Kim Lacapria was a columnist for Inquistr before she started working for Snopes. She described herself as openly left wing and wronte many columns expressing her liberal views. She may or may not do a good job of hiding her liberal biases but she does have them.
When people ask for a single, specific example, don’t think of it as a pointless challenge that’s a waste of time. Think of it as an opportunity to advance a worthwhile discussion that will otherwise GO NOWHERE.
The discussion is going nowhere anyway.
Imagine you’re discussing whether a dice cube is biased in favor of 6. Do you try to settle that by pointing to specific examples of it landing on 6?
[And that’s even without getting into the subjectivity in this case. Dice can at least be objectively measured.]
Right. When I was reading various articles I should have taken notes just for you. Somehow I didn’t foresee this thread. I used to find the site to be rock solid when it cae to the facts and over time I have noticed a shift. Not a huge shift. I still read their articles. I still use them as a source. I’m just much more careful with checking their work especially with certain writers they brought on. If you chose to dismiss my opinion so be it.
The thread on the original forum has since been locked. The other person had repeated the canard that “Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet” and I pointed out that he never made that claim and pointed to Snopes which had the actual quote.
I have relatives that insist it is biased, but they are Trump supporters anticipating a rigged election. And they believe Obama may not have been born in the USA.
Let’s just say their filter for belief is poor.
For myself, it would depend on the story. Still, Fox news does not typically source their material so it is hard to trust them completely. This is true of a lot of news outlets, not just Fox, but Fox is a bit more open in their bias than other sites. Fair and balanced my ass.
Do you have an example of this? I would like to see it.
Specifically what would you like to see here?
He would like to see two fish get caught using the same bait.
Lol. I’ve been told factcheck.org is a biased site. The people who believe stuff like that think any site without fox news in the title is biased.
In HS I knew a sport scholarship type who tried for an entire semester to say that “Shakespeare was Ignorant”.
He never convinced anyone that Shakespeare was ignorant…
In my experience, when people say that Snopes is biased, they aren’t talking about a subtle lean in political affiliation, or some other indicia that Snopes is framing the facts a certain way to prove a point. Instead, it’s a more blanket excuse to not have to give something referenced on Snopes any attention at all. It’s not that they are skeptical of Snopes; more drastically, if Snopes says it, it must therefore not be true.
These people are also blindly partisan, sorely lacking in reasoning skills, and fulfill numerous other unflattering stereotypes. Try as I might, I never succeed in getting them to break down a Snopes article and show me why it is unreliable.
As above, I think pointing to specific instances does not settle the matter. But I’ve come across an extremely misleading article tending to exonerate Jane Sanders. GOP Lawmaker: Allegations Against Jane Sanders Were ‘Hearsay’
If you look at the actual article that Snopes links to, it says:
Emphasis added.
So Snopes implied that Turner was the basis for the allegations against both Bernie and Jane Sanders, both that Bernie pressured the bank, and that Jane misled the bank, and that the basis for all this was hearsay. Further, that the hearsay was the basis for the investigation. In reality, the allegations against Jane, which resulted in an investigation, were not triggered by Turner, and were not the result of hearsay. The allegations against Bernie, which were based on hearsay from Turner, did not result in an investigation.
This seems pretty egregious to me, to the point that it’s hard to see it as innocent, IMHO.
The reason snopes seems left-biased is the left is more interested in research and facts than polemics. The right is more more Nugent-tangents, Breitbart-braying and Reilly-folly.
Never saw this thread the first time around. I saw this article from Forbes.com from Dec 2016 that expressed certain concerns about the overall processes of fact checking at Snopes. The Forbes article resulted from the author’s efforts to seek comment on a salacious article in the Daily Mail.
The author of the Forbes article, Kalev Leetaru, focused on an apparent lack of defined standards that would tend to limit bias. As an example he notes an email exchange with Snopes founder David Mikkelson that though Snopes has apparently employed staff who ran as political candidates but that affiliation is not disclosed. This could present an appearance of conflict at the least.
Further Leetaru notes a lack openness when queried about an apparent lack of internal controls at Snopes to verify continuity of ratings over time and to assess staff for bias.
Fundamentally Leetaru argues that by its own lack of openness Snopes functions as a sort of trust-me black box of fact checking. Perhaps like sausage making Snopes hopes we enjoy the result but does not want anyone to see how their fact checking work is done.
I agree with this. I don’t think their bias results in Republican statements being called false, so much as Democrats’ statements being labeled [mostly] true when you add context that was not included in the original statement.
When Forbes starts checking its own sources, I’ll care more. Snopes links to its sources and its answers are documented. It’s not as though it just comes up with a “true” or “false” rating absent context like a Magic 8 Ball or something.
You seemed to have disregarded the criticisms from the Forbes article with the same sweeping dismissal that is the subject of this thread when used to dismiss Snopes as a source. Ironic.
Snopes tends to dismiss things quickly in an attempt-to-sound-reassuring way, rather than an actual factual-analysis way.
Example: This article about “snuff films” - films in which someone is murdered on camera, for real:
Uh - no, I don’t think it is that easy. A video in which the murderer doesn’t appear in the video lens, in which there is no DNA evidence, murderer makes no vocal sound so as to not betray his vocal cord signature, killing takes place perhaps in a basement with no clue as to location (i.e., no visual landmarks), and we’re supposed to airily believe that the police will “quickly” be led to the right door? Why, there might never be such a thing as an FBI cold case. It sounds like the Hollywoodized “There is nothing the FBI can’t do” assumption.
The right is training people not to believe anything, so that they’ll believe bullshit.
Politifacts? Snopes? Educated people? Can’t be trusted. They have a liberal bias.
We see a lot of it even on this board. Cite one of the above and someone will cry “BIAS!” and then quote some obscure 2,000 follower blog as proof of something. :rolleyes: