Great Article on Snopes

Annie

Diamond Member
Nov 22, 2003
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Definately one of my favorite sites. IF something sounds 'too good' you'll probably be able to check it with Snopes!

http://www.nationalreview.com/seipp/seipp200407210830.asp

Excerpt:
July 21, 2004, 8:30 a.m.
Where Urban Legends Fall
Snopes.com, the ultimate debunker.

Many people have attacked Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 by now; my favorite description comes from Christopher Hitchens, who called it "a load of nauseating, boring rubbish from start to finish." But long before the familiar pundits began touring the Michael Moore media circuit, urban-legend debunkers Barbara and David Mikkelson, of the indispensable Snopes.com, were on the case.

The husband-and-wife team are not professional folklorists. She describes herself as "just a housewife;" he's a computer programmer in his day job. But their website is so first-rate that retired folklore professor Jan Harold Brunvand, probably the top academic specializing in pop-culture myths, told me it's a big reason he's never bothered setting up a site of his own. "They have it all there," he said, "so I will just stick to writing books."

Snopes began as a purely urban-legends site in 1995, run out of the couple's home in the Los Angeles suburbs. But especially since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it's become an invaluable resource for sifting through political and media facts and fallacies. You won't find a more exhaustive and nuanced dissection of Fahrenheit 9/11's central "big lie" — as Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, described Moore's claims about the Bush administration's supposedly sneaking Bin Laden family members out of the U.S. before the FBI had time to question them — than on Snopes.

Anyone, but especially reporters, should check out Snopes before passing on a story that seems too good to be true. The site isn't always a wet blanket; some tall tales turn out to be accurate. Soupy Sales, for instance, actually did once tell young viewers to mail him those "little green pieces of paper" in their parents' wallets. And indeed there are, believe it or not, words to the Star Trek theme: "Beyond/the rim of the star-light/My love/is wand'ring in star-flight..."

On the other hand, another popular TV urban legend — that Tom Green once dressed up as Hitler and crashed a bar mitzvah — is, alas, just a story. Green even denied it to Snopes personally. "I wish it was about something funny, like me having a gerbil removed from my a** or something."

My favorite Snopes sections chide professional news organizations for reporting urban legends as fact. Reuters had a nasty little item a few years ago about drug smugglers who hid their contraband in a girl's corpse. The wire service's source was the Gulf News, which said that smugglers had kidnapped and murdered a child in order to stuff her body with codeine. But an airport official "at the unnamed Gulf state" became suspicious and arrested the smugglers, according to a United Arab Emirates policeman quoted in the Gulf News piece.
 
I love snopes. I nose around that site often, even just looking for things that I didnt know before. My only complaint about the site is, they need a section for "New Rumors" so I dont have to search through each category for stuff I didnt know before.

So... I'm lazy. I'll admit it. :D
 

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