MRC Free Speech America exposed Wikipedia for creating an effective blacklist against right-of-center sources and greenlighting leftist coverage. Here’s one viciously anti-American, anti-Semitic source the so-called online encyclopedia’s editors greenlit, and won’t stop using.
Wikipedia editors greenlit the Qatari government-funded Al Jazeera, giving a pass to Hamas defenders on the same “reliable sources” list that MRC Free Speech America exposed earlier this year, which at the time effectively blacklisted every right-of-center source on the AllSides Media Bias Chart while approving the vast majority of radical leftist and elitist media sources. In fact, editors cited Al Jazeera 139,754 times across Wikipedia, including 48,229 citations for Al Jazeera’s English-language content.
On its “Reliable sources/Perennial sources” page, Wikipedia editors outrageously called the overtly biased publication “generally reliable.” However, Wikipedia editors made a tepid concession to reality: “Most editors seem to agree that Al Jazeera English and especially Al Jazeera Arabic are biased sources on the Arab–Israeli conflict and on topics for which the Qatari government has a conflict of interest.”
This minimizing language doesn’t even begin to describe Al Jazeera’s radical record, and yet, it hasn’t stopped editors from using the anti-Israel publication for precisely the instances in which Wikipedia editors acknowledged that the outlet has biases.
In fact, editors cite Al Jazeera multiple times in the article on the “Arab-Israeli conflict.” To be clear, this exact article is linked in the sentence warning of the publication’s bias on that issue. Oops.
And this is far from the only related article that Wikipedia editors cite Al Jazeera for.
This mouthpiece of the government — a government that hid Hamas leaders following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack — is repeatedly cited in a host of articles related to the Arab-Israeli conflict and Hamas. These include the “Arab-Israeli conflict,” “Benjamin Netanyahu,” “Gaza war,” “Hamas,” “Israeli attack on Doha,” “October 7 attacks” and “Palestine.” Add to that the fact that Wikipedia infamously does not label Hamas terrorists as terrorists, despite the U.S. government designating the group as such. Instead, the online encyclopedia cites Al Jazeera multiple times while defining Hamas. “[Hamas] is a Sunni Islamist Palestinian nationalist political organisation with a military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades. It has governed the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip since 2007,” the editors wrote in the first section of the “Hamas” article, citing Al Jazeera. This section does not acknowledge that Hamas is a terrorist organization, outside of noting that some countries have designated it as one at the end of the section.
For Wikipedia’s “Gaza war” article, editors cited Al Jazeera a whopping 80 times, while referencing the same Qatari government-funded media 16 times for an article on the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. Editors also ignored their own warning about using Al Jazeera to cover Qatar, referencing the publication seven times in an article on Qatar and 16 times in an article describing Israel attempting to blow up Hamas terrorists hiding in Qatar.
And according to the New York Post, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has personally weighed in about a “Gaza genocide” Wikipedia page that cites Al Jazeera 43 times and repeats claims from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. The heinous article begins with the vicious blood libel, “The Gaza genocide is the ongoing, intentional, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel during the Gaza war.” The last edit occurred on Nov. 3, and all edits were blocked until the evening of Nov. 4.
Wikipedia’s reliance on Al Jazeera for articles on Israel, Palestine and related matters is not a new development. When a March 18 report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) exposed a conspiracy of fervent anti-Israel Wikipedia editors to slant coverage of these topics, the ADL also found that this clique of propagandists used Al Jazeera to pull off the stunt.
In fact, the ADL found that since October 7, 2023, these editors used Al Jazeera more than any other source.
But before the report even came out, Wikipedia editors effectively blacklisted the ADL as a source for the “Israeli–Palestinian conflict, including related antisemitism.” Editors also wrote that “[t]he ADL can roughly be taken as reliable on the topic of antisemitism when Israel and Zionism are not concerned.” In other words, the ADL might be trustworthy so long as it isn’t calling out anti-Semitic leftists or Islamists.
For example, the ADL is not cited on the Al Jazeera Wikipedia page, which ludicrously defends Al Jazeera English by claiming it is “seen as editorially independent [from the Qatari government].” In fact, Al Jazeera hid any of the more substantive criticisms of Al Jazeera on a separate page, ensuring most users would never see it. The “Al Jazeera” Wikipedia page mentioned the words “Hamas,” “antisemite” and “antisemitic” zero times, and only mentioned terrorism in the context of Turkey and the Kurds.
Al Jazeera has a long history of anti-Semitism and downplaying terrorism against Israel. In 2019, Al Jazeera Plus published an anti-Semitic video linking Nazism to Zionism, minimizing the Holocaust and pushing anti-Semitic tropes like Jewish control of the media. According to ADL, Al Jazeera writers also engage in Holocaust denial, referring to the “alleged Holocaust” multiple times in their articles, including an article downplaying Hamas terrorism. Al Jazeera Plus has also loudly proclaimed that it will not label obvious terrorists as terrorists.
And if you needed more evidence on where Al Jazeera stands, look no further than the headline of an article it provided readers on the anniversary of the horrific Oct. 7 attacks against Israel perpetrated by Hamas terrorists. On Oct. 7 of this year, Al Jazeera published an atrocious headline that both smeared Israel and completely ignored the brutal Hamas terrorist attack two years ago: “Updates: Israel’s genocide continues in Gaza two years since start of war.”
Methodology: MRC researchers searched Wikipedia using its publicly available API on Oct. 30 to determine how many times Wikipedia editors cited the Al Jazeera domain as a source across all languages on Wikipedia.
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