Controlled Truth: How Wikipedia and the Media Shape Reality, Guide Opinion, and Consolidate Power

Introduction: When Facts Aren’t Enough

Wikipedia sells itself as a beacon of knowledge. Many still believe it is neutral, reliable, and objective. It is none of these things. Behind the façade lies a battlefield of competing agendas, hidden biases, and deliberate omissions.

It is open to anyone—PR firms, political operatives, corporations, intelligence agencies. Each edit, each citation, each quiet deletion shapes what the world is allowed to see. The result is not a neutral record of facts but a constantly edited reality—engineered to serve power.

The real challenge is not simply discovering the truth. The real challenge is ensuring truth survives the knives of those who fear it.

The Myth of Wikipedia Authority

I sometimes cite Wikipedia when its entries are strong. But more often, they are weak, distorted, or unreliable. Wikipedia is not a traditional encyclopedia; it is a crowd-sourced construction of perception.

Most of its contributors are men from the Global North—people with internet access, free time, and a Western worldview. Their dominance shapes what gets written, what gets erased, and what gets framed as “fact.” The result? An information ecosystem skewed heavily toward Western priorities: Washington, London, Silicon Valley, Hollywood.

Living in Asia, I see it clearly. Whole regions are reduced to footnotes. Perspectives that challenge Western orthodoxy are filtered out, censored, or banned. Wikipedia does not document reality—it curates a Western version of it.

Context: Power Through Control of Narratives

Asian friends tell me the same thing again and again: Western news outlets, Google, and Wikipedia are not neutral platforms. They are weapons of soft power. Their purpose is not illumination but domination. Until the Global South builds its own infrastructure, the majority of the world remains vulnerable to manipulation—fed a steady diet of Western half-truths and outright lies.

And this is why narrative control matters. This is why the U.S. President leaned on TikTok. TikTok had become one of the last digital spaces where unfiltered reality leaked through: the bombed-out streets of Gaza, the dead children, the war crimes that America’s political elites bankrolls and Israel carries out. Millions of young Americans were watching and asking dangerous questions. For Washington and Tel Aviv, that was intolerable.

Enter Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, proudly described by The Jerusalem Post as one of six Zionist billionaires forming the “backbone” of Israel’s wartime funding machine. He now leads the charge to seize TikTok—his mission: retrain its algorithm, bury the evidence, and sanitize the feed. At the same time, his son David Ellison is taking over Paramount Global, parent of CBS News, and reportedly bringing in Bari Weiss, a propagandist disguised as a journalist, to lock CBS firmly into the pro-Israel line.

The message could not be clearer: when Israel and its allies lose the information war, they do not debate. They do not defend. They suffocate. They buy the platforms. They censor the feeds. And from Gaza to Yemen, they silence the messengers permanently—by killing journalists in droves.

Bias, Vandalism, and Misinformation

Wikipedia is especially vulnerable to manipulation. Because it relies heavily on secondary sources, the rule is simple: if the sources are biased, so are the articles. And most mainstream sources today are compromised—whether by corporate control, influence from Western governments, or ideological bias.

On controversial pages, editors wage endless wars. One camp erases, the other rewrites. In the meantime, misinformation lingers, half-truths spread, distortions calcify.

Bias does not always announce itself with a scream. It slips in quietly: a loaded word here, a selective emphasis there, a convenient omission somewhere else. All perfectly within the rules, all technically “verifiable.”

But the result is anything but neutral. And universities know it. Cornell and others warn their students: “Wikipedia is unreliable”. Yet millions continue to mistake it for truth.

My Experience with Vice and Wikipedia

I have lived this firsthand. A Vice journalist once interviewed me about trade with North Korea. I explained a simple, legal fact: if less than half of a product is made in North Korea and more than half in China, it can be labeled “Made in China.” Vice twisted this into a moral scandal. Wikipedia swallowed it whole.

My Wikipedia entry now reads:

“This strategy has been criticized for exploiting laborers in North Korea who experience human rights violations.”

The insinuation is obvious: guilt by suggestion. 

Wikipedia ends my profile with a ‘Controversies’ section – a transparent signal that the editors were determined to brand me as a ‘controversial figure’ (see screenshot from September 29, 2025). Yet more revealing than what is written there is what was deliberately left out. 

The software joint venture I co-founded, where I served as deputy chairman of the supervisory board, created jobs with above-average pay – supplemented by food, medicine, and performance incentives. The allegation that North Korean employees were exploited was not only unfounded but inverted the reality: Because Western customers harbored prejudices against products made in North Korea, the company shifted parts of development, quality control, and packaging to the significantly more expensive China. More than half of the value was created there, which allowed the products to be legitimately labeled ‘Made in China’ – and gave them access to Western markets in the first place.

Vice, by contrast, has been dogged by allegations of harassment, toxic culture, and miserable pay. When I pointed this out in the article’s comments, my critique was deleted.

Make no mistake: I treated the workers in my ventures far better than Vice treated its own staff. Yet in Wikipedia’s edited reality, that truth was erased.

The deeper issue remains: why does Wikipedia rely on contested outlets like Vice—or on the personal opinions of journalists with questionable records—to shape reputations?

If this is what passes for “reliable sourcing,” then the term has lost all meaning.

Moral Double Standards

Consider another example. My Wikipedia page quotes Steven Borowiec, then at the Los Angeles Times:

“Abt deflects questions of human rights by claiming that he is neither a human rights expert nor a politician. That may be true, but Abt must be aware that one need not be either of those things to spot something that is morally objectionable.”

Here, hypocrisy stands in plain view: why is it deemed ‘morally objectionable’ to create jobs in a country crippled by sanctions, yet perfectly acceptable to profit as a shareholder from American companies whose taxes fund wars that kill millions?

And if Borowiec’s commentary is weighty enough to shape a Wikipedia entry, why is his own record ignored? This is a journalist dismissed from the Los Angeles Times after publicly wishing Donald Trump dead. Yet his personal judgments are presented as reliable evidence. Wikipedia has no problem amplifying his bias, while pretending neutrality.

This is not just double standards—it is narrative engineering.

 Conclusion: The Battle for Narrative Control

Wikipedia and media outlets like Vice do not simply reflect reality. They edit it. They rewrite it. They weaponize it. They shape reputations, crush dissent, and launder bias into something that looks like fact.

The problem is not only what they publish, but what they erase. Not only what they highlight, but what they bury. In doing so, they determine whose voices matter and whose are silenced.

So let’s ask the real question: if Wikipedia claims to be neutral, why does it rely on propaganda outlets like Vice? Why does it elevate the moral opinions of journalists with documented ethical lapses? Why are contested and compromised sources treated as gospel?

The answer is unsettling but unavoidable: because neutrality is a myth. The platform has been captured. It is not a library of facts but a fortress of narratives—carefully guarded by those with the most to lose if the truth were told plainly.

In a world where power thrives on perception, truth is under constant attack. The struggle is not just to uncover it, but to defend it—against deletion, distortion, and censorship. Wikipedia is not merely an encyclopedia; it is a frontline. On this frontline, the survival of truth depends entirely on who controls the edit button—and as we have seen, those who control it can ignore the truth at will.