No, Snopes, No
Eh, not so much.
The problem with fact-checking on social media is that the people who need it the most because they are dangerously ignorant and conspiracy-minded are also the most likely to reject it out of hand.
After all, if you view Donald Trump as a heroic truth-teller and The Washington Post and The New York Times as Fake News with a personal grudge against the disgraced, twice-impeached former president then negative reporting about Trump from the two most respected newspapers in the country will only make you feel more negatively about the press, not the president.
That’s why Trump branded every outlet to the left of NewsMax “Fake News”, even his formerly beloved FOX. If you can convince your cultists that the press are inveterate liars who lie about everything out of bias and corruption, then by extension every negative thing that they say about you is inherently untruthful.
Having worked in the media all my adult life I know how ragingly imperfect it can be but I also believe in the power and necessity of a robust free press. I also believe in fact-checking, particularly in this age of potent, purposeful misinformation.
So I was deeply disheartened to discover that David Mikkelson, the CEO and co-founder of fact-checking giant Snopes had written dozens of articles plagiarized from newspapers like The Guardian and The L.A Times, sometimes under the pseudonym Jeff Zarronandia and sometimes under a generic “Snopes Staff” byline.
The Buzzfeed expose paints a damning portrait of a former troll and online provocateur who re-made himself and his organization as the ultimate arbiters of truth and authenticity while remaining, on a fundamental level, a troll contemptuous of the very concept of journalistic ethics.
I’m horrified that Mikkelson was able to get away with blatant theft from some of the biggest, best known media sources in the world for so long and that he was able to do so on a website that ostensibly devoted to journalistic ethics and truth.
We believed in you, you fucking asshole! “Weird Al” Yankovic even referenced your website approvingly when he sang, “I have high hopes someone'll point you towards Snopes/And debunk that crazy junk you're spewing constantly” in “Stop Forwarding This Crap to Me.”
This is VERY bad for Snopes, particularly since it suspended his publishing privileges but let him continue to serve as CEO and retain his ownership stake in the company. In order to retain any credibility at all Snopes needs to part ways with Mikkelson as quickly and decisively as possible.
This isn’t just bad for Snopes, it’s bad for journalism and fact-checking as well. Now when a Trump cultist sneers of a fact-checker’s attempt to disabuse them of some ridiculous right-wing delusion, “Fact-checking is complete bullshit. The head guy from Snopes plagiarized a bunch of articles he published under a fake name and held onto his job” you can argue with the first assertion but not the second.
Mikkelson lied, and lied extensively and extravagantly in a way that didn’t just hurt his site and his career; it hurt journalism as a whole. He gave the field of fact-checking a black eye and while I still believe in the necessity and importance of independent fact-checking I will be the first to concede that my confidence has been shaken by a very ugly revelation about a very important website that just became much less trustworthy and consequently much less important.
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