After nine years of radical leftist leadership, Wikipedia has been converted into one of the left’s most powerful megaphones, and it is hiding its strategy in plain sight.
MRC Free Speech America researchers analyzed Wikipedia’s citations across all languages and found that the so-called online encyclopedia cites left-leaning media sources nearly 20 times more often than right-leaning outlets. As a result, the online encyclopedia amplifies outrageous allegations from elitist media outlets, including claims that Vice President JD Vance harbors “white supremacist” views, blood libel accusations against Israel, and even a “misinformation” jab placed at the top of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s page immediately after he was assassinated.
This imbalance is not just a quirk of “volunteer” editing, but a direct result of how Wikipedia is designed to operate. Editors rely on Wikipedia’s list of designated “reliable sources,” which overwhelmingly greenlights left-wing media sources like CNN and Mother Jones while restricting or banning right-of-center outlets. The result is clear: Wikipedia’s pages push the ideology of its radical leaders, and broadly promote a leftist agenda.
Key Findings
- Wikipedia overwhelmingly favored left-leaning media sources (5,320,017 citations versus 292,250), with editors citing radical leftist outlets such as MSNBC, Mother Jones, The Associated Press, The Daily Beast, The Nation, The New York Times, 18.2 times more than right-leaning sources like the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, The Daily Wire, The Federalist or The Washington Examiner.
- In head-to-head comparisons within regional markets, the results were much the same. Wikipedia cited left-leaning outlets like The New Yorker and The Washington Post significantly more than their right-leaning counterparts like the New York Post and The Washington Times.
- Wikipedia’s obvious favoritism of elitist media in its citations underscores MRC’s previous reporting, which showed that Wikipedia uses an effective blacklist to suppress right-leaning media on its pages.
Wikipedia Favors Left-Leaning Sources Far More Than Right-Leaning Outlets
Wikipedia favored leftist, anti-Trump sources like CNN, MSNBC and The New York Times across the board.
In fact, Wikipedia cited the radically left-wing New York Times more than any other outlet, a whopping 1,675,628 citations. Wikipedia editors cited another pillar of the left, The Associated Press, 137,939 times. The AP not only pushes leftist propaganda but also attempts to institutionalize leftist language on issues like transgenderism and abortion across the media landscape. Wikipedia’s editors also cited leftist sources like Time magazine (175,940 citations) and Yahoo News (338,173 citations) constantly across the so-called online encyclopedia’s webpages. Wikipedia editors even cited the media empire of leftist billionaire Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg News), infamous for its ESG campaigns, 140,017 times.
By contrast, Wikipedia editors almost completely ignored One America News Network (OAN), citing the media outlet only 35 times across Wikipedia. They didn’t do much better for other right-leaning outlets, providing only 435 citations for The Daily Wire. For context, neither one of these two right-leaning outlets had as many citations as the anti-Trump publication The Bulwark, a one-note, anti-Trump publication founded in 2018 with 451 citations on Wikipedia.
In fact, OAN and The Daily Wire, as well as The Blaze (434 citations), Just the News (128 citations), The Federalist (389 citations), and other right-leaning sources were cited less than any of their leftist counterparts. Similarly dismissed by Wikipedia, Breitbart (1,133), Newsmax (1,123 citations) and The Daily Caller (665 citations) received fewer citations than any leftist sources, except Semafor (622 citations).
And Wikipedia editors did not just starve out the right while elevating the left’s elitist media. They heavily cited the left’s JV team media outlets as well. Wikipedia provided citations for The Daily Beast (28,038) The Nation (11,575), Vox (24,756), Mother Jones (8,326) and Jacobin (2,706) thousands of times each.
Wikipedia Favors Left-Leaning Regional Market Competitors Over Their Right-Leaning Counterparts
Editors on Wikipedia also routinely chose left-leaning sources over right-of-center competitors within the same regional market.
The most stark example of this left-wing favoritism is in New York, where Wikipedia only cited 224-year-old right-leaning paper the New York Post 41,127 times, while bolstering its similarly situated, left-leaning print competitors. As already noted above, The New York Times is the most cited outlet on Wikipedia, referenced over 40 times more often than the right-leaning outlet that broke the Hunter Biden laptop story. Meanwhile, Wikipedia even cited The New Yorker (63,166 times) and The AP (137,939 times) significantly more than the Post.
Also in New York, Wikipedia cited leftist economic news outlets Bloomberg News (140,017 times) and Business Insider (67,204 times) more than Fox Business, which only had 3,692 total citations. Radical leftist outlet Huff Post was cited 31,445 times, while The Nation was cited 11,575 times and Soros-funded ProPublica was cited 6,733 times. Meanwhile, their right-leaning counterparts National Review (9,544 times), The Epoch Times (1,293 times) and The Free Press (only 217 times) were minimally cited across Wikipedia’s webpages.
Wikipedia included hundreds of thousands of citations from New York-based outlet CNN— 396,069 citations to be precise—dwarfing the 125,917 times Wikipedia cited Fox News. The so-called encyclopedia also boosted the leftist Big Three Networks with a combined number of citations nearing CNN’s total: ABC News (83,509), CBS News (95,393 citations) and NBC News (88,969 citations). That’s not even mentioning the tens of thousands of citations combined for NBCUniversal’s other two leftist products: CNBC (55,932 citations) and MSNBC (6,893 citations).
Similar results played out for comparable outlets that Wikipedia cited with their headquarters located in and around America’s other national media hub, Washington, D.C.
Even though MRC analyzed more right-leaning outlets compared to left-leaning outlets in the Washington, D.C. regional market, Wikipedia still cited left-leaning outlets significantly more than right-leaning outlets.
In fact, Wikipedia editors cited “Democracy Dies in Darkness” elitist outlet The Washington Post more times (376,260 citations) than all right-leaning outlets combined, regardless of regional market (292,250 for all right-leaning outlet citations) and over 10 times more than its regional market right-leaning competitors (only 37,048 citations). Add in other left-leaning competitors like USA Today (227,603 citations), National Public Radio (137,849 citations), Politico (59,014 citations), The Atlantic (49,989) and Alternet (1,998 citations) on top of The Post’s already gaudy number, and there is quite simply no comparison.
Put another way, Wikipedia cited six left-leaning outlets in the Washington, D.C. regional market nearly 23 times more than their 12 right-leaning competitors.
The most cited right-leaning outlet in the Washington, D.C. area was The Washington Times, which Wikipedia cited 16,775 times, fewer than 5% of the times it referenced The Washington Post. Other right-leaning outlets cited by Wikipedia include: the Washington Examiner (6,476 citations), Real Clear Politics (5,551 citations), the Christian Broadcasting Network (3,321 citations), The American Conservative (1,473 citations), The Epoch Times (1,293 citations), The Daily Caller (665 citations), The Washington Free Beacon (598 citations), The Federalist (389 citations), The Dispatch (247 citations), Independent Journal Review (131 citations) and Just The News (128 citations).
As for news outlets from the U.K., Wikipedia cited The Guardian — an aggressively anti-Trump British publication — 960,799 times. Its right-leaning counterparts, the Daily Mail and The Spectator, however, were only cited a total of 69,112 times and 924 times respectively.
Wikipedia Favoring Elitist Media Citations Underscores MRC’s Exposé of Wikipedia’s Effective Blacklist
In February, MRC revealed that right-of-center media sources, as determined by the AllSides Media Bias Chart, were effectively blacklisted, suppressing their use across Wikipedia pages except for in limited circumstances. Meanwhile, 84% of elitist media sources were deemed “generally reliable.” Since the MRC study was released, Wikipedia has partially greenlit one right-leaning media source, The Washington Free Beacon.
As noted by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, this heinous list majorly impacts Wikipedia’s biased “Neutral Point of View” policy (NPOV). Sanger has blasted Wikipedia’s current NPOV policy since it is limited to “significant views” published by “reliable sources on a topic,” and gives editors leave to dismiss views they label “fringe” or “minority.” And even the list editors use for “reliable sources on a topic” is heavily tilted to the left.
In addition to exposing Wikipedia’s effective blacklist, and now its effects on media source citations in this study, MRC researchers have also exposed specific examples of Wikipedia’s awful conduct.
MRC has exposed Wikipedia for stripping away now-Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s medals from the top of his page—even going so far as to delete some—in order to avoid giving “undue emphasis” to his military career. Wikipedia editors targeted Hegseth with personal attacks on his page, inflating it with negative content, doing so after President Donald Trump nominated him. Wikipedia editors did much the same to many Trump nominees, accusing now-Attorney General Pam Bondi, now-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, now-HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and now-FBI Director Kash Patel of spreading conspiracy theories or making false claims.
The leftist propaganda website did not limit itself to Trump administration officials, however. The online encyclopedia also cited Al Jazeera for its definition of the terrorist group Hamas, even though Al Jazeera whitewashes Hamas terrorism and is funded by the same government that sheltered Hamas’s leaders.
Wikipedia’s leftist tilt should come as no surprise considering its radical leadership.
The former chief operating officer of baby-killing Planned Parenthood, Maryana Iskander, currently runs the Wikimedia Foundation.
From 2016 to 2021, Wikipedia was run by current NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who labelled Trump a “racist,” while downplaying the violent and destructive Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 and brow-beating white followers with racist abuse and radical leftist messaging. For example, Maher berated white people in 2020, telling them that “white silence is complicity.”
Speaking about Wikipedia in her role as CEO, Maher also outlandishly claimed that “our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.” Maher even bashed the First Amendment as an obstacle to countering so-called misinformation, before saying, “it also means that it is a little bit tricky to really address some of the real challenges of where does bad information come from, and sort of the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”
Methodology: MRC researchers searched all languages of Wikipedia using its publicly available API on Nov. 18-19, 2025 to determine how many times Wikipedia editors cited each of the “right,” “lean right,” “center,” “lean left,” and “left” sources that appear on the publicly available AllSides Media Bias Chart. The Bulwark is not listed on the AllSides Media Bias Chart.
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