Max Keiser. Who is he?

Keiser is currently a muckraking investigate journalist (one who is actually still employed as such) for Al-Jazzeera (ooohhh !! bad !!) English. How do I know this ? While actively editing (and greatly improving, I might add) the "Naked Short Selling" (oooh!! That must make me a puppet!!) article, I discovered that Keiser had done a very witty yet in-depth investigate piece (video) for those baddies from the Middle East.

So....this set off two great big honking red fire alarms for our defender of all thats good on WP, Mantanmoreland. Just ask his puppets DoRight, TomStoner, LastExit, and EmilyWelles, and Mantanmoreland Jr. (aka SamiHarris), they think he's the bee's knees too.

Arabs ?
Naked Short Selling can be used to manipulate stocks?
Al-Jazzera Journalist?

Holy Cow, it's the trifecta of red flags. I suppose it could have been worse, Keiser could have written a flattering book about Martin Luther, and followed it with an interview with Patrick Byrne that didn't begin with "why are you crazy?".

So...I edited in the link to the Keiser video into the Naked Short Selling article. Extensive 60 Minutes style piece featuring interviews with some big players on all sides of the issue. News org is recognized as a major outfit, regardless of how you feel about Fox News and CNN. Every network has its biases, its target audiences, etc. Just ask blogger Mediacrity about the New York Times, a blog that Mantanmoreland is intimately familiar with, lol.

Of course, this set off Mantan (I wonder what Moreland's relatives think about this wikipedia warrior using their beloved's name?) to go off on AFD revenge (not the first attempt to squelch naked short selling party line dissent).

Max Keiser also "invented" the Hollywood Stock Exchange (which has an article in WP). He's an active reporter. Google search yields several major publications featured Keiser as the subject of a piece.

But Keiser is a reporter for...gasp...Al-Jazzeera (hey, it's the day after 9/11 and I don't like them either, but what I like or don't like shouldn't change the facts - I can't stand Bill O'Reilly either, but he is technically a "reliable source" as WP defines it, no matter how bad Team Mantanmoreland/Samiharris wants to keep Bad Bill out of the Soros article).

So with Mantan's petitioning [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Max_Keiser], and despite not many more advocates than opponents for deletion, the article is nuked. By an admin with explicitly stated profile reasons to really really not like Al-Jazzeera.

Ho-hum, just another day on Wikipedia, where some reliable sources are more equal than others.

Piperdown's comments about the cultural inability of EN.WP to deal fairly with articles about Muslim or Arab institutions seems to be on the mark. Al-Jazeera is an independent press, not some Tokyo Rose of Islamo-Fascism.

I think that XfD's are often the first glimpse that users get of the distortion and dysfunctional manipulation that characterizes WP processes. Although I don't feel much in common with "inclusionists" this is usually at the hands of some sub-cabal seeking to delete a perfectly reasonable article that they might have edited.

It doesn't look great, I'll grant you, but I'm not getting that many bad vibes off this. The closing admin, Sandahl, doesn't strike me as a "really really not liking Al-Jazzeera" type. Where does that come from?

And although Mantamoreland was typically herding the debate this way and that for his own dubious purposes, the keep voters - yourself excluded - made a piss-poor case out of what could have been a good call. I just can't figure out what was going on within those big fat paragraphs added by the IPs, and it looks like the keepers had hired this guy to take the stand in their defence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=143821078

Check the categories at the bottom of that user page (since redirected to a talk page). Not the ideal candidate to be deciding whether Al-Jazzera reporter bio's should get nuked.

I'm not getting it.

Do you mean because they're Jewish?

Al-Jazeera is just a regular TV 24 hour news channel. It used to be owned by the BBC - or rather, it appropriated the BBCs middle east programming in Qatar. Sure, it's no Fox News. But it's hardly a radical channel. You'd have to be pretty extreme to take a really dim view of its content. And I'm certainly not seeing that from Sandahl's history. In fact - quite the opposite.

I think the main story here is more of the usual chicanery from Mantamoreland. The admin, Sandahl, closing the afd is a red herring. I think it was an innocent move.

Let's put it another way. Say I'm a Protestant in Belfast, editing WP. My favorite football club is the Ultra Ulster Orange Bad-asses.

Someone puts in a reference into an article on it from a reporter from, let's call it, "IRA TV". You want that reference deleted because it says that the best club in Ireland is out of dear old Cork called Fenian United, not the Orange Bad-asses.

You even want to get another ounce of revenge against the Fenian bastard editing the article, so you go for having the reference's bio deleted.

What's a good way to ensure a close "vote" will go your way?

get an Ulster friend who's parents were killed in an IRA bomb blast to wave the admin wand.

Extreme, but if I'm going to be NPOV like all good WP'ians should, I'd go out of my way to ensure an atheist hippy from France or Russia or something is the judge.

Of course finding someone in the Western Hemisphere that doesn't hate Al-Jazeera is not an easy thing to do; if you think Al J is warmly regarded by anyone on the "showing 9/11 celebrators and Nick Berg/etc executions is not the best way to endear yourself to the West" side of things, then you haven't been paying attention. And California doesn't count ;-P

I think this is the tag in question:

[[Wikipedia administrators]]

nyuk nyuk nyuk

Max Keiser's BLP, once deleted by vewy vewy angwy gawy weiss cause I used a Keiser article as a reliable source once, is back on WP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Keiser


Meet the Max:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-mQ9unGSIo

If you get bored with Max's Seinfeldesque hilarious ranting, zoom ahead to the 14:50 mark for his interview with Matt Tiabbi (sp?), Rolling Stone writer.

Indeed it was recreated in January.