Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson and his wife Barbara Hamel set out to create a fact-checking website that would become the standard for reliable and fact-based reporting, but over time it became another propaganda tool for the left. Now, Mickelson is not only found to be incredibly biased, but also a plagiarist.
according to New York Post, Mikkelson was found to have been deported from the company he founded because he copied phrases and paragraphs from the New York Times, CNN, Los Angeles Times and other media under the signature of “Snopes Staff” or the pseudonym Jeff Zarronandia:
David Mikkelson (David Mikkelson) launched Snopes in 1995. Its mission is to become “the most authoritative fact-checking website on the Internet.” Doreen Marchionni confirmed the news to BuzzFeed. No less than 54 plagiarized articles by Mikkelson.
“Let’s be clear: Plagiarism destroys our mission and values, full stop,” Marcioni Said in a statement on Friday“It has no place in any environment of this organization.”
The Post reported that Snopes withdrew 60 articles, 140 of which were marked for review, and that these withdrawals will continue as the investigation continues.
In response to the investigation, Mickelson said, “There is no excuse for my serious misjudgment,” and apologized.
According to reports, Mickelson said that his plagiarism was because he was not from a news background and was “not used to doing news aggregation”. He said that during the 2016 election, when “fact checking” became more and more popular, his Zarronandia signature was a “decompression method”. The “fact check” response to his political opponents clearly made him happy.
“Let’s have some fun and watch these people vent their tempers and vent for the prejudices of this non-existent character,” he said.
buzzingThe person who initially reported the matter interviewed colleagues and found that Mickelson encouraged employees to plagiarize and strive to become one of the first websites to publish breaking news, and told his writers to edit the article after it was published:
“He will instruct [writers] Brooke Binkowski, the former editor-in-chief of Snopes, told BuzzFeed to copy text from other sites and post it verbatim so that it looks like we are fast, can attract traffic, and then change the story in real time. “I hate it and will not tell any employee to do this, but he does it all the time.”
The only reason for this investigation was that his current ex-wife Hamel sold her shares in the company to Proper Media, who subsequently sued Mikkelson for mismanagement of the website’s finances.
This is just another example of why these so-called “fact-checking” sites should not be believed to be arbiters of fact and fiction. Not only do they make the same mistakes as others I’ve written before, but many of them also have such serious prejudices that they deliberately use their reputation as “fact finder” to fool people into believing half-truth or total Lies are through tricks.
(read: Add “Pulling a PolitiFact” to your list of common phrases)
