I've been snoping around at snopes.com

[IN-dem]

A boy is that woman (I think it is a woman that writes little notes in there) She is 100% REPUB!!!! I will be looking for a better site to look up my urban legends. Anybody know about urbanlegends.com are they biased?

[Selatius]

1. I don't think it's biased.

If it were so, you would not have entries like this:

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.htm

[IN-dem]

17. Go check out the link I sent and then you tell me n/t

[seriousstan]

2. You are ass backwards on this. Show me proof.

[RoyGBiv]

3. Sorry, no ... n/t

[fujiyama]

4. Sorry I don't buy that

If that were the case they wouldn't be debunking crap like this:

"Claim: Bill Clinton has been quietly doing away with those who oppose him.

Status: False. "

or this:

"Claim: New York Senator Hillary Clinton refused to meet with a contingent of Gold Star mothers.

Status: False. "

or this:

"Claim: Bill Clinton was the "first pardoned federal felon ever to serve as President of the U.S."

Status: False. "

or this:

"Claim: The Clinton administration failed to track down the perpetrators of several terrorist attacks against Americans.

Status: False. "

and so on...

You get the picture. It's fairly unbiased. The only time there was an issue with bias was regarding Michael Moore and the Saudi flights. At first they claimed he was false but they later changed it.

[Az]

5. The people at snopes are right leaners

But they are not so far gone that they tarnish their work with their politics. They even bit their tongue and apologised for getting a Michaele Moore story wrong.

[ladylibertee]

7. Thanks' for the heads up.I'll stay away

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Synnical]

36. They're Libertarians, or at least David is

I was on a Skeptic discussion list with David Mikkelson - and his politics were abundantly clear. I quit the list some time ago - traffic was too heavy and my focus changed from skepticism to politics.

It's this list:

http://www.csicop.org/bibliography/list.html

He posts as "Snopes" if anyone cares to search.

Edit for typo

[skids]

6. Sortof.

She does attempt balance. Which is actually pretty frustrating because a lot of the bias ends up very subtle.

But I'm not so sure anymore that she personally has a big repug streak. Maybe a little one. More likely a medium-sized establishmentarian streak, really.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that the main reason for bias when it occurs at snopes is that she is susceptable to influence. She writes articles based on how many emails she receives about them, and the quality of the emails that come in that make her job easier.

While I would never advise anyone to rely on snopes individually, they do have some good material, and they are considered an authority to some extent.

This is the new media. We have to lobby it just like the old media. View snopes like a TV reporter. If you see a story, or information about a story, mail it in. Otherwise, the freepers will outweigh us.

[dutchdemocrat]

8. Mickelsons are Bush boot lickers

Barbara and David P. Mikkelson are blatant Bush supporters as was clearly evident by their ugly unfounded and vitriolic attack on Michael Moore which they later had to retract because they were WRONG with the facts. And even then the apology and retraction were lame and weak with a 'but... but.. but...' spin.

The attack was controversial enough that snopes.com now blocks archive.org and google.com's caching systems so they will never leave traces again if anything like that happens in the future.

Their choice content in general reflects their political bias. They throw the odd bone out to make it look like they are 'fair and balanced' but the truth is - they are not.

[MisterP]

41. I no longer follow the links after I realized that by just having the e-

mails posted with "true" to the most blatant rubbish (Charlie Daniels, Gitmo taxi drivers will kill us all), they're probably just enabling their propagation.
www.breakthechain.org often actually addresses content

[clu]

9. agreed

The only article I can recall offhand has to do with clear channel's "do not play" song list reported on shortly after 9/11.

The author states this is false in the heading, then indicates in the body that a memo was distributed and not forced.

[tamtam]

10. I don't know about that

I e-mailed snopes.com about a nasty blog that was going around. I got a reply within days and they seem to be pretty fair about the whole thing. I haven't taken a good look at that site. I did make an comparison between snopes.com and urbanlegend.com in regards to this particular weblog I inquired about. It seems that urbanlegend.com was more aggressive in their analysis opposed to snopes.com

[Webster Green]

11. "A boy is that woman"...?.......WTF does that mean??....

Can you translate that into english?


Demand resignations! Now!

[Kailassa]

13. And boy is that woman ...

Could you really not work out that obvious typo, or do you get off on pointing out spelling mistakes?

[IN-dem]

14. Excuse my typo..it should read AND boy

[REP]

15. No, She's Not

She and her husband do get things wrong, but not because they love *.

[IN-dem]

16. Here is a couple links...smells like repub to me

I found two or three last night. But tonight for some reason there is only this one.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/military/sandplanes.asp

[seriousstan]

18. I don't know what you are misconstruing as "repug" in this link.

The question was, "were planes found buried under the sand", the answer was "yes". Where is the slant?

If you are referring to the text included in the original quoted post....the reference to WMDs.....then you don't understand how SNOPES works. It begins with actual internet posts and the either verifies them or debunks them.

I think you are mistaken in your characterization of SNOPES.

[IN-dem]

23. I was questioning the comments that were made

above the pictures. Here is the quote "Mig Buried in Sand
This has been out for well over a month, and I'll bet you haven't seen anything about it in the liberal news media.
No WMD’s, huh? Stand by!"

What does that quote mean to you? Sounds to me like they are against Liberals. And they are for the war? Somebody correct me if I am wrong or if I am misreading something here.

[Bouncy Ball]

27. That quote came with the original email that went around.

They reproduce the email completely. If there were captions, pictures, text, anything, they reproduce all of it, THEN analyze it.

[Xithras]

30. Here's a correction...you need to REREAD that!

The section in blue is the original email/info they were debunking. Snopes didn't write that text.

In case you didn't know, Snopes includes the original text and/or claims in their debunks whenever possible. The text you're referring to was part of the original claim.

[IN-dem]

31. I apologized..I said I was wrong

I am so embarrassed

[Liberal In Texas]

33. Sometimes people are still writing and don't see updates very fast. n/t

[Liberal In Texas]

32. No no no... the blue box is an excerpt from some other internet site

that they are attempting to set the facts straight on. Just because that site has a "liberal media" line doesn't mean that snopes agrees with the text. It just happens to be a place that they are using that has the pictures as an example.

This story has been in the widespread media and is no secret. The RW likes to point at it as "evidence" Saddam was hiding WMDs, when in fact it may have been more of an attempt to get rid of the planes. After this burial, it's doubtful they would be any more useful than museum pieces.

[IN-dem]

34. I realize that now. My face is red (blue) believe me n/t

[Liberal In Texas]

38. Don't worry about it. Welcome to DU.

[ISUGRADIA]

19. They debunk stupid shit that gets spread around the internet

this one was true. How that is repub I don't know.

How would you have phrased the responce?

[Taxloss]

20. Proof? Anything? n/t

[RebelOne]

21. Check out TruthOrFiction.com.

I don't know about their political leanings, but it is another myth-busting site.

[Modem Butterfly]

22. Every other week there's a thread on FR about how liberal Snopes is

They seem pretty centrist to me.

[IN-dem]

24. My apologies...I must be reading it wrong then. n/t

[Bouncy Ball]

25. I don't think you've been "snoping" around there at all if you

come to that conclusion.

If she does what she's doing really well, you really shouldn't be able to tell what her political inclination is. It isn't a strictly political website, after all.

Go try really reading some stuff. I've read loads of her commentary and it's kind of hard to tell which way she leans, to be honest.

[Beaverhausen]

26. They had the "looted" and "found" pictures and captions up by 9/1

No way they are totally rightwingers.

http://www.snopes.com/katrina/photos/looters.asp

[IN-dem]

28. Again my apologies

I think I mistook the quote as being her words. Sorry everyone...ignore this whole thread please...I am already embarrassed.

[blondeatlast]

35. Ask to have it locked, then. I've had that done myself when I was

demonstrably wrong.

[alphafemale]

29. The people that run it do "lean right." But seem to be honest.

They call BS on both sides.

The political stuff is a small percentage anyway.

It's an amazing site.

[jim3775]

37. This is about as RW as you can get: Snopes' Michael Moore hit piece

This article was mysteriously changed after people called them on their bullshit. Snopes has stopped allowing their website to be added to the google cache and archive.org.

Archived Copy
Related Blog Post

Claim: Two days after September 11 -- while all other planes were grounded -- a secret flight arranged by George W. Bush flew Osama bin Laden's relatives out of the USA.

Status: False.

...

How Michael Moore could have spun all of this into the tale he now spouts is beyond us. Yet spout it he does...

...

Some folks play fast and loose with the facts when they've an axe to grind, however, and in Moore's case his axe is "the dastardly Republicans and how they're responsible for every ill ever visited upon the USA." In this case, inventing a bin Laden jet that secretly flew out of the country while the rest of us were barred from the skies, and peopling it with folks who were spirited out of the FBI's grasp by a U.S. president intent upon paying back some unnamed (but darkly hinted at) favor, is a handy way of reinforcing the stereotype of Republicans as callous and greedy politicians whose paramount values involve money, not people.

[B Calm]

40. It's beyond me that Snopes doesn't know the bin Laden family

was flown out of the USA after 9-11...

[Liberal In Texas]

42. HUH? Just looked it up on Snopes:

In the two days immediately following the September 11 terrorist attacks on America, the U.S. government allowed bin Laden family members to fly within the country during a general ban on air travel: True.

OK, edited to say...
They say it's undtermined that they were allowed to fly OUT.

Point taken.

[alfredo]

39. Most hoaxes seem like Republicans lying to Republicans about

Democrats and hated minorities.