SPOKANE, Wash. — An article from a national political publication that focuses on Democratic congressional candidate Lisa Brown is gaining traction online this week.
The piece was written by the Washington Free Beacon, a right-leaning site, and claims that consultants working for Lisa Brown edited her Wikipedia page. The edits have to do with time Brown spent in Central America.
Some KREM 2 viewers wanted to know the accuracy of these claims, so we set out to verify.
The evidence suggests the basic claims of the article are accurate. The edit history for the entry on Lisa Brown shows that several sentences on Brown’s time in Nicaragua in the 1990s, as well as a visit to Cuba two years ago, were removed. Wikipedia records the IP address of all users who make anonymous edits and multiple IP-lookup websites trace that address to GMMP.
GMMP is a consulting group and Federal Election Commission records show that Brown’s campaign has hired them, primarily for ads.
Brown’s campaign did not want to comment at length on this issue, but did say that nobody from the campaign itself edited the Wikipedia entry. That does not dispute what the article says, so we can verify the basic claims of the piece are accurate.
Now, let's move on to the edits themselves. The content that was removed, and soon replaced, contained information pertaining to those Central American trips.
One portion of the content claims that Lisa Brown praised aspects of the Cuban health care system and said it should be used in the U.S., citing an interview from 2016. The statements in the interview do not support the claims in the Wiki entry. Brown only makes basic observations. Some of those observations lean toward the positive but others are more critical. She does say America could work on making more local, integrated clinics but nowhere does she say we should be outwardly replicating any part of the Cuban system.
Another edited portion of the entry says that Brown taught in Nicaragua, and supported the Sandinistas and opposed free-market economics while there. There is little evidence to support this either. The 1990 article the Wiki entry cites characterizes Brown as nervous about the recently-elected conservative government. A fact-check on this issue done by The Spokesman-Review included interviews with the author of that article and people who worked with Brown in Nicaragua. All of them said Brown was more of an observer than an activist.
Finally, a comment on Wikipedia in general. It can be trustworthy. The editing process is fairly rigorous. But on rapidly-changing issues of current events and politics, it is normally unreliable. Take a look at either entry for Lisa Brown or Cathy McMorris Rodgers and you will see they are constantly being edited and re-edited, usually by people with a political motive in mind.
In other words, it is probably best not to make voting decisions based off anything to do with Wikipedia.
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