesus say" - Christiospams from totally unrelated topics.
> > And the folks insinuating that the "Vietcong", not the U.S. had used 
> > Napalm in Vietnam must have been entirely correct as well, I guess.
> 
> I didn't say all articles, but the general slant.  There are attempts to 
> bash Bush thrown into completely unrelated articles; the "Rumsfeld 
> shaking hands with Hussein" images...  There's also an odd strong pro-science-establishment 
> bias, as evidence by the fact that most of our psychology articles are 
> basically the (controversial) "party line" from American Psychiatry 
> Association's _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual_.

Columbus: ...That reminds me, I want to take some of you folks home with 
me to show that I discovered you.

Indian: What you mean, you discover us?  WE discover YOU!

Columbus: *You* discovered *us*?  Just how to you get that?

Indian:  We discover you on beach here.  It all in how you look at it.

--Stan Freberg, in an innocent time when NativeAmericanPidgin was a 
humorously outdated stereotype, not a punishable offense

It's all in how you look at it.  

We all have selective perceptions.   Nearly everyone thinks that those bad
Other Guys dominate the press and (by some unscrupulous means) the 
government and Wikipeida and on and on.  Hell, half the US believes that 
there is a Liberal Media Bias.  Phaugh.  And perhaps a Martian would 
perceive that I'm as bad in my own way as they, or as the super-patriot 
Ronald Reagan who constantly bemoaned the terrible danger that the poor 
little USA was in from powerful dictators in Cuba and Nicaragua.  

One does not have to be a right-winger (by world standards -- those of the
USA are irrelevant) to perceive a widespread active hostility to anything 
American around here, often accompanied by the "they're all alike" dogma 
of the true [fill in inflammatory word for yourself].  This is annoying.  
There are also lots of All-American Yahoos, whose works have been cited in
(but did not originate) this thread.  This is annoying.  Which is worse?  
Wrong damn question.  But the answer is NPOV.

If we were not determined to avoid agreeing on the obvious, we might 
conclude something like this:
Wikipedia has a whole lot too much political POV stuff, and it should be 
fixed.  

But meanwhile, I respectfully commend Delirium's attention to articles on 
Cold Fusion, Pathological Science, and other centers of dissidence where 
Establishment ideas of science have not suppressed the fans of the weird. 
I notice these, of course, because  it seems to me that Reason is under 
serious threats in such articles.  

[Bets being accepted on whether responses will point out that the stupid 
American is unwittingly showing his own bias in that last sentence.]