Let me tell you a story about the kind of Wikipedia bias we’re covering at NPOV and how it really works. It's a story about the world's biggest knowledge platform, the most famous newspaper in the world, a nepo baby news publisher, an angry editor—and me.

Over the past five years, the New York Times has paid a white-shoe Wikipedia editing firm to polish NYT-related Wikipedia articles. They put a lot of focus on the article of A. G. Sulzberger—the paper's publisher and chairman of the NYT Company.

This firm has made a lot of requests about A. G. Sulzberger's Wikipedia entry. For example, apparently Mr. Sulzberger prefers there not be spaces after the periods in his initials—"A.G." and not "A. G. " This must be one of those news-owner peccadilloes us plebs don't get, but they were very insistent and spent DAYS coaxing Wikipedia editors to make this change. Wikipedia (i.e. the two editors who gave a shit about this bit of media marginalia) stood its ground on the basis that spaces after periods in initials is "house style."

Mr. Sulzberger lost that particular battle: tragically, his name is now etched into digital eternity punctuated not quite to his particular liking. (Davos-world problems.)

Some of you—not nearly enough—might be aware that I wrote a book about the Times. It's called The Gray Lady Winked, and it chronicles 10 instances where NYT's misreporting actually changed history. (Available at all major booksellers—a page-turner! Link in thread! )

The through-line in the book is the Sulzberger Family, which controls the Times, and which is truly the last American power dynasty in the most classic sense.

The current Arthur ("A. G. ") Sulzberger inherited the NYT throne from his father, Arthur Sulzberger, who inherited it from his father, Arthur Sulzberger, who inherited it from his father, Arthur Sulzberger. It's a literal patriarchy. They even have primogeniture. But I digress. In 2024, Mr. Sulzberger and his band of merry Wikipedia editors had another request. Four years earlier, in 2020, while Mr. Sulzberger was dealing with pressing punctuation issues, another, slightly more serious problem cropped up. James Bennet, then the Times' highly regarded editorial page editor, had dared to commission an oped by Tom Cotton on the George Floyd riots.

"Send the troops in" was the title of the piece, which called for the government to invoke the Insurrection Act and bring in the military to quell the riots:

"The American people aren’t blind to injustices in our society, but they know that the most basic responsibility of government is to maintain public order and safety. In normal times, local law enforcement can uphold public order. But in rare moments, like ours today, more is needed, even if many politicians prefer to wring their hands while the country burns." (It's all in The Gray Lady Winked, folks!)

Reminder: this was 2020. Elite America was in the throes of a moral conniption about race. The suggestion, from a Republican senator in the New York Times, that widespread rioting should be put down through government force was the equivalent of that guy who took a leak on the Altar of the Confession in St. Peter's Basilica. It's simply not done.

The uproar was intense—much of it from NYT's newsroom, which, over the preceding years, had grown more woke than Ta-Nehisi Coates' alarm clock. Bennet was fired (ahem..."resigned") and a wild 300-word-editor's-note-qua-exercise-in-self-flagellation was added to the top of the oped begging America (or half of it anyways) for forgiveness.

A. G. Sulzberger did the necessary with a nice statement, likely crafted by some luckless PR rep toiling away in a corporate monastery in Midtown: “James is a journalist of enormous talent and integrity who believes deeply in the mission of The Times.”

Except that last bit wasn't true. Not in the way A. G. intended it, anyways. Bennett may "believe deeply in the mission of the NYT," but that doesn't mean he was happy taking a career double-tap to center mass from a man who'd inherited a news fortune. In 2023, Bennet got his (quite wordy, but no less cold) revenge with a 16,000-word (!) essay in The Economist where, among many, many, many other things, he wrote:

“As preoccupied as it is with the question of why so many Americans have lost trust in it, the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.”

Youch.

Here's where Wikipedia comes back into play. In 2024, NYT's Wikipedia editing agency had another request on behalf of their client—this one considerably more significant than punctuation styling. NYT wanted Wikipedia to include Sulzberger's response to Bennet's smackdown in the "A. G. Sulzberger" entry. But on account of some quirk in the news cycle, the response they wanted to add was covered in a Fox News (gasp!) article co-written by the estimable Brian Flood, who interviewed me a number of times about NYT.

Sulzberger wanted his quote from the Fox story in his Wikipedia article. But that's a touchy subject on Wikipedia, whose famous/infamous "Reliable Sources" list gives Fox News a big, fat "Generally unreliable" rating.

This has been the source of a lot of debate and discussion—for example, Al Jazeera, controlled by the Qatari government, gets a beautiful for "Generally reliable" on Wikipedia. And while this seems sort of bureaucratically incidental—the kind of thing that excites about as much passion as the margin width of forms at the DMV—in reality its important cannot be overstated. The Reliable Sources list is the top-most control mechanism that shapes what counts as legitimate information on Wikipedia—and what gets feds into Google and virtually every major AI model—and what gets tossed out as right-wing trash. (I wrote a banger on this topic for Pirate Wires)

All that is to say, NYT's paid editor was understandably mincy in making his request. His tone was that of a mere supplicant approaching a high priest of knowledge with an impure offering: "I understand Fox News is sometimes not a preferred source on Wikipedia..." he wrote. But. But.

This was a legacy-media-dose of understatement, the epistemological version of "mostly peaceful protests."

Tension. Suspense.

But—surprise!—when it came to giving the assist to NYT's publisher and chairman, Wikipedians were happy to make the exception. In fact, the editor involved in fielding the request didn't even question the use of the "Generally unreliable" source in this case. He didn't open a debate, he didn't question whether this was the appropriate thing, given Wikipedia's furious scorn for Fox. Instead, the editor offered an emoji and a single-word response:

" ✅ Done."