During the campaign, I've had many discussions with people who used Snopes.com to verify sources and stories that came along. But my question has always been, what makes Snopes this neutral end all-be all debunker?

This may come as a surprise to many of you that use snopes.com to seek the truth.

For the past few years www.snopes.com has positioned itself, or others have labeled it, as the 'tell all final word' on any comment, claim, email or "urban legend".

But for several years people tried to find out who exactly was behind snopes.com. Only recently did Wikipedia get to the bottom of it – kinda makes you wonder what they were hiding.

Well, finally we know. It is run by a husband and wife team – that's right, no big office of investigators or researchers, no team of lawyers. It's just a mom-and-pop operation that began as a hobby.

David and Barbara Mikkelson in the San Fernando Valley of California started the website about 13 years ago. They have no formal background or experience in investigative research. After a few years their website gained popularity, many people believing it to be unbiased and neutral. Over the past couple of years people started asking questions who was behind it, and did they have a selfish motivation?

The reason for the questions – or skepticism – is a result of snopes.com claiming to have the bottom line facts to certain questions or issues when in fact they have been proven wrong. Also, there were criticisms the Mikkelsons were not really investigating and getting to the 'true' bottom of various issues. I can personally vouch for that complaint.

A few months ago, when my State Farm agent Bud Gregg in Mandeville hoisted a political sign referencing Barack Obama and made a big splash across the Internet, 'supposedly' the Mikkelson's claimed to have researched this issue before posting their findings on snopes.com. In their statement the Mikkelsons claimed the corporate office of State Farm pressured Gregg into taking down the sign, when in fact nothing of the sort 'ever' took place.

I personally contacted David Mikkelson (and he replied back to me) thinking he would want to get to the bottom of this, and I gave him Bud Gregg's contact phone numbers – and Bud was going to give him phone numbers to the big exec's at State Farm in Illinois, who would have been willing to speak with him about it. David Mikkelson never called Bud. In fact, I learned from Bud Gregg that no one from snopes.com ever contacted anyone at State Farm. Yet, snopes.com issued a statement as the 'final factual word' on the issue as if they did all their homework and got to the bottom of things – not!

We now know that the Mikkelson's are very pro-Democratic Party and extremely liberal. As we all now know from this presidential election, liberals have a purposeful agenda to discredit anything that appears to be Conservative. There has been much criticism lately over the Internet, with people pointing out the Mikkelson's liberalism revealing itself in their website findings. Now, that should come as no shock.

So, I say this to everyone who goes to www.snopes.com to get what they think to be the bottom line facts: "Proceed with Caution."

Take what snopes says at face value and nothing more. Use it only to lead you to their references where you can link to and read the sources for yourself. Plus, you can always Google a subject and do the research yourself. It is apparent that's all the Mikkelson's do. After all, I can personally vouch from my own experience for their 'not' fully looking into things.

So when you go to Snopes, remember that despite the sanctimonious hype, humans are incapable of being non-biased and you'll probably learn more from seeking out both sides and using common sense to reach a logical conclusion.

h/t Amy V

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 9th, 2008 at 8:59 am and is filed under Education, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.