Help - Search - Members - Calendar
Full Version: "Soviet propaganda" becomes WP propaganda
> Wikimedia Discussion > Articles
communicat
Most sensible publishers, for obvious reasons including copyright, prohibit excessively repetitive same-source attribution. WP is not exactly sensible. Its article on Soviet propaganda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_Soviet_Union cites author Robert Service 41 times; Richard Overy 47 times; Lewis Stengelbaum 31 times; Richard Pipes 15 times; and so on. It gets worse.

After a promising start, the article transforms itself magically into what is in effect anti-Soviet propaganda, while deftly retaining its title "Propaganda in the Soviet Union". Philip Agee is falsely described as a "historian" and an implied Soviet agent whereas, in reality, Agee was a CIA defector whose 1970s biography "Inside the Company" blew the whistle on CIA covert operations. In his later book "On the Run", Agee actually made a point of emphasising he does not aspire to being a historian. But never mind, WP would have it otherwise.

Soviet propagandists are credited with devising propaganda to the effect that the AIDS epidemic was caused by chemical and biological weapons (CBW) experiments at Fort Detrick in the US. In fact, that possibly was first raised by reputable Western scientists; and the independent Washington-based Covert Action Information Bulletin (for which Robert Brandt was once a contributor) published a fully referenced and comprehensive dossier on the possible AIDS/CBW link. (I doubt if Brandt or any of the folk at the since discontinued CAIB would support the view that they are/were commie agents).

For the above false allegations, the article relies indirectly and without proper referencing on a self-published source -- self published undoubtedly because no reputable publisher would touch that kind of crap. Certainly there's room in any encyclopedia for a reliable article about Soviet propaganda, but it should at least be credibly referenced with a range of creditable sources. So too should there be room for a balancing article on NATO propaganda, which is conspicuously and unsurprisingly absent from WP. fear.gif

Predictably, the usual WP apologists, censors and wikihooligans will attempt energetically to derail this thread by forcing it off topic. I urge the moderator to dissuade them.
Herschelkrustofsky
This looks like an example of the "megaphone effect," where a particular viewpoint, which has been published (i.e. by Reliable Sourcesâ„¢) and for which there may not be many English-language rebuttal sources, gets amplified by Wikipedian POV-pushers. It is probably typical of controversial subjects on Wikipedia.
communicat
Re: "...there may not be many English-language rebuttal sources ..."

Seems incongruous to me that a reliably sourced rebuttal should be necessary to counter something that has itself not been properly sourced in the first instance. When I tried in particular to have the disinformative Agee "historian" issue corrected (i.e. deleleted), I was promptly mobbed and shut down by the ruling radical-rightwing elite.
This is a "lo-fi" version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.