In my ongoing Quest for Universal Truth™, I have frequently turned to Snopes.com for help in debunking myths and hoaxes. Lately, I’ve been chastised by a couple of friends, who seem to believe that Barbara and David Mikkelson are some sorts of liberal operatives, and that their website leans to the far left. Honestly, I don’t believe this, but for the sake of argument:
[ul]
[li]Do you yourself believe that the Snopes website has a political agenda?[/li][li]Can you provide any credible cites that support that belief?[/li][li]Are there other sites out there (besides this one, of course) that you use to research urban myths and hoaxes and such? (Especially political topics.)[/li][/ul]
Well, this board has been criticized as having a liberal slant too. I tend to agree in both cases, but don’t know about any truly unbiased board in respect to politics.
The people who claim Snopes has a liberal bias are likely the same ones who say schools have a liberal bias.
Example: The Earth is 6,000 years old. Schools teach Geology classes that state the Earth is billions of years old. Ergo, schools have a liberal bias.
There was a thread a while back, asking if Snopes was ever wrong. It contains a long discussion of whether a small airplane crashed into a tree next to a LEARN TO FLY HERE sign, and whether the sign was photoshopped. The incident is True (as Snopes says), but the image was 'shopped. Snopes have never edited their article to make people aware that the sign was digitally reversed for comedic effect.
Aside from that incident, the articles I’ve read on Snopes have contained footnotes and links citing evidence. There are people who ignore evidence when it conflicts with their beliefs, and those are the people likely to disparage Snopes as having a ‘liberal bias’.
Heh. I pointed out to an old friend that a meme he shared was a bit misleading, and added the correct George Washington quote. He angrily asked for my cite, and told me “not to use that damned liberal Snopes crap” to prove my point. So I cited guncite.com (along with the Library of Congress and the George Washington Papers Project at the University of Virginia.) Old Friend didn’t have the grace to thank me for using non-Snopes cites… :dubious:
And thanks for the links to prior threads, y’all - I should have searched before posting!
My litmus test for finding an outfit that is less biased is how they report items that have lots of science against extreme ideas, in this case, the ones against Genetic engineering in food and nuclear power that have lots of opposition from leftists.
RationalWiki passes that test, with articles putting down many of the radical left ideas on those subjects in Genetic Manipulation and a fair pro and con view of the Nuclear issue.
I did a brief bit of research about a year ago. I’m not going to go look up all the links again, but the credible consensus is that while they’re not infallible, they are reliable.
I had the exact same dismissive arm waving re Snopes in a Facebook squabble I was having with some TPers pushing a false flag conspiracy story re the Boston bombing.
I will say, however, I was surprised by Snopes saying this item a 4th grade creationist science test was “probably true” based on an anonymous person claiming they were the source for it. It reeks of obvious BS.
I use Equal in my coffee, and a friend of mine hates it, because she’s convinced that it’s going to kill me.
In a subsequent conversation, she mentioned Snopes several times and I asked her how accurate she thought Snopes was. Pretty darned accurate, she says. What about Equal, I says? They say it’s safe as mother’s milk! No, she says, they’re wrong on that one; it’s poison and it’s gonna kill ya.
I’ll toss in my 2 cents… I was a regular in the early days. I’m a moderate Republican. There was a joke from the very beginning about people accusing us of being Liberally biased. If you look in their message board… which is split into way to many sections (IMHO), you will find one called the SLC (for those who have passed the secret initiation rites). This is an inside joke. SLC stands for “Secret Liberal Cabal” which obviously all of us who spent hours researching urban legends in the early days were a part of.
The individual fora in which people express opinions and engage in debates may or may not have a liberal bias. But for individual fora where hard facts are discussed (e.g. “General Questions”, or Snopes, where specific truth claims are evaluated for validity/veracity), I’m not clear on how a liberal or conservative bias may manifest itself.
In discussing the veracity of various assertions about the Obama administration and campaigns, they seem to veer from their general mission to assess the facts into a more subjective editorializing about how what might seem like negative facts are really different when you consider them in context etc., to a greater extent than they do when discussing similar issues about Republicans.
But it’s not especially egregious, and I could be wrong.