Snopes: "Liberal apologist"?

Just got this in reply to my reply to a muslim hate e-mail:

"trof, as so often before, www.snopes has distinguished itself to be a liberal apologist site, here too it does it again. To wit…

“How, then, do we now distinguish friend from foe? Wouldn't it be so much easier if — as advocated here — we could simply assume all ARAB-MUSLIMS to be guilty and demand them to demonstrate otherwise?”

“Assuming all Arabs-Muslims guilty” is NOT what the article advocates…it’s premise is just the opposite; that we as a nation are not assuming and we are giving the individual Muslim the benefit of the doubt. However, it is also clear it is their responsibility to speak out loudly against the terror being wrought by some of their community-but they are not. So, until they do, all those who do not speak out and disavow are suspect.

As the article DOES say…” I want to know where

>> every Arab/ Muslim in this country stands, and I think it is my right

>> and the right of every true citizen of this country to demand it.” …”I am pleading with you to let me know. I want you here

>> as my brother, my neighbor, my friend, as a fellow American. But

>> there can be no gray areas or ambivalence regarding your allegiance,

>> and it is up to YOU, to show ME, where YOU stand. Until then .. you

>> worry me."

Regards,
jerk"

So...is Snopes a liberal apologist?
I replied that I had always found them to be pretty even-handed.

that the right-wingers like to spread around complete bullshit. Snopes refutes their bullshit - so the right-wingers have to say that Snopes in irrelevant.

It's as simple as that.

EVERY SINGLE DAMN TIME I've read here about someone receiving one of these "emails" (kinda funny how Democrats don't do this?) *EVERY* TIME IT'S 100% LIES.

There has not been ONE SINGLE TIME when one of these viral emails is TRUE.

Ohhh, so MUCH they like this FANTASY of the liberal media. "Here's the story the liberal media ISN'T telling you - Clinton's an ALIEN!" But we need to distribute this by email!

That they've tried to turn the tables on Snopes is a JOKE.

Looking up to your message, you've said EVERYTHING there is say (outside of my rant).

they're hardly "liberal apologists" - but that line gets trotted out usually when freepers get confronted with their myths getting exploded in their faces.

DO you have a link to the Snopes article in question?

Freepers just don't like it when snopes exposes the fake "list of actual Al Gore quotes" or "Democrats who said there were WMDs" emails they like to send to each other.

:shrug:

A twist on the oft-forwarded email:

In 1985, Air India Flight 182 was blown up over the Atlantic by:
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Bill O'Reilly
c. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir
d. Indian Sikh extremists, in retaliation for the Indian Army's attack on the Golden Temple shrine in Amritsar

In 1986, who attempted to smuggle three pounds of explosives onto an El Al jetliner bound from London to Tel Aviv?
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Michael Smerconish
c. Bob Mould
d. A pregnant Irishwoman named Anne Murphy

In 1962, in the first-ever successful sabotage of a commercial jet, a Continental Airlines 707 was blown up with dynamite over Missouri by:
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Ann Coulter
c. Henry Rollins
d. Thomas Doty, a 34-year-old American passenger, as part of an insurance scam

In 1994, who nearly succeeding in skyjacking a DC-10 and crashing it into the Federal Express Corp. headquarters?
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Michelle Malkin
c. Charlie Rose
d. Auburn Calloway, an off-duty FedEx employee and resident of Memphis, Tenn.

In 1974, who stormed a Delta Air Lines DC-9 at Baltimore-Washington Airport, intending to crash it into the White House, and shot both pilots?
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Joe Scarborough
c. Spalding Gray
d. Samuel Byck, an unemployed tire salesman from Philadelphia


The answer in every case is "D".

http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/06/16/askthepilot190/index_np.html

The "B's" are really representative of hate mongering in the U.S.A.

If they were biased, people wouldn't go there to check whether all the stupid stuff in emails is wrong or correct. It's about credibility which is the basis for their success.
As soon as they favour one side, they lose all credibility.


So your freeper friend is just an idiot who doesn't want to realize, that a research solely based on mass emails doesn't have its flaws.

Anyone who refutes those lies is bound to look liberal.

'Taint necessarily so.

She and her husband run snopes.
Just asked her if they got many complaints about political bias from one side or the other.
If she answers I'll post it here.

99 percent of the debunking on snopes is against RW propaganda.

So I guess you COULD say it's biased that way... :eyes:

Repub: "Snopes is biased. You almost never see them debunking some liberal lies."

Me: "Every day I," this was the mid-90s when every day I did, in fact, "receive email messages containing rightwing lies. I rarely receive any email containing a leftwing message, lying or otherwise."

Repub: "Oh, so I suppose Liberals never lie. Yeah, right. I at least acknowledge the fact that my side isn't always perfect."


This argument was not, of course, for my consumption. But for the consumption of the people around us. He used his admission that the rightwing lies on a daily basis to paint me as a bigger liar for not admitting to leftwing lies on a daily basis.

I could never figure out a way of re-framing it except to offer to produce reams of evidence in the forms of emails collected over a period showing rightwing lies and challenge him to produce the leftwing counterpart. His response to that was the tried-and-true freeper reply, "prove that the leftwing doesn't send out lying emails."

Me: "How the hell can I prove I did NOT receive something?!?"

For years this worked for him. All I could do was keep pounding away at him, answering lies with facts. Ultimately I saw the incredulous looks switch from me to him. But it took years of repeating over and over again, "here is my proof, where is yours".


Which is of course why the 50-State Strategy is so important. Throuhgout huge portions of this country the Republicans have spent two decades lying with impunity. It will take years to counter those lies.

Kind of an epiphany?
I can't remember ever getting something that's flat untrue from left-wingers.
And they usually include website references, etc. in the e-mail.
Righties NEVER do.

dinner for every copy of a "lefty" or anti-Bush email that he has received and can forward to you.

He can't go out on the web to find it, he has to retrieve it from his own email.

We'll see who's wrong, and who's fat! ;)

He'll starve.

Your statement about snopes being a liberal apologist website aroused my curiosity. I've also been told that they had a right-wing bias. I usually go there when my BS detector sounds. I did a google search of 'snopes and politics'. Found a website where that exact discussion had taken place. Below are some of the comments. I guess, like beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder?

trof

Honestly, it's strange to hear Snopes being labelled as a "reliably liberal" site when, at least until recently, the slam from some circles was that the site had a conservative bias. I remember over a year ago (well before Fahrenheit 9/11) when Snopes tore Michael Moore a new one over his claim that Bin Laden family members were able to fly out of the country in the days after 9/11 despite the existence of a travel ban. The site subsequently retracted some (but not all) of its original post on the subject (you can read the edited version at http://www.snopes.com/rumors/flight.htm). Snopes has debunked lots of erroneous, malicious claims about Bush (skim the listing at http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/bush.asp), which I wouldn't think a decidedly liberal site would do.

What Snopes DOES do, as you mention, is give acts "context." To me, this is extremely useful. The rightness or wrongness of acts/statements depends on their relationship with surrounding facts. Hillary's "defense" of the Black Panthers is much less outrageous (though probably still a bad thing) than the e-mail making the allegation portrays it to be once you understand the surrounding context. Perhaps it's erroneous for Snopes to label claims as "True" or "False" in certain cases, but it's certainly demonstrated a talent for proving claims to be not nearly as truthful as they purport to be.

Posted by: Mike on February 15, 2005 03:01 PM



One other thing. The Snopes article on the brothel rumor ends with this final paragraph:

"This was another case where, like a game of 'telephone,' a story was...passed from one news source to the next, and somewhere in the rewriting and translating process what was originally discussed as a mere hypothetical possibility has now been reported as a factual occurrence."

I love ya, Ace, but I think you might be a bit guilty of this yourself. You link to a NRO post that you claim "debunks... , and notes that Snopes is hopelessly left-leaning." I think most folks who read the NRO post(s) themselves can see this is an exaggeration.

The post you cite only says that the writer feels that Snopes has "a vague lefty bias," which is something considerably less than a "hopelessly liberal" one. Also, none of the NRO posts debunk the Snopes article; they simply suggest that because Snopes hasn't completely disproven the possibility that a German unemployed woman might be forced to work in a brothel, it hasn't completely debunked an article that alleges that unemployed German women are being compelled to work in brothels (a subtle but important difference). I don't think such counterarguments "debunk" Snopes's claim with respect to the content of the Telegraph article, anymore than I thought lefties "debunked" right-leaning blogs' coverage of Rathergate by arguing that the righties hadn't proven that the content of the (forged) memos was absolutely false, even if the memos themselves were.

I've been reading Snopes for a long time and they always struck me as pretty middle of the road despite my oversensitive and very weary liberal bullshit detector.

I can see them lean left every now and again, but even with that Hilary Clinton thing they're basically saying that "Gosh, you know people who e-mail these kind of screeds are pretty much full of shit."

Status on that: True.

They get hammered a lot from both sides from people wanting to believe or challenge the worst they get off their MoveOn e-mail lists. I've been impressed with how much of that they handle without showing even more of their personal opinions.

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/067591.php