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The left-leaning fact-checking website Snopes.com has spurred anger and anxiety among liberals for ruling, right before the first Biden-Trump debate, that former President Donald Trump never praised neo-Nazis at a Charlottesville protest as “very fine people” in a 2017 press conference with combative reporters.
Snopes checker Taija Perry Cook wrote that “while Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists and said they should be ‘condemned totally.’ Therefore, we have rated this claim ‘False.'”
It’s a welcome development, even if the timing is odd, except for the debate. It might inhibit Biden from one of his favorite attacks on Trump.
So why now? Perry Cook embedded a tweet from tech executive Shaun Maguire sent to over 120,000 followers on June 16, with a video of Trump’s press conference from the account “End Wokeness.” Maguire, who recently endorsed Trump, added this was “a case study in media manipulation.”
The subject is historically important, because the leftist media and Democrat partisans have long pretended Trump aligned himself with neo-Nazis when he was arguing there were “very fine people” on both sides of the controversy over taking down Confederate statues. During the 2020 Republican convention, then-PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor mangled Trump’s remarks: “We can think back to his response after Charlottesville, when he said there are very fine people that go to Nazi rallies.”
President Biden’s video announcing his presidential campaign contained this misinformation. After running footage of neo-Nazis, he claimed Trump “assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.”
Other fact-checkers have tried to put this in context. Even Politifact – in an article by Angie Drobnic Holan, then the website’s Editor-In-Chief – put Trump in context on April 19, 2019, six days before Biden’s video. But Holan didn’t have a “Truth-O-Meter” ruling for anyone – no “False” or “Pants On Fire” tag — and there was no PolitiFact article checking the truth of Biden’s announcement video when it came out.
Snopes and PolitiFact provided a transcript for context. A reporter argued “The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville.” Trump put “very bad people” next to “very fine people.”
SNOPES’ DEBUNKING OF CHARLOTTESVILLE HOAX SHOWS BIDEN LIED, SAYS TRUMP CAMPAIGN
Trump replied: “Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group — excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did — you had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”
Trump then talked about how George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners, so are their statues going to come down? (Since then, some statues have been taken down, and others were toppled by leftist protesters. The same goes for Abraham Lincoln.) Trump added: “You’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
Snopes is not the most reputable of the “independent fact-checkers,” despite being one of the earliest sites to check facts on the internet. It was founded in 1994 by David and Barbara Mikkelson to document “urban legends” and call out hoaxes.
For example, Snopes went to war with the satirists at the Babylon Bee. They ran a satire headlined “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication.”
The spoof began: “In order to aid the news station in preparing stories for consumption, popular news media organization CNN purchased an industrial-sized washing machine to help its journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication.”
Who really believes you put news stories in a washing machine? But Snopes felt the urgent need to call this out as “FALSE.” Their humor-deprived headline was “Did CNN Purchase an Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News? The news media organization reportedly invested in mechanical assistance to help their journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication.”
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Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson, who wrote the article, claimed he found people dumb enough to take this literally: “Although it should have been obvious that the Babylon Bee piece was just a spoof of the ongoing political brouhaha over alleged news media ‘bias’ and ‘fake news,’ some readers missed that aspect of the article and interpreted it literally.”
As a result, Facebook sent Babylon Bee’s owner Adam Ford a note that an “independent fact checker” had located “disputed” information in their humor, and threatened to throttle their reach. They later admitted error and apologized. The Snopes article now carries the tag “Labeled Satire.”
The pro-Biden media have lectured incessantly that Donald Trump should be “fact-checked in real time,” and even insisted his speeches and comments should not be aired live, because they’re so unreliable. The “independent fact-checkers” are hailed as saviors of democracy.
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That signals they are reliably biased sources, and Biden and the Democrats count on these “independent” websites to discredit their opponents and add heft to their argument that the Republicans and conservative media outlets are democracy-undermining factories of misinformation.
Ideally for them, Democrats strive to be seen as identical with democracy, and liberal journalism as identical to facts. Rule against them, and their toxic branding is undermined. No wonder they’re mad at Snopes.
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