Tag: snopes

Drudge Sludge

I have a dear friend who gets all of his news from the Drudge Report, and therefore spends the bulk of his time angry, scared, and bitter. Talking to him can be exhausting. It’s like being the opponent in a sadistic game of dodgeball. He lobs paranoid gobs of information at me, I dodge the insanity, do some research, and do my best to calmly parry with logic and the facts.

  • In 2008: “Obama is going to make us pay 10 dollars a gallon for gas!” “Er…first of all, the president doesn’t set gas prices. Second, if he did that it would be political suicide.”
  • “Vaccines cause autism!” “Uh… actually, even the scientist who started that rumor has since recanted and apologized. Here are about 30 articles.”
  • “The government just imposed a quota on disciplining African Americans in schools.” “Nope. The government has just provided guidelines so that minorities will receive the same punishment that whites are getting for identical infractions.”
  • “Obama didn’t vote for anything in the senate. He only voted ‘present’ on everything.” “Hmmmm… that’s funny. I’m looking at his voting record right now, and there’s an awful lot of ‘yay’ and ‘nay’ votes for someone who supposedly only voted ‘present’.”
  • “Snopes.com is run by paranoid, incompetent, hysterical liberals!!!” Sigh. “That reference you’re citing is from a blog. And that blog got it from a viral e-mail that has been circulating since 2008. Here is an article from a reputable source that dismantles that e-mail point by point.”
  • In 2009: “There are concentration camps hidden throughout the US and soon we’ll all be in them.” “Well, that will become obvious pretty quickly, when everyone starts reporting missing friends, neighbors and relatives.”
  • “Dennis Rodman and Barack Obama are close friends, so he must have sent him to North Korea on purpose.” “Wow. If that’s the case, Rodman sure trashes his good friend in the media with a brutal frequency.”
  • “You can’t get out of state health care with your Obamacare, you know.” “Okay, I just spent 20 minutes on hold with my new insurance company, and they say of COURSE I’m covered for out of state healthcare.”

Honestly, it’s emotionally draining.

Here’s the thing about the Drudge Report. If you read it, it quickly becomes apparent that the main theme is “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” And when you look deeper you discover that its primary sources are Fox News, the Daily Mail, and Rush Limbaugh.

Fox News is caught in lies so often, and promotes such a warped agenda, that it has become the butt of jokes internationally. The Daily Mail, with its plummeting subscribers list, is Britain’s fear-mongering equivalent. And Rush Limbaugh… don’t even get me started on that ignorant fool.

For your own mental health and the sanity of those around you, it’s best to get your information from a wide variety of reputable sources. The Drudge Report is not reputable. It’s risible at best. I’d sooner get my news from a supermarket tabloid.

Speaking of reputable sources, I’m just a humble blogger and this is simply my opinion. By all means if you wish to chow down on a healthy stew of racism, homophobia, misogyny and a lunatic fringe hyper-conservative fantasy, then the Drudge Report is definitely for you.

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[Image credit: interestingtopics.net]

The Misinformation Movement

The other day I was perusing Youtube and I came across this video called The Eyeball Collector:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdaJRJFMty8

It says in capital letters, TRUE CRIME CASE, so I was taken in for a split second. But, as I’ve written in a recent blog entry, I am a bit of a sick puppy, so surely in all my twisted web searches I’d have come across a little girl who likes to collect eyeballs. I mean, how could I have missed that? So I did a Google search, and sure enough, the ONLY hit is for this guy’s video. And not a thing on Wikipedia, either.

I decided to look into this guy’s list of other videos. A lot of “TRUE CRIME CASES” popped up. These included “The Killer Santa”, “The Spam Murders”, “The Sofa Corpse”, and “The Lesbian Bride Murder”. Actually, they’re worth a peek, because once you figure out they’re bogus, they’re kind of fun to watch. The guy’s got the kind of warped imagination that appeals to me. But what disturbs me are the comments. People actually fall for this stuff! They think they’re true. He could have advertised them as jokes, and I’d still have watched them, and I would have had much more respect for him.

The thing is, this is becoming more and more of a trend. It’s so easy to communicate with the world these days that people with questionable integrity are taking advantage of it. We saw that, in particular, with Hurricane Sandy. Some bozo decided to tell the world that the New York Stock Exchange was under 3 feet of water, and that spread quickly through Facebook and Twitter, and before all was said and done, it was even reported on CNN. If it had been true, it could have had worldwide financial implications, so spreading that kind of bs is, at best, irresponsible.

I have even found myself unintentionally participating in the misinformation movement. I once posted a link to Sokoblovsky Farms on my Facebook page. For the uninitiated, this was a really cute prank web page for a supposed miniature giraffe farm. It even had a “live” webcam of its “petite lap giraffes”.

Petite Giraffe baby

I thought it was cute and funny, but I never in a million years expected that people would BELIEVE that there are actually miniature giraffes out there. Within 24 hours, half my friends list was desperately searching for a way to own one! Good grief. I had to explain, and then I felt horrible about disappointing them. It kind of makes you wonder about the gullibility of the internet viewing public. Now if you do a search of Sokoblovsky Farms, what you find is a lot of links to people asking “Does this place really exist?” So sad.

There are generations of adults now who have lived with the internet their whole lives. I fear that that will engender in them an unhealthy level of trust in this type of media. It takes a lot of effort to double check every fact you come across, but please, at the very least, go to www.snopes.com or www.factcheck.org before spreading misinformation. Not a week goes by without my receiving some hysterical, cautionary and FALSE e-mail in my inbox, which I am able to debunk through Snopes in a matter of seconds, but when I point this out to the sender, I rarely see them sending out a follow up e-mail that says, “oops…”.

Misinformation is easy to spread. I’d like to think most of it is unintentional. But it has to originate somewhere. If you’re an originator, thanks for the laughs, but SHAME on you.