Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Snopes Left Leaning Conclusions

I have begun to notice a trend in the conclusions reached by the editors of Snopes.com.
Their conclusions tend to have a left-leaning bias.

Example Bush -vs- Clinton (out of context?)

Take the following article regarding comments made by Hillary Clinton:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/marxist.asp
This article status is determined by Snopes editors as "Status: Multiple - See Below". When I continue to read the article, nowhere does it say "Status: True", nowhere does it say "Status: False". The editor spends most of his or her article space explaining how each Clinton comment (that could be construed as Marxist) was taken out of context.

Ok fine... Let's give them the out of context defense. If it's good for the goose, then it should be good for the gander. Right?

Apparently not so.

Let's take the first random article that I pulled up with a snopes search for "Bush out of context". Note: I have never been a George Bush fan. I'm just using this article because it was the first thing that came to mind.

Here's the article related to a comment made by Barbara Bush:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/barbara.asp
This entry is determined as "Status: True" right at the top. Yet read further and you will see that this statement was also taken out of context. But, instead of taking the time as they did in the Clinton article to further explain the context, the Snopes editors simply stamped the comment as "True".

Snopes should apply the same rules for both articles. They should either change the Bush article status to "out of context" or change the Clinton article status to True.

Snopes still has value, however as I have said in a previous posting - Snopes is not necessarily the last word.

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