Wikipedia trashes Hegseth, Patel, Gabbard, censors their pages after Trump nominations: report

Four years ago, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger launched a competing service called Encylosphere, on the grounds that the crowdsourced encyclopedia he created with Jimmy Wales had been so captured by the political left that its entry on socialism "completely ignores any conservative, libertarian, or critical treatment of the subject."

While Sanger's identity recently changed from "skeptical philosopher" to Christian, Wikipedia's identity remains the same as ever, according to a longtime conservative critic's review of its edits to pages for President Trump's appointees after their nominations.

The Media Research Center's report on ideologically suggestive makeovers to pages for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought found that Wikipedia editors piled on the dirt and, for Hegseth, stripped out the accomplishments.

Wikipedia created "entirely new negative sections," revamped their "Personal Life" sections, changed "the characterization of incidents described" and beefed up "existing coverage of controversial material/events," the report states.

By contrast, editors greenlit 116 edits to the recession page, "apparently to avoid embarrassing the Biden-Harris administration with clear evidence of their Bidenomics disaster," and "allowed consultants connected to Hunter Biden" to alter his page, MRC claims.

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not answer queries for its response to MRC's report and explanation of the edits' propriety.

'My jaw is on the floor'

The matter seems likely to come up at this week's Department of Government Efficiency Subcommittee hearing with chief executives from taxpayer-funded PBS and NPR.

Katherine Maher of NPR, whose audience is "overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns" according to a critical former editor, led  the Wikimedia Foundation from 2016 to 2021, spanning perhaps the second half of the so-called 'Great Awokening'.

Soon after resigning from Wikimedia, Maher called the First Amendment the "number one challenge" to stopping "bad information" and "the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it," comments that came back to bite her when taking the helm of NPR – with no journalism experience – three years later. 

"The bias of Wikipedia, the fact that certain points of view have been systematically silenced, is nothing new," Sanger told Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo last year. "But I did not know just how radical-sounding Katherine Maher is … my jaw is on the floor" that Maher would publicly call the First Amendment an impediment to truth.

The foundation aggressively solicits donations from users despite swimming in money, Scrooge McDuck-style, from "major benefactors" including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and several other charitable foundations, the Foundation for a Better World, Google's philanthropic arm, and matching gift programs from Apple, Google and Microsoft.

NPR reported when Maher was named its CEO that she had built a $140 million endowment at Wikimedia.

Google, which heavily incorporates Wikipedia content in both search results and knowledge panels, gave Wikimedia $2 million for the endowment and another $1.1 million for the foundation based on an employee vote in 2019, and up to that point had given Wikimedia $7.5 million over the years, according to TechCrunch.

Hegseth's medals and exculpatory evidence removed

Wikipedia, via its contributors and editors, has long been accused of ideologically motivated edits as well as cementing preferred narratives.

Robert Malone, a pioneer-turned-critic of mRNA technology, promoted claims in 2021 that his Wikipedia page had been scrubbed of his mRNA contributions and was then locked against edits to restore his accomplishments. But Wikipedia editors appear to spring into action for biographical backfitting when public figures such as Eliot Page announce gender transitions.

MRC released another report last month that claimed "Wikipedia has designed a protocol that directly and unerringly produces the worst descriptions about conservatives and Republicans" – including Trump's nominees awaiting confirmation hearings – "by virtually guaranteeing that right-leaning media sources" as rated by AllSides "cannot be cited."

None of the right-leaning media reviewed by Wikipedia received its "generally reliable" rating, which guarantees they can be cited in entries. The vast majority were deemed "generally unreliable" (such as The Daily Wire and The Federalist), "deprecated" (such as The Daily Caller and Daily Mail) and "blacklisted" (Breitbart), which is a total block.

By contrast, 84% of AllSides-rated left-leaning media that Wikipedia reviewed were deemed "generally reliable," including ABC News, Axios, CNN, Insider, The New York Times, NPR, Politico, ProPublica, USA Today, The Washington Post and Yahoo! News.

MRC has done at least six studies on how Google has amped up dirt on Trump administration officials, and the new report suggests "Google and Wikipedia have made a dual effort to influence how Americans view the Trump administration," MRC said.

It compares archived versions of Wikipedia pages for Hegseth, Patel, Gabbard and Vought from directly before their nominations to how they appear now. 

The report also documents less sweeping changes to pages for nominees including FCC Chair Brendan Carr, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. the bulk of whose trashing happened when Kennedy challenged President Biden for the 2024 Democratic nomination, according to MRC. 

Hegseth endured the worst, losing three medals from the "infobox" at the top of his page and the "complementary images" for the remaining medals, getting new sections titled "Campaign to Pardon War Criminals" and "Sexual Assault Allegation," and his introduction now including "alleged sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement, and public drunkenness." 

His revised page notes an editorial decision he made as publisher of a Princeton student newspaper, cites allegations from "unnamed sources" about his time at Concerned Veterans for America, and memory-holed exculpatory evidence about Hegseth accidentally causing "minor injuries" to a participant in a "Flag Day television segment." 

Wikipedia said he has "explicitly rejected democracy" without noting Hegseth was referring to America's status as a constitutional republic, and it added a quote from his mother's email but "removed a huge section" of her email to apparently increase Hegseth's portrayal as abusive.

Stripped: Gabbard's missed votes typical for presidential candidates

Editors added seven paragraphs to Patel's page with the title "Promotion of conspiracy theories," his failure to secure hostages and accusation that he lied about another hostage rescue situation, and Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin's opinion that Patel was a "real threat to democracy." 

The section of Gabbard's page on "missing votes" as a congresswoman grew like the Grinch's heart following her nomination, emphasizing how often she was gone while erasing the earlier version's caveat that "her absences were similar to other members of Congress running for president," as Gabbard was at the time.

Editors flooded mentions of foreign policy positions for which "Gabbard has taken fire," especially on Russia and Ukraine, where they rose from 19 to 106 and from 7 to 64, respectively, the report said. Wikipedia also devoted "10 consecutive paragraphs" to her views on Syria, where she met with former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Vought got roughed up by Wikipedia primarily by it portraying him as a hypocrite, adding a new "Personal life" section that contrasted his support for "Christian marriage and family involvement in church" with his divorce and adding his ex-wife and date of divorce to the page's top.

It added two new mentions of his connection to Project 2025, "a tactic frequently used by leftist activists apparently to drive a wedge between Trump and his nominee," according to MRC. It noted his pre-nomination page already included an "out-of-left-field" section titled "Trump Ukraine Scandal."