Factless Check

The problem with Snopes isn’t that they’re biased to the left (although they very well may be).

The problem with Snopes is – much like banished commenter Dog Gone – they seem to think “Big Left’s Current Cant” is interchangeable with fact.

As we see here, it just isn’t so.

Snopes.com recently fact-checked a post that we first put up in June 2015 and updated on January 7, 2016.  This became an issue for them because a story that Fox News’ Special Report that had run a couple years ago was getting circulated on Facebook after the Florida high school shooting.  They wrote: “Our conclusion is that this is accurate based on the CPRC’s definition of a mass shooting, but also extremely misleading. It uses inappropriate statistical methods to obscure the reality that mass shootings are very rare in most countries, so that when they do happen they have an outsized statistical effect.”

Watching the CPRC go on to flense Snopes’ claim is joyful thing.  Give it a read.

 

3 thoughts on “Factless Check

  1. Snopes credibility regarding their bias, was seriously damaged by an excellent investigative article by Kalev Leetaru, a contributing writer at Forbes, on December 22, 2016.

    He did some follow up work on an earlier piece, questioning Snopes bias, by the Daily Mail UK’s Alana Goodman, published the previous day.

    Sorry, but I couldn’t get the links to work on this stupid iPhone, but if you’re interested in reading them, they can be readily found.

  2. The first step a “fact checker” must take is to determine whether a statement can be judged to be true or false. The second step is to determine whether it is useful to judge that statement true or false.
    Most statements fail the first or the second test. I would say that the statements in most human discussion fail both tests.
    Politics is hard because it is about values, not facts. Politics can never be about facts because facts are rare things. The late, great, physicist Richard Feynman was political liberal, but he knew how hard it is discover a fact: https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo

  3. It is sometimes said that “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.” And that is sometimes what happens in our political debates– that there are facts on both sides. A proper “fact check” would perhaps assess the full set of contrary facts and perhaps arrive at some overall truth. That NEVER happens, except in our own minds and we are severely hampered in being able to do that. What generally happens is that we make up our minds based on our existing bias (based on experience and reason) on general issues, and then listen to either “facts” that confirm that view or to opinion that simply agrees with us, fact free.

    For example, we’ve got students skipping school in support of some kind of unspecified “gun control.” But ask them what KIND of gun control they are talking about, and then, if they know even that, how such “control” would have prevented this Florida shooting or any other school shooting, and it is obvious they should have stayed in school and learned something.

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