Manufactured news on Danish TV2 – #tv2wikigate

Posted on | May 18, 2009 | 1 Comment

These last days an interesting topic has circled in the Danish blogosphere; a quite embarrasing one for Danish national television channel TV2, who was simply caught manufacturing news. The event has been named #tv2wikigate and started when I the live morning show ‘Go’ Morgen Danmark’ on Danish national television channel TV2 on May 13, 2009, they ran a critical piece on Wikipedia and its user-generated business model – and subsequent potential accuracy shortcomings. To illustrate its alleged flaws, the host Cecilie Frøkjær and Anders Breinholt checked the entries of their own names and discovered that Frøkjærs birth date was wrong.
This puzzled many viewers who knew about Wikipedia, because even if Wikipedia often has errors in its entries (because contributors disagree on viewpoints – often of political or historic kind), cold facts are almost always right.
This entized a Wikipedia user (S. Juhl) to check the version history, where you can see when editing of a page has taken place. This revealed that the birthday had been edited the day before the tv-program by an unknown user with the ip-address 194.182.139.62. S. Juhl ran a Whois on the ip-address and discovered that it belonged to the Egmont Media corp, who produces ‘Go’ Morgen Danmark’!

Since then – in the last days – the blogosphere has been buzzing with this alleged manufacturing of news:

Read the Wikipedia discussion – host Anders Breinholt’s attempts at damage control on Twitter – or read a chronological account of the event from beginning up until now, courtesy of Stefan Bøgh-Andersen at overskrift.dk.

Latest update:

Today TV2 issued a correction, that – however – only excuses the fact that it was wrongly mentioned in the show that Wikipedia is unregulated, when it is in fact supervised by a group of users.

“Vi starter morgenen med en berigtigelse.

I onsdags sagde vi her i programmet, at det brugerstyrede internet leksikon Wikipedia ingen opsyn har med forkerte oplysninger. Det var ikke korrekt. I Danmark holder en gruppe almindelige brugere øje med ændringer.

Jeg skal desuden beklage, at det fremstod som om flere opdigtede oplysninger om min medvært Anders Breinholt og mig selv rent faktisk var lagt ud på wikipedia. Det var ikke tilfældet.

Vi beklager unøjagtighederne.”

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