(...) A vanishingly rare example of the BBC propaganda system being blasted open was the special edition of the Radio 4 Today programme edited by the English musician PJ Harvey on January 2, 2014. In her opening statement, Harvey explained that she wanted to 'do something unusual with the format and content of the programme.' She invited people whom she considers 'to be highly articulate, stimulating and extremely interesting to listen to - people who challenge us and move us to examine our deepest beliefs and feelings.'

Harvey's guests included John Pilger talking about the propaganda role of the corporate media; Denis Halliday, former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, on the urgent need to democratise the warmongering UN Security Council (here at around 49 mins); Ian Cobain and Phil Shiner on torture committed by UK forces (here at around 2 hrs : 34 mins); and Mark Curtis on how Britain's arms trade fuels oppression around the world.

Harvey wanted her contributors to be unrestricted in what they could say, and she had asked the Today programme to agree to this before accepting the invitation to be a guest editor. She rightly noted that 'a great deal' of her edition of the programme was 'about censorship in one way or another.'

Predictably, reactionary voices bewailed afterwards that the BBC had broadcast 'left-wing tosh' and 'liberal drivel'. Nick Robinson, the BBC's 'impartial' political editor, took particular exception to the contribution by John Pilger, while the pro-war Murdoch employee David Aaronovitch, a Times columnist with a penchant for wagging a warning finger at Glenn Greenwald, objected to being 'lectured at in a news programme'. (...)

We all know that Wikipedia can be subverted – it’s an inevitability of an open platform that some people will seek to abuse it, whether to gain some advantage or just for a laugh. Fortunately, the Wikipedia community has strong mechanisms in place to deal with this, from the famous cry of {citation needed} to the rigorous checks and standards put in place by its hierarchy of editors and admins.

In recent months though, insiders have encountered something altogether more worrying: a concerted attack on the very fabric of Wikipedia by PR companies that have subverted the online encyclopaedia’s editing hierarchy to alter articles on a massive scale – perhaps tens of thousands of them. Wikipedia is the world’s most popular source of cultural, historical and scientific knowledge – if their fears are correct, it’s all-important credibility could be on the line.

The king of these Wikipedia reputation managers is a company called Wiki-PR, who specialise in editing Wikipedia on behalf of their paying clients. The promise on their Twitter profile couldn’t be clearer: “We write it. We manage it. You never worry about Wikipedia again.“ (...)