Interesting information about snopes.com

[Tiz]

For the past few years ( http://www.snopescom/ has positioned itself, or others have labeled it, as the 'tell-all final word' on any comment, claim and email. But for several years people tried to find out who exactly was behind snopes.com (http://snopes.com/) . Only recently did Wikipedia get to the bottom of it - kinda makes you wonder what they were hiding. Well, finally we know. It is run by a husband and wife team - that's right, no big office of investigators and researchers, no team of lawyers. It's just a mom-and-pop operation that began as a hobby . David and Barbara Mikkelson in the San Fernando Valley of California started the website about 13 years ago and they have no formal background or experience in investigative research. After a few years it gained popularity believing it to be unbiased and neutral, but over the past couple of years people started asking questions who was behind it and did they have a selfish motivation?
> The reason for the questions - or skepticisms - is a result of snopes.com (http://snopes.com/) claiming to have the bottom line facts to certain questions or issue when in fact they have been proven wrong. Also, there were criticisms the Mikkelsons were not really investigating and getting to the 'true' bottom of various issues.
> A few months ago, when my State Farm agent Bud Gregg in Mandeville hoisted a political sign referencing Barack Obama and made a big splash across the Internet, 'supposedly' the Mikkelson's claim to have researched this issue before posting their findings on snopes.com (http://snopes.com/) . In their statement they claimed the corporate office of State Farm pressured Gregg into taking down the sign, when in fact nothing of the sort 'ever' took place. I personally contacted David Mikkelson (and he replied back to me) thinking he would want to get to the bottom of this and I gave him Bud Gregg'scontact phone numbers - and Bud was going to give him phone numbers to the big exec's at State Farm in Illinois who would have been willing to speak with him about it. He never called Bud. In fact, I learned from Bud Gregg that no one from snopes.com (http://snopes.com/) ever contacted anyone with State Farm.
> Yet, snopes.com (http://snopes.com/) issued a statement as the 'final factual word' on the issue as if they did all their homework and got to the bottom of things - not!
> Then it has been learned the Mikkelson's are very Democratic (party) and extremely liberal. As we all now know from this presidential election, liberals have a purpose agenda to discredit anything that appears to be conservative. There has been much criticism lately over the Internet with people pointing out the Mikkelson's liberalism revealing itself in their website findings. Gee, what a shock?
> So, I say this now to everyone who goes to snopes.com (http://snopes.com/) to get what they think to be the bottom line fact 'proceed with caution.' Take what it says at face value and nothing more. Use it only to lead you to their references where you can link to and read the sources for yourself. Plus, you can always Google a subject and do the research yourself. It now seems apparent that's all the Mikkelson's do. After all, I can personally vouch from my own experience for their 'not' fully looking into things.
> http://http//www.wikipedia.org/ ; or http://http//www.snopes.com/
> I have found this to be true also! Many videos of Obama I tried to verify on Snopes and they said they were False. Then they gave their liberal slant! I have suspected some problems with snopes for some time now, but I have only caught them in half-truths. If there is any subjectivity they do an immediate full left rudder.
> Truth or Fiction, is a better source for verification, in my opinion. http://www.truthorfiction.com/
> I have recently discovered that Snopes.com is owned by a flaming liberal and this man is in the tank for Obama. There are many things they have listed on their site as a hoax and yet you can go to You tube yourself and find the video of Obama actually saying these things. So you see, you cannot and should not trust Snopes.com, ever for anything that remotely resembles truth! I don't even trust them to tell me if email chains are hoaxes anymore.
> A few conservative speakers on MySpace told me about Snopes.com. A few months ago and I took it upon myself to do a little research to find out if it was true. Well, I found out for myself that it is true. Anyway just FYI please don't use Snopes.com anymore for fact checking and make your friends aware of their political leanings as well. Many people still think Snopes.com is neutral and they can be trusted as factual. We need to make sure everyone is aware that that is a hoax in itself.
> Thank you, Alan Strong
> Alan Strong CEO/Chairman
Commercial Programming Systems, Inc.
4400 Coldwater Canyon Ave. Suite 200
Studio City , CA. 91604-5039
http://cpsinc.com/meetOurTeam.html
>
>

[WashingtonBay]

Heh....

I actually have wondered how snopes ended up being the authority on 'what's true'. Who snopes snopes? :)

[mare]

Well, shucks. I depended on them to be objective. Now I'm back to 98% confuzzled.

The other 2%, I'm being generous with myself, hoping I can believe 2% of what I believe.

[Tatesgram]

I sent this to the head of our IT department. He is often sending us info from snopes. Here is his reply:

http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/s/snopes.htm. As I remember, the State Farm part of this was incorrect. I also looked up the Mikkelson's to see if they were contributors to Democratic candidates and they were not. The writer makes a claim that many items are hoaxes but doesn't provide any references to the specific content on youtube that contradicts the snopes page. Snopes is small time but it doesn't take a team of lawyers and researchers to debunk most of the emails that go around. All you have to do is make a phone call or jfgi (just freaking google it). For example, there was one about George Bush paying for some kids funeral. I called the funeral home. Wasn't true. There was another one about some muslim in the dept of homeland security. I googled him and found saw where he had been working in the Bush administration for years.
　
I've got no love at all for Obama but I think that a lot of the emails do a disservice and discredit those that oppose him. There is enough day to day crap in the news that the Obama administration is doing that's bad enough. I think that the internet has bred a lot of conservative and liberal "foundations", "centers for", organizations that exist on the cheap primarily to sell their books, newsletters and ads for crap on their websites and emails. I get a lot of them from Newsmax, Worldnet Daily and some other that try to sell absolute quackery. Cures for this disease and that. Weight loss products, Get rich quick schemes, etc. It's like listening to the commercials during talk radio shows. They make me absolutely crazy because they are stealing from people.

I'm a life member of the NRA and I've even sent them letters complaining about the ads in their magazine for health quackery "male enhancement" products and bogus investment schemes.

My favorite site is realclearpolitics.com. They have a lot of articles every day by some very good writers. Another one I like is reason.com. That's a good libertarian site. That's libertarian with a small "L". The capital letter "L" libertarians can be a bit kooky.

freakonomics.com can be pretty interesting too.

[Tiz]

How do you find out if someone contributed money to a political campaign, or candidate? Is there a big google list of names?

Anyway, I'm not surprised that someone who relies on snopes would not have an open mind about it's reliability. I've seen inaccuracies on snopes site, though I can't remember what I was trying to verify now.

I like realclear, biggovernment and the cato institute. I've found that conservative, or libertarian, sites are far more reliable for facts then lefty sites. Generally speaking, I agree with mare, and hold my state of belief to about the same percentages.

[Ragnar Danneskjold]

I've been aware for a while that the Mikkelson's are lefties. But giving credit where it's due I think they do a pretty fair job of de-bunking things that need de-bunked, and their research is usually pretty solid. Their bias shows up every now and then, but it's not obnoxious. It's especially good when arguing with lefties... I should say. :)

It's an interesting time in the history of "information management". How do we establish credibility in the totally free-form world of the Internet? Well... it's the same as it's always been: reputation. You spend a lot of time building a reputation that becomes widely known as being a trustworth source-- and then you keep working hard to protect that brand equity.

It's the same Reason that "Webster's" became the brand to have in dictionaries, or "Britannica" became the reference-standard brand name in Encyclopedias. Reputation. After all... the whole reason to have a "reputable" source to quote from is so you can convince someone else that whatever point you're making has validity. So... the sources need to be places that they also accept as authoritative.

[offgridgirl]

hummm all good information... I usually google it myself....:) I did this recently when I was sent a request to advertise on my site. There was a great article by investigative reporter for the NYtimes.

[Sundays Man]

Hey, why don't one of us go to "snopes" and see if that article is accurate or not.:)