Folklore Foul

I just received an email entitled: We learn the “truth” behind Snopes.com. Basically the email discredits the website as fact based and states that it’s run by a husband and wife. “No big office of investigators and researchers, no team of lawyers it’s just a mom and pop shop.” It goes on to say the couple that own and operate the site are “jewish- very Democratic (party) and extremely liberal.”

Hmmm…

My RA (Republican Aunt) recently questioned me about the validity of FactCheck.org. Apparently when the site debunks rumors about Obama it’s being biased and liberal as well. Actually, I think that every source I have used in political debates with folks from the Republican side have been questioned, ridiculed and found “Unreliable”. Funny thing is, it was a dedicated Republican that gave me the FactCheck.org site as a valuable site for information.

I’m bothered by all of this. I have no idea if David and Barbara Mikkelson (the couple who started Snopes) are biased in their opinions. I’m not at all sure what being Jewish has to do with it!! Their web site seems to be a pretty valuable tool when trying to figure out if any random piece of information floating in the Internet atmosphere holds any truth, or not. They include on the web pages references~ the actual places they used to come up with the answer they are giving.

This reminds me of the good old days. Remember the one’s where we had to footnote things we wrote about? The days when we weren’t allowed to just make shit up? I wonder how my children will ever be able to discern any valuable information out of this mess we call the web.

FactCheck.org is funded by The Annenberg Foundation. The president and chairman of the Annenberg Foundation is Leonore Annenberg. She in fact, endorsed McCain for president on Oct. 8th. So if there is any bias coming from FactCheck it should be on the side of the Conservatives.

I realize there are few sites we can count on as unbiased and reliable. I think it’s sad that on any one thing we try to research we have to search through dozens of crazy links and decipher for ourselves the sites that seem “the most factual”.

I hate to get the emails about the missing kid (usually not true) or the one about the new US Dollar Coins that omit the motto “In God We Trust” (not true) or the 1000’s of petitions if you sign this and send it HERE you will get back $1000’s of dollars. I like the idea that I can go to a website and just check.

As a side note can I point out here that Email Petitions of any kind don’t work. If someone sends a petition out to 10 people with his name on the bottom and those 10 people sign it and send it out to 10 more, we now have 20 petitions with the same name on them. They send those out to 10 more, now 30 petition with the same name on them. I think you get the point.

Who do you think they hire to go through the millions of petitions name by name to cross of all of the signatures that are a repeat?~ If it pays well, I’ll take that job. Besides the fact that the signatures could all be fakes. No one is going to take an email petition seriously. Skip me when sending those –K?

All I can say is every thing we want to learn needs to be backed up by a somewhat reliable site – Texas Beeoches blog, is not one of those – and then common sense and reason has to be applied. Unfortunately fewer and fewer people seem to have inherited that little trait…