Fox News Gets Punk’d by Obama Birther

Remember that WorldNetDaily story about how President Obama’s Wikipedia page had been scrubbed of “any mention of the well-publicized concerns [i.e. conspiracy theories] surrounding Obama’s eligibility to serve as commander-in-chief”? Kevin Poulsen at Wired reports that the story was written by one of the very Birthers trying to wedge that junk into the Obama page.

[Reporter Aaron] Klein found it particularly alarming that a Wikipedia user called “Jerusalem21″ was recently hit with a three-day wiki-suspension after twice posting the neutral and encyclopedic fact that there are “some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S.” … curiously, it turns out that Jerusalem21, whoever he or she might be, has only worked on one other Wikipedia entry since the account was created, notes ConWebWatch. That’s Aaron Klein’s entry, which Jerusalem21 created in 2006, and has edited 37 times.

Klein is the “Jerusalem Bureau Chief” of the conspiracy site. The punchline, as Poulsen notes, is that Joshua Rhett Miller of Fox News wrote a long story about Obama’s supposed Wikipedia-scrubbing for the “science & technology” section of the Fox News Website.

One other news organization led by the nose by an Obama conspiracy theorist: the Daily Telegraph, which brought you the report that the president was “overwhelmed” and over his head.

Hat tip: Terry Krepel.

UPDATE: Eric at Classical Values is “annoyed” at me for blogging about this. Point-by-point:

• Eric says I “Dowdified” (i.e. truncated in a way that suggested something not in the text) Gateway Pundit by not quoting his specific statement that “Wikipedia scrubs Obama’s entry clean of any critical information that may taint your view of Dear Leader.” GP and Eric seem to think that the hyperlinks to multiple pages on the Obama scandals don’t count. I do. It would be another story altogether if Wikipedia was preventing people who view its main Barack Obama page from finding out about the scandals. If the issue is whether Wikipedia should give commenters more leeway to post detailed information about scandals and conspiracies on the main page, then that’s a quibble with Wikipedia’s standards. Notice that the George W. Bush page is not a festival of conspiracies and scandals, but you can click through to pages about that stuff if you like.

• “Since when is a link to a post which contains a link to a WorldNetDaily a promotion of a WorldNetDaily story?” Obviously, giving traffic to something is promoting it. I’m promoting Classical Values right now! GP linked a factually flawed and biased story from a web site that encourages readers to send letters to judges asking them to investigate the Obama birth conspiracy. Instapundit linked the GP post with very little detail (Still airbrushing Obama’s Wikipedia page), which is how he links most items he likes.

Also, since I called Gateway Pundit “mysteriously popular” yesterday, let me explain: he refers to the President of the United States as “dear Leader,” a reference to what  North Koreans call Kim Jong Il, and he illustrates a fake story about Wikipedia editing its entries with pictures of Stalin airbrushing his enemies out of photos. It’s really quite odd that Instapundit and Fox News would be promoting something this fringey.