The Man Who Didn't Kill Kennedy
Wikipedia accused a distinguished journalist of treason and murder
In May 2005, an unregistered Wikipedia user added a sentence to the John Seigenthaler Sr., the then-78-year-old former editor of The Tennessean newspaper:
For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.”
This, of course, was a lie. Seigenthaler had worked for Bobby Kennedy in the 1960s. He was also a pallbearer at RFK’s funeral. Needless to say, he had nothing to do with the assassination of either Kennedy.
Despite this, the lie remained on Seigenthaler’s Wikipedia article for months. Not only that, but it spread to other websites, including Reference.com and Answers.com. To deal with this obvious—and totally unsourced—lie, Seigenthaler had to draw on his considerable social capital as a well-known editor to get the claim removed from his Wikipedia entry.
When pressed on this issue in a November 2025 interview with USA Today—where Seigenthaler was a founding editor—Jimmy Wales responded:
So we had an unfortunate error in Wikipedia in which we said that John Seigenthaler Jr. had been briefly suspected of having something to do with the Kennedy assassinations, which was completely false, and he was a friend of the Kennedy family. He got in touch and we took it down within 10 minutes, and it turned out not many people had seen it. I mean, I checked the logs myself. This is the olden days.
In the interview, Wales significantly downplaying the impact this had on Seigenthaler, whose recollection of the episode paints a very different picture. In a column for USA Today, Seigenthaler wrote:
Wikipedia’s website acknowledges that it is not responsible for inaccurate information, but Wales, in a recent C-Span interview with Brian Lamb, insisted that his website is accountable and that his community of thousands of volunteer editors (he said he has only one paid employee) corrects mistakes within minutes.
My experience refutes that. My “biography” was posted May 26. On May 29, one of Wales’ volunteers “edited” it only by correcting the misspelling of the word “early.” For four months, Wikipedia depicted me as a suspected assassin before Wales erased it from his website’s history Oct. 5. The falsehoods remained on Answers.com and Reference.com for three more weeks.
As Wales was scrubbing unfavorable but entirely accurate facts from his own article, a journalist with a five-decade-long career behind him had to pull strings to get libelous lies about him removed from his own article. In attempting to pursue justice, Seigenthaler learned that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 would shield both Wikipedia and the internet service provider of the individual who libeled Seigenthaler.
This would become a template for how Wikipedia would be used not just as an attack vector, but as a tool for propaganda.
Wikipedia depicted me as a suspected assassin
Seigenthaler concluded his account of this experience by writing:
When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of “gossip.” She held a feather pillow and said, “If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That’s how it is when you spread mean things about people.”
For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.