Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger denounced the online encyclopedia for its rampant bias, and among other things, an effective media blacklist, which MRC exposed earlier this year.
In an interview posted on Sept. 29, independent journalist Tucker Carlson interviewed Sanger on how Wikipedia has become “the most comprehensive propaganda op in human history.” During the interview, Carlson took issue with an ill-defined attack on him on his Wikipedia page, to which Sanger explained exactly why prominent figures who have spoken out against the left’s narratives remain undefended from vicious smears on their Wikipedia pages.
“If you look at only the sources that are permitted to be used in Wikipedia — so, mostly secondary sources, and they are mostly left-wing, or center, generally speaking —[T]here is now a blacklist called the perennial sources page, that contains lists of dozens of conservative sources that are just not allowed.” Sanger added, “And so if the only defenders of Tucker Carlson can be found in those other sources, then you won't be defended in the article about you, and they will call the article about you neutral.”
MRC Free Speech America exposed this wildly biased list in February 2025, calling out the propaganda website’s editors for labelling mainstream right-of-center media sources like The Daily Wire and the New York Post, among others, as “blacklisted,” “deprecated,” or “generally unreliable,” while greenlighting leftist legacy media sources like MSNBC, Mother Jones, The New York Times, and CNN. MRC research showed how 100 percent of right-of-center media sources, as determined by AllSides Media Bias Chart, were effectively blacklisted. By contrast, 84 percent of leftist media sources were deemed “generally reliable.”
This “perennial sources page” list is directly connected to Wikipedia’s overall bias. Sanger explained why, pointing to the smoking gun in the so-called online encyclopedia’s farcical “Neutral point of view” policy. The “Neutral point of view” page defines what Wikipedia means by “neutral,” which Sanger explains is anything but neutral.
From the page, “All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.”
Both Sanger and Carlson called out Wikipedia for “two modifiers” in this written policy that provide editors with the opportunity to weed out disfavored sources: “‘all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.’” [Emphasis added]
The Wikipedia co-founder read further, explaining how the website, by its own rules, undermines any notion of neutrality. Sanger said, “If you look further down on the page, they go on to discourage giving equal validity to ‘minority view, fringe theory, or extraordinary claim[s].’ All right? So—and that such views should be labeled that way. So, the ‘Neutral point of view’ policy, essentially, dictates that Wikipedians must write articles in a biased way.”
During the interview, Sanger and Carlson also pointed to particular sources that have been effectively blacklisted, including The Daily Caller, of which Carlson is a co-founder. Sanger, meanwhile, echoed MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider, who testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight on Wikipedia’s biases and antisemitism. Sanger noted that the Anti-Defamation League could not be cited as a source on topics related to Israel.
After Sanger and Carlson listed these examples, Sanger called for the whole reliable sources list to be canned.
As Sanger described, Wikipedia’s choice to rig how its editors cover information presented on its pages with this perennial sources list has serious consequences. MRC has repeatedly exposed the leftist website for the incredible amount of bias on the pages of individuals from the late Turning Point USA (TPUSA) Founder Charlie Kirk to Vice President JD Vance and even President Donald Trump’s nominees like Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and FBI Director Kash Patel.
As Trump began announcing his nominees after the 2024 election, Wikipedia editors defaced their pages. For example, Wikipedia editors removed some of Hegseth’s war medals and diminished the space on his page devoted to them. Wikipedia editors then spun these changes as an attempt to avoid giving “undue emphasis” to Hegseth’s service. At the same time, they added personal attacks to his page and recharacterized previously described events in an attempt to make Hegseth look bad. Hegseth’s page originally described a man Hegseth accidentally injured with an axe, suffering “minor injuries” and even rejoining the event where he was injured, but then edited out both of these details in favor of a lawsuit suggesting severe injuries.
Wikipedia editors similarly roughed up Vance’s entry, making hundreds of edits to his page when he ran for Senate, and then a whopping 883 edits from the time legacy media sniffed him out as a potential vice presidential contender to his speech at the Republican National Convention. In addition to another raft of personal attacks, editors stuffed in material that seemed to create friction between Trump and Vance, adding and emphasizing past anti-Trump quotes made by Vance.
The same occurred when Kirk was assassinated. Wikipedia editors altered the TPUSA founder’s page — which was already full of attacks against him — to emphasis that Kirk spread so-called “misinformation” in the top section. This ensured that curious readers learning about him for the first time, and perhaps especially those looking for a quick summary about him, wouldn’t miss this obvious, and often repeated leftist smear.
Sanger and Carlson also discussed Wikipedia’s reach, mentioning how Google often places Wikipedia at the top of its results pages in searches. Carlson even went so far as to do a search for his own name on Google and found that Wikipedia was the first result. Sanger went on to discuss how Wikipedia owed its huge size to Google.
In addition to the privileged placement of Wikipedia articles, Google uses Wikipedia for its “knowledge panels” for many searches and gave a combined $7.5 million to the encyclopedia’s parent company, Wikimedia Foundation, and its fund, Wikimedia Endowment. Also, a recent study by Pew Research found that Google Gemini responses that sometimes appear at the top of search results were twice as likely as Google search to cite Wikipedia.
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