Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah's Sept. 11 column is a lengthy tirade against fact-checker Snopes. It reads a lot like a December 2016 WND article on Snopes; both are based on a UK Daily Mail article and obsess over lurid details of the private lives of Snopes' founders and some of its employees, which have nothing to do with its veracity in fact-checking. Nevertheless, Farah tries to link this to "the question of whether Snopes can be trusted to be fair, balanced and unbiased."
That's rich, since the last thing anyone expects from Farah and WND is fairness, balance and a lack of bias.
Farah then regurgitated a post from an obscure blog attacking Snopes for purported double standards and whining that Snopes found thatthe Clintons did not "steal" thousands of dollars of furniture, china and art when they left the White House because intent could not be determined, huffing that "If taking things that do not belong to you is not 'stealing,' then we need a new definition of the word." Strangely, Farah didn't link to that blog post or to any of the Snopes articles it attacked.
Farah concluded:
Ultimately, bias is in the eye of the beholder, but even David Mikkelson admits most often it is conservatives and Republicans who detect bias in Snopes reports.
Is that surprising after learning the history of this enterprise?
And what does it tell you about the worldview of Snopes’ new partner – Facebook?
The fact that Farah and WND have a right-wing Christian worldview has not stopped them from publishing fake news and highly biased journalism -- which makes Farah a bad messenger for the idea that Snopes' "worldview" somehow makes it unreliable as a fact-checker.
