Snoping on Snoping Snopes by Snoopies! Or, Who Watches the Watchmen? By James Reed
I am always irritated by the Leftist fact checkers, who take a super-literal approach to opposing political views from the Right, but when it comes to those on their team like Beijing Biden, usually there is no fact check at all. For example, when Biden said in a press conference that his “butt is wiped,” did Snopes do a Snoopy dog and go and fact check that? Sure, I know that this is a sensitive topic near dinner time, but we are talking about the so-called president of the DisUnited States, and he said it, not me. They certainly fact checked Trump to death. Hey, how about the allegations that your co-founder published heaps of articles containing material plagiarized from sources such as The Guardian and the LA Times. Better fact-check the fact checkers!
“David Mikkelson, the co-founder of the fact-checking website Snopes, has long presented himself as the arbiter of truth online, a bulwark in the fight against rumors and fake news. But he has been lying to the site's tens of millions of readers: A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that between 2015 and 2019, Mikkelson wrote and published dozens of articles containing material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times.
After inquiries from BuzzFeed News, Snopes conducted an internal review and confirmed that under a pseudonym, the Snopes byline, and his own name, Mikkelson wrote and published 54 articles with plagiarized material. The articles include such topics as same-sex marriage licenses and the death of musician David Bowie.
Snopes VP of Editorial and Managing Editor Doreen Marchionni suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties pending “a comprehensive internal investigation.” He remains an officer and a 50% shareholder of the company.
“Our internal research so far has found a total of 54 stories Mikkelson published that used appropriated material, including all of the stories Buzzfeed shared with us,” Marchionni and Snopes Chief Operating Officer Vinny Green said in a statement.
"Let us be clear: Plagiarism undermines our mission and values, full stop," Marchionni added. "It has no place in any context within this organization."
Snopes’ editorial staff disavowed Mikkelson’s behavior in a separate statement signed by eight current writers. “We strongly condemn these poor journalistic practices. … we work hard every day to uphold the highest possible journalistic and ethical standards.”
Snopes told BuzzFeed News it plans to retract all of the offending stories and disable advertising on them. It will also append an editor's note of explanation to each.
Said Mikkelson, “There is no excuse for my serious lapses in judgement. I’m sorry.”
“So I was browsing the news and came across an article on the CBS News web site about a horrific crime involving a Memphis woman charged with killing four of her children by slitting their throats with a butcher knife: Hmm, I wondered, as I pondered the headline ("Memphis mom charged with grizzly butchering of 4 of her kids"), did this woman murder her children in bear-like fashion? Or was the mother of extremely advanced age?”
Meet Jeff Zarronandia. During a brief but memorable career, his byline, which linked to a bio detailing his Pulitzer Prize and his skill at mule-skinning, appeared on at least 23 Snopes articles on topics like Donald Trump’s financial woes and false rumors about Hillary Clinton. His reporting made enemies of hoaxsters and fabulists across the political spectrum, including former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone and the late “fake-news kingpin” Paul Horner, both of whom were unaware of his true identity.
"It's just a David Mikkelson alt,” Snopes' former managing editor Brooke Binkowski explained when BuzzFeed News inquired. "He used to write about topics he knew would get him hate mail under that assumed name. Plus it made it appear he had more staff than he had."
Between 2015 and 2019, Mikkelson regularly plagiarized reporting from other news outlets in an effort, he said, to scoop up traffic.
In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Mikkelson attributed this behavior to his lack of formal journalism experience. “I didn't come from a journalism background,” he said. “I wasn't used to doing news aggregation. A number of times I crossed the line to where it was copyright infringement. I own that."
In an explanation about the website’s practices, Snopes informs readers that it “follows all industry guidelines for transparency in reporting” adding, “we think being transparent with readers is the coolest.” But the fact that Zarronandia was in fact Mikkelson was not disclosed anywhere on the site. Following BuzzFeed News’ inquiry, the Zarronandia author page has been removed, and the Zarronandia byline has been replaced with “Snopes staff."
Founded in 1995 by Mikkelson and his then-wife, Barbara Hamel, Snopes bills itself as "the internet's definitive fact-checking site," and is a two-time Webby Award winner cited by the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post. It served as one of Facebook’s fact-checking partners between December 2016 and February 2019. But in recent years, the site has been troubled by a bitter ownership dispute.
Mikkelson’s alias flies in the face of the site's mission, once described by the New York Times as "a quest to debunk misinformation online." It also highlights his penchant for trolling, something he was known for in the early 1990s, when he posted on Usenet forums under the handle “snopes.” At that time, he was so strongly associated with trolling — even tricking advice columnist Ann Landers into running several prank letters — that the practice was sometimes referred to as “snoping.”
Similar pranks and allusions to trolling are littered throughout Snopes’ site. For example, a section called “The Repository of Lost Legends,” which forms the acronym “TROLL,” contains spoof fact-checks with titles like “Mister Ed was a Zebra.” Another article, “Do People Swallow Eight Spiders Per Year?” which was penned by Mikkelson as a lesson to readers to always check their sources, includes reference to nonexistent tech columnist "Lisa Birgit Holst,” whose name is, in fact, an anagram for "this is a big troll."
In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Mikkelson said that he created the Zarronandia pseudonym as a joke intended to mislead the trolls and conspiracy theorists who frequently targeted the site and its writers in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election.
“It was kind of a stress-relief thing [after] spending 20 years seeing people trying to discredit our work by just making stuff up about us,” Mikkelson said. “Let’s have some fun and watch these people vent their spleen inventing reasons why this nonexistent persona is biased.”
Knowingly misleading readers by using a fake name is considered unethical for many news outlets — especially one that markets itself as a bulwark of truth and transparency. Far worse is plagiarism.
BuzzFeed News found dozens of articles on Snopes' site that include language — sometimes entire paragraphs — that appear to have been copied without attribution from news outlets that include the New York Times, CNN, NBC News, and the BBC. Six of these articles were originally published under Zarronandia’s byline, three under Mikkelson’s own, and the rest under “Snopes staff.” Snopes’s subsequent internal review identified 140 articles with possible problems and 54 that were found to include appropriated material.
“He would instruct us to copy text from other sites, post them verbatim so that it looked like we were fast.”
"That was his big SEO/speed secret," said Binkowski, whom Snopes fired without explanation in 2018 (she currently manages the fact-checking site Truth or Fiction). “He would instruct us to copy text from other sites, post them verbatim so that it looked like we were fast and could scoop up traffic, and then change the story in real time. I hated it and wouldn't tell any of the staff to do it, but he did it all the time.”
Two other former employees also said that copying and rewriting content was part of Mikkelson's strategy for driving traffic to Snopes’ site. One, who asked to remain anonymous, told BuzzFeed News that "taking credit for other people's work" was "part of his model.”
Edward Wasserman, professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in ethics, said that using other people’s work “must be conducted subject to rules of attribution, so that the reader isn't misled into crediting the current writer with finding the information first, which is an important claim to credibility and proficiency.” Many prominent news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and BuzzFeed News, have acknowledged plagiarism in their own pages and publicly corrected the record, as Snopes is doing now.”
Good for you BuzzFeed News, and a much harder edged name than “Snopes,” which I keep mistyping as “DOPES.”
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