The fake, far-left fact checking site Snopes has just been caught plagiarizing dozens of articles, inventing writers who do not exist, and now, even though it was no secret, the Snopes editorial staff is pretending to be shocked and outraged by the revelations.
That, at least to me, is the real story here. Not the plagiarism, which, as you’ll see below, is bad enough, but the fact that the editorial team is now posing as innocent victims who had no idea this was going on. The facts say different.
Guess who busted Snopes? None other than BuzzFeed, which is itself a fake, far-left outlet that’s been caught publishing dozens of plagiarized articles.
Honestly, it’s like Hitler tattling on Goebbels.
Between 2015 and 2019, BuzzFeed found that Snopes published “dozens of articles containing material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times.”
A Snopes’ internal investigation — motivated by the BuzzFeed bust — uncovered 54 plagiarized articles — 54!
And here’s why no one should believe the editorial staff’s innocent-outraged act… Guess who the plagiarizer-in-chief is over at Snopes? Yep, it’s no less than their TOP GUY, cofounder, and CEO David Mikkelson. And not only did Mikkelson publish dozens of plagiarized articles; he openly bragged — bragged! — about it and told others to do it:
In one Slack message from January 2016, Mikkelson detailed his strategy for copying and then quickly rewriting articles after publishing. “Usually when a hot real news story breaks (such as a celebrity death), I just find a wire service or other news story about it and publish it on the site verbatim to quickly get a page up. Once that’s done, then I quickly start editing the page to reword it and add material from other sources to make it not plagiarized,” he wrote.
In two emails from 2014 and 2015, Mikkelson told staff to “pop over to one of our competitor sites (urbanlegends.com or hoaxslayer.com), pick something out that they’ve recently published that we haven’t covered,” and “rewrite it just enough to avoid copyright infringement.”
In other emails from around the same time, Mikkelson described his vision for the site’s future “as a platform for traffic-generating junk that people would complain about if it were on ‘classic’ snopes,” including articles copied from “viral item of the day” sites.
Despite all this evidence that everyone knew they were working for a fabulist and plagiarizer, here’s a portion of a memo from the Snopes editorial team in which everyone pretends to be gobsmacked by BuzzFeed’s report:
We strongly condemn these poor journalistic practices. No writer participated in this behavior, nor did any editors — Doreen Marchionni, Camille Knox, and David Emery — support or encourage these practices. We have all been held to very high journalistic standards, both by our editors and by our audience. Although none of us was to blame for the actions of Snopes’ co-founder, we empathize with the journalists whose work was appropriated. This simply should never have happened.
Oh, okay, then explain this… “That was his big SEO/speed secret,” one former employee told the far-left BuzzFeed. “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[.]”
On top of being theft, this is also breathtakingly stupid. You don’t have to steal to get the same result. All you have to do, and online sites do this all the time, is copy and paste a few paragraphs of the story you want to highlight. Just be damn sure to do it in a way that makes clear you’re featuring someone else’s work, and be sure to add a link to the originator.
It really is that easy.
It gets better…
Here’s what Snopes is supposedly doing about it…
Someone who works for plagiarizer-in-chief and CEO Mikkelson is now assuring us plagiarizer-in-chief and CEO Mikkelson has been “suspended … from all editorial production pending a final outcome to the internal review and removed his access to our content management system[.]”
Oh, okay… Yeah, we believe that.
And Snopes will get away with this “one bad apple” excuse because Snopes is safely ensconced in the far-left’s elite ecosystem of propagandists and liars.
The bottom line is this…
Long before this, we all knew Snopes was a left-wing racket run by a mob of dishonest hacks, bullies, and McCarthyites. We all knew Snopes was created to push the far-left’s agenda and is so shameless it fact checks the satire site, Babylon Bee. So we can honestly say plagiarism is the least of Snopes’ crimes.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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