Yeah, there's no journalistic standards over there (and granted I don't think they ever claimed otherwise). Snopes tries to be a debunker, but for political matters, it'll just be debunking in favor of whoever wrote the particular article.
Great for chain letters and virus alerts, but there are probably better places to find out the truth behind the latest political outrage circulating among your friends.
Wasn't there some huge thing in the news about one of their political fact checkers being any actual liberal blogger? I seem to remember that from a couple of years back.
But why is that relevant? I (and assume most people) are capable of assuming different modes of writing, including modes devoid of opinion; or with opinion carefully noted as such.
Parent just asked for an example and I remembered that.
People who feel strongly enough about something to write legitimately leaning fluff pieces are not the personality type that I expect to be able to assume writing modes devoid of opinion, personally. I know very few people who aren't considered moderate/independent who I believe could pull that off.
These are the same people who've been proven to disbelieve factual information when it contradicts their world view.
That is the type of person that I would not trust in a "fact checker" position, especially one in which their version of events will be cited by others as "fact".
> With the number of somewhat mysterious deaths now over 100, this article looks like they gave up trying to debunk all these deaths about ten years ago.
That's because the "Clinton Body Count" is an textbook example of a Gish Gallop [1], a bad-faith debating tactic in which charlatans spread nonsense by spewing forth so much of it that opponents have no hope of countering it all with facts.
Interestingly, the comment to which you're responding seems ready to mount its own Gish Gallop: it uses the old "I don't even know where to begin" gambit at the outset.
> Claim: Bill Clinton has quietly done away with several dozen people who possessed incriminating evidence about him.
> Rating: False
I think you're mistaking your own bias for their's. They have 48 people on that list. Are you insisting that there need to be more deaths that need to be debunked in order for that claim to be rated as something other than False? Unless you have a really good argument for a particular name or names, you come off as someone who will never be satisfied.
So to be clear, the one objection you can articulate after your earlier blanket statement is that they've stopped updating a list of crank conspiracy deaths after every one they investigated turned out to be false?
Face it, you want this absurd Clinton conspiracy theory to be true, and you dislike Snopes because they consistently debunk it. That's not bias, that's presenting truth.
In defense of the Clinton body count thing, I think it would be an assassin's number 1 goal to make an assassination seems like anything but, so it would be reasonable that there would be more reasonable explanations for every incident.
Not saying it happened, or any of those deaths were assassinations, but the nature of the claim makes it perniciously difficult to refute.
If a man who couldn't even get away with some consensual foolin' around with an intern without it becoming global news had access to an untraceable assassination force capable of removing people with impunity, how do you explain the fact that so many of his enemies are still alive?
