Misinformation: Anger for Hire

In his article Anger for Hire reprinted in Readers Digest, Michael Crowley says, " You can't always believe what you see -- especially if you're looking at political protests."

"It's hard to know who to trust these days, " he says. "When we see people staging protests we think, Wow! These folks are passionate about their cause -- otherwise, why would they stand in the rain for hours? But sometimes it's a sham: You and even your Congressman may have been set up by manipulative marketers who pay serious money to hire protesters.

"It's a sneaky trick. Let's say you want to stage a political rally, but you just can't find enough people for a good turnout. What you need are folks with lots of time on their hands, who can be persuaded to make a fuss over almost anything. Solution: Head down to a homeless shelter and dole out cash."

Jeff's take on "anger for hire": it generates blatant misinformation. An alert press should interview a random sampling of the protesters, which would quickly reveal that many have no ideas about the issues about which they are "protesting!"

Wikipedia's Contorted Entries

The Herald Tribune reports that "Last year, someone edited the Wikipedia entry for the Sea World theme parks to change all mentions of orcas to killer whales, insisting that this was a more accurate name for the species... There was another, unexplained edit: A paragraph about criticism of Sea World's "lack of respect toward its orcas" disappeared. Both changes, it turns out, originated at a computer at Anheuser-Busch, Sea World's owner."

"Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, Virgil Griffith, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor's network."

...So, read what you will on Wikipedia with a huge grain of salt.