Said former Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski, quoted in "Snopes Retracts 60 Articles Plagiarized by Co-Founder: ‘Our Staff Are Gutted’/The fact-checking site has banned David Mikkelson, who owns half the company, from writing articles after a BuzzFeed News investigation prompted an internal review" (NYT).
In a 2016 Slack message... Mikkelson [said]: “Usually when a hot real news story breaks (such as a celebrity death), I just find a wire service or other news story about it and publish it on the site verbatim to quickly get a page up,” he wrote. “Once that’s done, then I quickly start editing the page to reword it and add material from other sources to make it not plagiarized.”
Even if he had rewritten the text a few minutes after publication, that would not be considered ethical under widely accepted journalistic standards. But as both the BuzzFeed investigation and Snopes’s internal investigation found, he frequently never got around to changing the sentences he had stolen....
Mikkelson still owns 50% and is the chief executive of this business that's supposed to be all about ferreting out the truth.
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18 comments:
I just want to be clear about one thing; this story exposes plagiarized content in some Snopes stories, but does not indicate erroneous content or mistaken conclusions. Do I have that right?
I frequently look to Snopes on contentious stories. They frequently cite and quote other sources. I expect that. The notion that they were plagiarizing is wrong, of course; and when you are plagiarizing on a wholesale basis, you aren't exactly fact-checking the writing. But did Snopes ever get a fact-checking conclusion wrong?
This doesn’t argue that the plagiarized posts weren’t accurate, just that the process of composing them was unethical. Of course, a lot of people learned early on that Snopes was no more free from the left’s influence than any other popular cultural entity. The lesson is don’t trust any single source. It’s not smart and not necessary, what with a gazillion options available.
Yes, as it turns out, creating 'truth' is far more lucrative than actually just sticking to reporting things as they are.
It is always hilarious watching journalists pretending to have ethics.
" ... (t)hat would not be considered ethical under widely accepted journalistic standards."
As an individual who was once covered by journalists, that would make me spit out my coffee, were I drinking coffee.
I consider Snopes is no better, no worse than any "fact-checking" site, thus I presume it to be less than reliable.
First, reenforcing your world view is not the same as always being right. Second, it appears that in many instances actual fact checking (what they are supposed to be doing) didn't take place. Therefore it is reasonable to look for another fact check service, as this one is no longer trustworthy.
Agree with Chuck. I thought Snopes' thing was fact checking. People read it for straight news?
Who knew.
Journalistic standards don't allow for retroactive editing of a story or completely scrubbing it. But that's standard practice for the NYTimes these days.
Ferrets are closely related to weasels.
Chris Lopes said...
First, reenforcing your world view is not the same as always being right. Second, it appears that in many instances actual fact checking (what they are supposed to be doing) didn't take place. Therefore it is reasonable to look for another fact check service, as this one is no longer trustworthy.
When was Snopes' plagiarism happening? 2015-16? We now have the advantage of time and perspective to know pretty clearly when and if they ever got one of their fact-check declarations wrong. Again I ask; when has Snopes been wrong?
And I have no problem with absorbing all the fact-checkers and crticizing any of them where warranted; Politifact; Factcheck.org; WaPo's Fact Checker; or Snopes.
I even have and understanding of why WSJ's James Taranto fundamentally rejects the idea of "fact-checking" being deserving of some special category in journalism.
But I do have a problem with those who simply reject all of fact-checking out of hand. If you're going to criticize the fact-checkers, you had better marshal your own facts and you better be very specific.
I used to love Snopes and would reference it at my blog in the 00's. Someone made an accusation that they had developed a political bias, and I shrugged, because I figured it was minor at worst and some conservatives were getting their knickers in a twist on the abortion issue. Eventually I checked it out and was stunned. The supposed urban legend was that Chinese companies were using material from aborted fetuses to produce cosmetics. Snopes rated this "false," but in their explanation it was clear that they meant "Okay they do, but all the companies don't do it, and they might not be doing it Very Much."
I don't change horses easily, so I was merely suspicious at first. I simply remained alert for what I might see. Sure enough, they showed a social/cultural liberal bias, and within a year it was clearly an political, and eventually a partisan bias. This was around 2010. I stress that I didn't find other examples that were simply wrong and inaccurate. Everything had "some truth values" as they say. Yet I sometimes knew additional bits of information that were left out, and these followed a liberal narrative pattern. I haven't kept up with it. Maybe they arrested the slide and are quite reputable now. But my trust was lost, and I don't go there.
You can usually trust a fact-checking organization on non-political topics, but if there are politics involved, you can't trust them at all any longer.
I have graduate degrees in history and library and information science.
I know fact. Online 'fact-checking' generally consists of 20- and 30-something y.o. mass comm or journalism majors (i.e. utter ignoramuses) checking with their peers online to see what's true today.
A friend who started out as a journalist told me that as a rule of thumb, if a reporter gets half the story half right, she's done her job. My own experiences with the breed make think it's more like 33/33.
Feel free to fact-check me.
Chuck said...
Again I ask; when has Snopes been wrong?
Well, since you asked so nicely:
https://notthebee.com/article/snopes-goes-full-clown-town-calls-stories-pointing-out-aocs-lies-about-the-capitol-riot-mostly-false
Snopes rates as Mostly False "Did AOC Exaggerate the Danger She Was in During Capitol Riot?"
They admit: "What's True: Ocasio-Cortez wasn't in the main Capitol building where the House and Senate Chambers are located."
Which, if they weren't lying partisan hacks, would have ended the fact check, which would have been "Completely true"
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/03/my-day-with-snopes.php
Over the weekend I came across the Snopes fact check: “Did U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar Marry Her Brother?” It rates the allegation, originally raised by me on Power Line, “Unproven.” Published on February 15, it stated in its conclusion that neither Omar nor Power Line had responded to a list of questions.
Turns out that was a lie, Snopes had never sent any questions to PowerLine
https://thefederalist.com/2017/02/21/4-recent-examples-show-why-no-one-trusts-media-fact-checks/
Our next example of a “fact” “check” failure is a Snopes piece on whether Planned Parenthood rewards employees for promoting abortion services. Journalist Lila Rose interviewed former Planned Parenthood employees who said they were expected to increase the revenue-generating abortion portion of the business. She also had a document purporting to show a reward for one clinic exceeding its abortion visits relative to a prior period of time. Therefore, the check couldn’t determine that the allegations were “false.” Instead they were rated “unproven.”
So, if you "trust" Snopes, it's because you trust them to give the left wing spin you desire. no one who wants an honest "fact check" goes to Snopes for anything that has the least bit of a political angle
To Greg the Class Traitor:
I asked for specifics, and you gave me specifics.
As to your first fact-check check, I agree with you, and with notthebee. AOC deserved to be checked on her language, full stop. Snopes' writer bent over backwards to find some shred of credibility based purely on AOC's subjective emotions.
As to your second fact-check check, I again agree with you. Powerline wins that one going away.
As to your third fact-check check, I regard that one as a typically annoying Mollie Hemingway column; she's criticizing a dog's breakfast of differing unconnected news reports. Some were actual "fact checking" enterprises, some not. Her examples were quite trivial. I have real issues with Mollie these days. She's as sloppy as anyone in the business:
https://www.thebulwark.com/the-tear-gas-hoax-hoax/
But again; I asked you to be specific, and you were. This is how good discussions go. Kudos to you Greg.
Oh and Greg; I'm not sure if you were addressing me directly, but I never said that I "trust" Snopes. I said I look at Snopes frequently on contentious stories.
On contentious stories in other contexts, I also consume; NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, The Bulwark, The Dispatch, the New York Times, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, and too many others to name.
Chuck said:
As to your first fact-check check, I agree with you, and with notthebee. AOC deserved to be checked on her language, full stop. Snopes' writer bent over backwards to find some shred of credibility based purely on AOC's subjective emotions.
The reality is that that is what Snopes always does, on anything of a political nature. The same is true for NPR, the BBC, The Bulwark, The Dispatch, the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN.
Chris Wallace, of "Fox News", described CRT as "racial sensitivity training, just trying to keep people from offending each other unnecessarily". So I'm sure you find lots of things to buttress a left wing point of view from them.
The WSJ "news" pages are as left wing as CNN. The opinion pages are generally globalist / "free trade".
Between your sources, you can always find backing for any left wing lie you wish to embrace.
But if you want actual facts checked, you go to the right wing blogosphere, not any of the groups you mentioned. After you've gotten their take, then you could look at the others with a critical eye, look at all the things they don't say, and realize that, once again, the Left is wrong and the Right is correct.
How to determine the truth of a matter:
1: Go to the side the Left hates, and find out what they have to say:
For example, I wanted to know what was happening with the Sheikh Jarrah controversy. So I did a Duck Duck Go search (never use Google first, never use Google for anything political) and found this
https://www.jns.org/sheikh-jarrah-a-legal-background/
2: Then go to the side supported by the Left, and see what they have to say about the things the other side claimed.
So, in this case, I went here:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-sheikh-jarrah-jerusalem-neighbourhood-eviction-explained
3: Compare
What I found was that The JNS site had reported everything covered by MEE. But while MEE stopped at the point where things were going to start going bad for them, JNS kept on going, bringing in the details that made a difference.
MEE: In 2005, the Israeli court dismissed Ottoman documents presented by Suleiman Darwish Hijazi, one of the residents of Sheikh Jarrah, as evidence of his ownership of the land.
JNS: In 1997, Suliman Darwish Hijazi, a Palestinian man, attempted to challenge the trusts’ ownership of the property, based on a kushan (Ottoman title) that he allegedly purchased from a Jordanian man, al-Bandeq, in 1961. The court ruled that Hijazi failed to demonstrate that the kushan refers to the claimed property in Shimon HaTzadik, and that forensic evidence raised the likelihood that the kushan had been altered or forged. Furthermore, Hijazi failed to prove that al-Bandeq had ever owned the property and thus had the right to sell it.
Finally, Hijazi had never acted to protect his property rights, both during the Jordanian and Israeli periods, by registering it, charging rent, or paying property tax.
Advantage: JNS.
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