Update/Clarification [Nov. 10]: This issue is muddied a bit by redistricting and its effects on the geography of congressional representation. Swing State Project in June 2009 noted that "Almost two-thirds of the population of the current district (62%) live in territory" in the New York 23rd "that has not elected a Democrat since 1890 or earlier." However, a sizable part of the district (38%) includes parts of counties that as late as 1976 and 1978 voted Democratic in congressional races.

If you've heard it once, you've heard it 1,000 times: the New York 23rd Congressional District (NY-23) has had a Republican incumbent since the 1870s. It's a helpful talking point for mainstream media types bent on portraying the Hoffman loss in the district last night as evidence of how the Republican mainstream has moved away from conservatism.

The only trouble with the talking point is it is patently false and the New York Times can prove it. (h/t EyeBlast.tv's Stephen Gutowski)

From the 1990 obituary for one Samuel Stratton:

Call it the Press Conference From Hell.

Toledo mayoral candidate Ben Konop, an earnest young liberal, thought it would be a great idea to conduct a press conference in front of the home where his mother grew up. Little did Ben know that Maxwell the Heckler, the next door neighbor, would completely destroy his press conference and forever burn that incident into the public memory of Mr. Konop. To get the full hilarious flavor of how Maxwell destroyed the press conference, take a look at the video.

Most of the heckling consisted of "Boo! LIAR! BOOOOO!"

The first reaction of your humble correspondent when watching that video was that Maxwell the Heckler was some sort of anarchist bent on destroying Konop's press conference in a humorous way just for the sake of fun. However, upon investigation, it turns out that Maxwell the Heckler was actually "speaking truth to power," a favorite leftwing slogan.

Wikipedia can be a vehicle for tearing down barriers and democratizing information. Unless the New York Times is involved.

Just as the Times was able to keep 40 other media organizations from reporting on the capture of their own David Rohde, so too were they able to keep Wikipedia from reporting it. They also used his Wikipedia page to try to win favor with the Taliban.

Just three days after Rohde was captured, a user edited his Wikipedia page to reflect his capture, but that edit was quickly deleted, and with the help of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, news of Rohde’s capture was kept off the page until his release.

Starting July 1, the Associated Press will begin publishing articles produced by nonprofit organizations, all four of which are left-leaning.

I guess they couldn't find any conservative nonprofits.

As reported by the New York Times Saturday (h/t Paul Chesser):

Wikipedia users have scrubbed all references to homegrown terrorist William Ayers and the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright from Barack Obama's entry at the online encyclopedia.

Apparently, any information posted about Ayers or Wright in the text of the Obama biography is not only immediately taken down, but the offending user is banned for three days.

Such was revealed by WorldNetDaily moments ago:

(Wikipedia has now removed Obama's name from their "New Party" Wikipedia page. See update at bottom of this blog for details.)

I don't know how long Barack Obama's name will remain on the Wikipedia page for the New Party entry but it looks like it was added yesterday after a bit of struggle. By not so strange coincidence, your humble correspondent also provided evidence yesterday that Obama was a member of the socialist New Party. First the description of the New Party in Wikipedia:

On PBS's Web site today, ombudsman Michael Getler writes of complaints over an incident during last Sunday's pledge drive.  He describes the cheap shot taken by actor Mike Farrell against vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin:

According to Joseph Campbell, vice president of fundraising programs, here's what happened:

 On CNN's American Morning today, White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux reported on Barack Obama's campaigning in Virginia.  Afterwards, anchor Kiran Chetry had a question:

CHETRY: All right. And Suzanne, what's on tap for the campaign today? And please tell me it's not lipstick again.

MALVEAUX: Let's hope not. He's going to be in Norfolk, Virginia. That is in southeast Virginia, and it's home to the world's largest Naval base. It's one of the most competitive areas that the Democrats and Republicans are fighting over. It's a critical piece of property, piece of land there with folks in Virginia, and they want those voters.

It remains to be seen whether this turns out to be Barack Obama's "Christmas in Cambodia" untruth, his Dukakis-in-tank hilarity -- or both.

Regardless, what follows is a pretty obvious "misstatement" that would not possibly be ignored if it were uttered by a conservative or a Republican.

In his hilariously titled post ("Mighta Joined If He Coulda Capped Some Cong") on Barack Obama's interview in a barn this morning (not kidding) on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, fellow NewsBuster Mark Finkelstein reported on Obama's answer to a viewer's question about whether he ever considered military service. You can read Mark's post for his overall thoughts, but I want to focus on something the Illinois senator said that several commenters at the post took exception to (photo courtesy DayLife):

You know, I had to sign up for Selective Service when I graduated from high school. .... But keep in mind: I graduated in 1979.

There are only two "little" problems:

In a "Leading the News" story primarily about Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden's prior praise of John McCain, Susan Crabtree at The Hill noted previous posts made by yours truly about the alterations made to Biden's Wikipedia entries shortly before and after he was named by Barack Obama.

Those posts showed that at least these changes were made since I downloaded -- and kept -- Biden's main Wiki entry on Friday:

• (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) The details of Biden's undergraduate grades went away, and other text in the related paragraph was worked over.
• (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) The section relating to 2004 under "Presidential Campaigns" was deleted, and most of the text that had been contained there moved to a section before the 1988 campaign. It was if the idea that Biden campaigned for the presidency was true before Obama selected him, and not true after that.
• (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) The footnote relating to the original entry's claim that Biden had only plagiarized British politican Neil Kinnock one time, which never related to that claim anyway, was removed. Further, no Wiki entries relating to Biden -- before or after -- adequately described the full extent of his 1987 plagiarism, which included Kinnock at least one and probably several other times, and other plagiarizing of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey.

What Ms. Crabtree wrote follows. It includes some follow-up she did, which is in bold:

Joe Biden's 1987 stump-speech plagiarism of Neil Kinnock likely occurred more than once. Additionally, according to contemporaneous New York Times reports, including an editorial, Biden's orations featured unattributed speech-lifting from John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey.

That's a lot more than Joe Biden's defenders and two of his Wikipedia entries have thus far revealed.

Previous posts (here and here at NewsBusters; here and here at BizzyBlog) noted "interesting" modifications to the main Wikipedia entry of Biden, who Barack Obama selected as his vice-presidential running mate this past weekend.

The first post reported that the detail of Biden's undergraduate grades (generally C's and D's, with two A's in phys ed and an F in ROTC) "strangely" disappeared between Friday and Saturday. The second ultimately noted that a section relating to Biden's involvement in the presidential campaign of 2004 had been deleted, but that its text had inexplicably been moved to before 1988. It was as if the idea that Biden had "campaigned" in 2004 was true before Barack Obama selected him, but no longer true after that.

But to get to the next example of Wiki whitewashing by Obama-Biden's busy bees -- the worst found thus far -- we need to go back 21 years to the New York Times.

The Friday evening version of Joe Biden's Wikipedia entry remains firmly ensconced in a Firefox tab on my desktop, so it can be compared to its current form as Obama-Biden's busy bees brush it up. I'm doing comparisons as time allows, and there isn't much of it at the moment.

One thing is quickly obvious -- a section heading for a whole year has disappeared:

Amazing. Where did 2004 go?

You'll just loooooove what got moved to a different and less logical section of the entry, while the section "2004" went away (Note: I originally believed that the text in the "2004" section had been deleted; also see my comment below):

Well, well.

The portion of Joe Biden's Wikipedia entry relating to his 1988 presidential campaign has been worked over a bit.

Specifics relating to his undergraduate grades have strangely disappeared. There are other subtle changes as well.

Comparison pics are after the jump.

Wikipedia, the community-edited encyclopedia that anyone can revise, is one of the Web's biggest success stories. What you may not know is that it also has become an important player in the political world.

Started in 2001 on a shoestring budget, Wikipedia now ranks as the ninth most popular Web site in the U.S., according to Internet ratings company Alexa.com, outpacing such "old media" stalwarts as CNN, ESPN and the New York Times. (It's even more popular worldwide, where it is currently the seventh most-read site.)

This popularity makes Wikipedia very interesting in a political context, particularly because its pages are highly regarded by most Internet search engines. Chances are, if you look up the name of most any state or national politician, the Wikipedia entry on him or her will be in your top three results. In some cases, such as those of President Bush or Vice President Cheney, Wikipedia's article actually beats out the official government biography pages.

The controversy over Wikipedia's censorship of any update regarding the alleged John Edwards scandal as chronicled by your humble correspondent yesterday has taken an interesting new turn. Wikipedia, in response to this controversy, has now made an announcement at the top of their John Edwards entry:

This page is currently protected from editing until July 30, 2008 or until disputes have been resolved. This protection is not an endorsement of the current version. See the protection policy and protection log for more details. Please discuss any changes on the talk page; you may use the {{editprotected}} template to ask an administrator to make the edit if it is supported by consensus. You may also request that this page be unprotected.

Wikipedia, which allowed verb tenses for their Tim Russert entry to be changed from present to past tense about a half hour before the official announcement of his death, is suddenly going ultra legal in its refusal to allow their John Edwards entry to be updated with mention of the alleged scandal which was reported in the National Enquirer with many of the details confirmed by Fox News. Suddenly Wikipedia has become a stickler for confirmation detail before the Edwards entry can be updated. To get an idea of how much Wikipedia is twisting itself into a pretzel to justify their refusal to update their John Edwards entry, one needs only to look at their pained, but comedically entertaining, discussions of this matter in their "Tabloid scandal accusations" section:

As many are aware, Edwards has been accused of scandalous actions by a supermarket tabloid. As per Wikipedia's policy regarding biographies of living persons, including information about the tabloids claims is inappropriate at this time because the tabloid does not qualify as a reliable source and current reports in more reputable news sources do not confirm the claims, only reporting the fact the tabloid has published claims about Edward's actions. The same policy that prevents inclusion of the accusations within the article also prevent details from being included on this talk page.

Two weeks ago, a parent-teacher council blamed the online research source Wikipedia for falling test scores in Scotland.

On Tuesday, Canadian columnist Lawrence Solomon blamed Wikipedia for helping to spread global warming hysteria around the world.

The connection? Oftentimes "inaccurate or deliberately misleading information" published by Wikipedia being taken as fact by unsuspecting readers.

In the case of climate change, such inaccurate or deliberately misleading information acts to solidify the myth being espoused by Nobel Laureate Al Gore as millions of people across the globe believe Wikipedia is a purely factual resource.

As the Scotsman reported on June 21, such an assumption carries risks (emphasis added):

More news from the front of the Wiki Wars, the ideological battle for the soul of Wikipedia: it seems left-wingers at the online encyclopedia site are angry that anyone would want to mention Absolut's reconquista controversy in the vodka maker's article.

How do we know this? From reading the "Talk" page for the Wikipedia entry "Absolut Vodka," where people can discuss the article and changes they'd like to see made to it. Apparently liberals there do not want the public to know that the company got in big trouble win consumers after it ran an ad in Mexico portraying that country as having taken over certain parts of the United States.

The discussion starts off with an anonymous person (apparently from Loyola University judging by their IP address) who asks that the Absolut entry be partially blocked from editing to prevent "vandalism:"

You may not be aware of it but Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is a virtual war zone, one of which most conservatives are blissfully unaware. Over at the New Republic, Eve Fairbanks explores this in the presidential campaign where supporters and critics of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton battle daily over their entries:

Back when we got basic information from encyclopedias instead of Wikipedia, politicians were at the mercy of the encyclopedia-writers' particular biases. Take the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Apparently controlled by smug British nationalists, it described the important Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell as "not over-scrupulous," "repellent," "powerful for evil," and, owing to the "mental affliction of his ancestors," probably possessing a "mental equilibrium [that] was not always stable."

Wikipedia was supposed to fix this problem. Anyone can add, delete, or massage language in its online articles, and--boom!--refresh the page to see their changes appear instantly. These volunteer contributors ("editors," in Wikipedia lingo) discuss their changes on an article's associated "talk page," and eventually (or so the theory goes) merge their different perspectives on various subjects into something truly neutral. But, after you see what happens when two warring Democratic candidates are thrown to the mercy of the Wikipedians, you kind of yearn for the 1911 Britannica.

Did you know that "Fox and Friends" co-host Steve Doocy is a 61-year-old stripper who tragically died today? No, he is not, but according to a Wikipedia edit today he is. The November 26 edition of "Fox and Friends" discussed word of some school districts banning Wikipedia and the false information some readers add. As a result, some apparently angry viewers proved their point and added wild information to their pages.

Apparently, Steve Doocy died in a car accident today, is 61, and a stripper. Brian Kilmeade has been dead for ten years. Perhaps his ghost now hosts "Fox and Friends."

Several months ago, MRC President Brent Bozell warned of unreliability of Wikipedia. One internet user falsely claimed there is an ongoing feud between Bozell and famed media critic Bernard Goldberg.