CNN's Morning Show Covers NYT's ‘Jerk’ Jab at Bush, 'Fox & Friends' Ignores It

"American Morning" co-host Kiran Chetry, an alumna of Fox News Channel’s "Fox & Friends Weekend," gave her former colleagues at Fox a run for the money in highlighting a case of media bias. While "Fox & Friends" on Thursday morning was covering the earthquake in Peru, and featured several segments on the 30^th anniversary of the death of Elvis, Chetry interviewed "Wired" magazine senior editor Nick Thompson towards the end of the 7 am EDT hour on a new website that traces who is editing different entries on Wikipedia. Chetry brought up an instance in December 2005 where the words "jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk" appeared on President Bush’s Wikipedia entry, and the new website traced the entry to the IP address of a computer at the New York Times.

The key excerpt from Chetry’s interview of Thompson:

KIRAN CHETRY: Here's George W. Bush, this is our commander in chief. Has a Wikipedia page here. And there were some changes made to it. It -- suddenly the words jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk -- here you go -- ended up. You can tell just by looking, when you look at history, that it was revised on December 28, 2005. But who was behind this one?

NICK THOMPSON: We don't know exactly the individual, but it was somebody using a “New York Times” computer.

CHETRY: And what did “The New York Times” say about it?

THOMPSON: They said, well, we don't know exactly who it is. It could have been anybody in the building. Anybody using any of our computers. We can't find the individual.

CHETRY: All right. Now, we did call “The New York Times” and they said, as you said, there's no way to tell what employee was responsible.

THOMPSON: Right.

Chetry and Thompson also discussed changes Diebold, a company that makes voting machines, made to their own Wikipedia entry.

Wired Magazine’s own article on the Wikipedia-tracking website actually didn’t mention change made by "The New York Times," but instead focused on "obvious targets" like Diebold, Wal-Mart, the CIA, and Halliburton, companies and organizations that are consistently marked for criticism by left-wing groups. So, CNN’s coverage of the story was actually more balanced than that of Wired.