Wikipedia’s co-founder sparked MAGA outrage by naming news sources the site has “blacklisted.”
“The blacklisted sources are Breitbart, Daily Caller, Epoch Times, Fox News, New York Post, The Federalist, so you can’t use those as sources on Wikipedia,” Larry Sanger told Tucker Carlson on Monday’s episode of The Tucker Carlson Show.
The co-founder of Wikipedia, now a critic of the site, revealed to Carlson’s surprise that Wikipedia has a “Reliable sources/Perennial sources” page outlining the reliability of cited sources.
“Why is no one talking about this?” Carlson asked on Monday’s podcast, prompting Sanger to reply, “It’s simply embarrassing for the left, so the left aren’t going to report about it,” which sparked a surge of MAGA discussion on X.
“This is wild from the Wikipedia co-founder,” one user wrote, sharing a clip from Carlson’s podcast along with the list Sanger gave of banned sources alongside an “automatically approved” list: “NYT, WashPo, CNN, GLAAD, ADL.”
This is wild from the Wikipedia cofounder:Automatically approved Wiki sources: NYT, WashPo, CNN, GLAAD, ADL.Automatically banned Wiki sources: Breitbart, Daily Caller, Epoch Times, Fox News, NY Post, The Federalist. pic.twitter.com/llfC29IqcS
— John LeFevre (@JohnLeFevre) September 30, 2025
But while the approved list checks out, Wikipedia’s treatment of other outlets is more complicated. Of those cited by Sanger, only Breitbart News is formally “blacklisted” with edits citing it automatically blocked. The New York Post and The Federalist are flagged as “questionable” sources, and allowed in limited cases, while the Daily Caller and Epoch Times are marked “deprecated” and considered “generally unreliable,” though they can be cited for “uncontroversial self-descriptions.”
Wikipedia appears undecided about Fox News, labeling its general news coverage as “marginally reliable” while deeming its politics, science, and talk shows “generally unreliable.”
“Wikipedia is brazen propaganda,” Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz wrote in response to the clip of Monday’s podcast. While American conservative activist, Tom Fitton, called the site “a smear machine for the Left.”
Elon Musk, a long-time critic of Wikipedia, told his followers that he is building “Grokipedia,” which “will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia.”
In response to Musk, Sanger posted, “Let’s hope it won’t be as biased as Grok itself,” referring to the tech billionaire’s AI chatbot controversies earlier this year, when some of its responses contained antisemitic and racist content.”
This isn’t the first time Musk has spoken about Wikipedia. In 2023, he vowed to give the site a billion dollars if it changed its name to “D–kipedia,“ and later called for it to be defunded after his own Wikipedia page claimed he once made a gesture ”compared to a Nazi salute,” referring to an action Musk made at President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.
“I think Elon is unhappy that Wikipedia is not for sale,” Wikipedia’s other co-founder, Jimmy Wales, wrote in response to Musk at the time.
Unlike Sanger, Wales has defended criticism of Wikipedia as a “woke” site. “We do have a very long tradition of, you know, having respect for freedom of expression,” he told The Telegraph in 2023.
Following Sanger’s appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, even the president’s son weighed in on the criticism, posting: “Wikipedia regularly defames conservatives with lies and smears, so this explains a lot.”
Wikipedia regularly defames conservatives with lies and smears, so this explains a lot. https://t.co/BlVHyO7oKH
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 30, 2025
“Wikipedia is hopelessly biased. An army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections,” tech entrepreneur David Sacks wrote, adding, “Magnifying the problem, Wikipedia often appears first in Google search results, and now it’s a trusted source for AI model training. This is a huge problem.”
Wikimedia Foundation—a nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia— has previously noted that “to date, every LLM [Large Language Model] is trained on Wikipedia content, and it is almost always the largest source of training data in their data sets.”
Wikipedia describes its source list as “a non-exhaustive list of sources whose reliability and use on Wikipedia are frequently discussed,” meaning that consensus on a source’s reliability can change, and the list is subject to updates.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Wikimedia Foundation for comment on how decisions about reliability are made.
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