I've been very hard on fact checkers and quite frankly, they deserve it. They really are little more than opinion pieces and about as biased as opinion pieces tend to be. Indeed, the fact that none of them from Politifact to Snopes have a comment section is a big giveaway. After all, studies have found that comments significantly affect the way people view an article. It's almost as if they just want people to take their word for it. Now Snopes was a bit better. They started out by looking into urban legends and those chain emails (before descending into using company money on prostitutes and lavish vacations, of course). Now they've taken on The Babylon Bee, a Christian satirical site, in one of the dumbest moves I could have possibly imagined. After multiple "fact checks" on satire (like this one) they issued a "study" showing that "many people believe satirical news." Of course, the study just asked people if a sentence describing a satirical headline was real or not. They didn't actually note to anyone the source. Remember when everyone thought it was funny if someone didn't realize an article from The Onion was satire? I guess this is a threat to democracy now or something. The Babylon Bee, for their part, has stuck to lampooning Snopes over and over again. Good for them. But what's more interesting (and damning) is a review of their work on the Russiagate hoax. A breakdown of their reporting finds that Politifact and Snopes flagged "only 4% of fake news stories from Mueller" as false. As an article on (the admittedly partisan) Gateway Pundit points out, 67 of the wrong articles come from Sharyl Atkkisson’s list, 23 are from Timothy Zebel’s book “The Fake News Epidemic”. Well done guys!
Can we move past the stupid idea these "fact check" sites are anything more than opinion writers now please? Thanks.
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