Posted on 12/29/2016 6:49:02 PM PST by Tennessean4Bush
Yesterday afternoon a colleague forwarded me an article from the Daily Mail, asking me if it could possibly be true. The article in question is an expose on Snopes.com, the fact checking site used by journalists and citizens across the world and one of the sites that Facebook recently partnered with to fact check news stories on its platform. The Daily Mail’s article makes a number of claims about the site’s principles and organization, drawing heavily from the proceedings of a contentious divorce between the site’s founders and questioning whether the site could possibly act as a trusted and neutral arbitrator of the “truth.”
When I first read through the Daily Mail article I immediately suspected the story itself must certainly be “fake news” because of how devastating the claims were and that given that Snopes.com was so heavily used by the journalistic community, if any of the claims were true, someone would have already written about them and companies like Facebook would not be partnering with them. I also noted that despite having been online for several hours, no other major mainstream news outlet had written about the story, which is typically a strong sign of a false or misleading story. Yet at the same time, the Daily Mail appeared to be sourcing its claims from a series of emails and other documents from a court case, some of which it reproduced in its article and, perhaps most strangely, neither Snopes nor its principles had issued any kind of statement through its website or social media channels disclaiming the story.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
The Daily Mail’s article makes a number of claims about the site’s principles and organization...Unless they're referring to the principles under which the site was founded and operates, I'm thinking that the word they want is principals.
I had assumed...
I had assumed....
Sounds like this guy did not do any fact checking just assumed.
Aren't reporters suppose to check things out for themselves?
Read the article. He does precisely that, he investigates his assumptions and finds that he was wrong.
Saw that. Good catch.
Snopes has put out hundreds of articles per day for years in support of their god in the white mosque.
Have been wondering what would happen when the Mikkelsons have to pay federal income tax again.
Wonder what Al Sharpton’s plan is....
I was hoping he’d write about the claim that his new wife is a former prostitute that also works for Snopes.
I guess he doesn't read FR.
He had not, apparently, had a reason to dig deeper until recently.
Snopes USED to be a decent site. Now, it is CLEARLY a leftwing hack site.
Jim, I make a plea again to you to consider removing snopes as a credible source on the homepage of FR. :)
Agreed. Let’s remove the Snopes as a reputable fact check site. It is run by an embezzler, porn star, and dominatrix. All exceedingly liberal.
Good post. I always thought Snopes was leftist based on which news they decided to check.
I knew snopes was dubious over a decade ago because I fact checked their fact checking. I do not depend on just one source for anything. I am not a reporter just a goof-ball with a keyboard. Yet I knew things that this "academic" did not because he assumed, he never questioned until the wheels started coming off the wagon.
He gets a small pat for actually looking in the hole after someone else dug it. He gets a kick for not doing his job for years.
Snopes is nothing but a pack of leftard scumbags, still yearning for the sixties.
Is no one literate save thee and me?
Meaning, he had never read a conservative critique of Snopes, or he did not consider that it might be valid.
To his credit, he seems willing to have his mind changed by facts.
Unfortunately, Forbes is another one of those sites that blocks readers who use AdBlock. Since I refuse to turn it off, all I need to do is read the brilliant comments by my fellow FReepers to know the real deal.
“as I had assumed that a fact checking site as reputable as Snopes”
Uh, yeah. Right. Proves the author is a complete idiot.
And until the Daily Mail article it appears nobody else did either. He lays out how he came upon the story and all the steps he took to confirm it. I’m not sure what else he could have done. Did you expect him to write this 5 years ago? Why him? Why not another reporter?
You appear to be singling out this one reporter for having done a job, following up on the DM article, that nobody else did.
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