John Seigenthaler

John Lawrence Seigenthaler ( SEE-gən-thaw-lər; July 27, 1927 – July 11, 2014) was an American journalist, writer, and political figure. He was known as a prominent defender of First Amendment rights.Seigenthaler joined the Nashville newspaper The Tennessean in 1949, resigning in 1960 to act as Robert F. Kennedy's administrative assistant. He rejoined The Tennessean as editor in 1962, publisher in 1973, and chairman in 1982 before retiring as chairman emeritus in 1991. Seigenthaler was also the founding editorial director of USA Today from 1982 to 1991. During this period, he served on the board of directors for the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and from 1988 to 1989, was its president. =

On May 26, 2005, an unregistered Wikipedia user created a five-sentence biographical article about Seigenthaler that contained false and defamatory content. The false statement in Seigenthaler's Wikipedia article read:

John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960s. 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.

When alerted of the article's existence, Seigenthaler directly contacted Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who removed the false claims. As Seigenthaler later wrote: "For four months, Wikipedia depicted me as a suspected assassin before Wales erased it from his website's history" on October 5.Seigenthaler noted that the falsehoods written about him on Wikipedia were later posted on Answers.com and Reference.com. He later wrote an op-ed on the experience for USA Today in which he wrote, "And so we live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research – but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects. Congress has enabled them and protects them", a reference to the protection from liability that internet service providers are given under federal law versus editorially controlled media like newspapers and television.

According to a scholar specializing in biographies, including digital life narratives, "The Seigenthaler case became a formative moment in Wikipedia's history, and led to the development of policies to protect individuals from defamation."