I'm a librarian, and I've been impressed by Snopes' research, the on-line search operation conservatives hate. The owners have never kept it a secret that they are a small operation. When you go to the library you can get a lot better information asking one reference person who will go after your question with a good strategy, experience, and a gut feeling that develops over time (or you're the 10th person that day to ask), than you will if you try to google it yourself and look at the first 5 based on an algorithm that favors some advertiser.
In my opinion, the reason people don't like Snopes is because they put faith in a really dumb viral story they saw on the internet, and get mad when it is disproven. There are more fact finders debunking right wing stories than left because the right seems to have so many gullible folks. (Better gullible than mean and destructive, right?) When I write a conservative blog entry, the screamers and nasties are usually liberals who call me every imaginable name--but they are really mad about the facts I cite. (My filter deletes people with bad manners.)
I NEVER share a story without checking it first, and probably 50% of the time there are errors or exaggerations--quotes from famous people seem to be the worst—why try to improve on Billy Graham or John Wayne? It’s a mystery.
Facts don't belong to a political party, but politics do definitely influence which questions are answered. Is Snopes' ownership liberal? Probably. And librarians are 223:1 liberal to conservative, but most people still go to the library for information and pay taxes to support them.
http://www.rd.com/home/rumor-detectives-true-story-or-online-hoax/
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Came across your blog while doing research on fact checking (might have to take up your offer on asking the researcher at a library). Long story short, what I've run across concerning "facts" is interesting are you comment about conservative "facts" being incorrect more than liberal "facts" leads into this. Specifically, conservatives tend to have far more incorrect facts concerning social issues and liberals tend to have far more incorrect facts concerning economic issues. Why? That's the interesting part and as far as I've determined it has to do with ideology. Conservatives have an ideology bent when it comes to social issues, so they find "facts" that support their ideology..say for example abstinence only education works better than sexual education. They find "facts" and spread them to uspport an ideology that is not support by actual facts. Liberals do the same with economic issues. It's easier for the to deceive the American public with economic "facts" but they deceive more than conservatives here because the conservative ideology is supported more often by the economic facts than the liberal ideology. This is NOT to say that either party doesn't use "facts" in the region their ideology supports, it's just more likely that than not that if it's outside their region of ideology, they will make things up more often to support their position instead of actually CHANGE their position (which is what we need).
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