Snopes.com: How Reliable is It?

For the past few years www.snopes.com has positioned itself, or others have labeled it as the 'tell-all, final word' on any comment, claim and e-mail.

But for several years, people tried to find out who exactly was behind snopes.com.

Only recently did Wikipedia get to the bottom of it - kind of makes you wonder what they were hiding.

Well, finally we know.

It is run by a husband and wife team - that's right, no big office of investigators and researchers, no team of lawyers...It's just a mom-and-pop operation that began as a hobby.

David and Barbara Mikkelson who live in the San Fernando Valley of California started the web site about 13 years ago - and they have no formal background or experience in investigative research.

After a few years it gained popularity believing it to be unbiased and neutral, but over the past couple of years people started asking questions about who was behind it and did they have a selfish motivation?

The reason for the questions - or skepticisms - is a result of snopes.com claiming to have the bottom line facts to certain questions or issues, when in fact, they have been proven wrong.

Also, there were criticisms that the Mikkelsons were not really investigating and getting to the 'true' bottom of various issues.

When I saw that Snopes had falsely claimed that Obama's Birth Certificate had been properly validated, I realized something was wrong with either their research and/or their credibility.

It seems something is seriously wrong with both.

Then a few months ago, when my State Farm agent Bud Gregg, in Mandeville, hoisted a political sign referencing Barack Obama and made a big splash across the Internet, supposedly, the Mikkelsons claim to have researched this issue before posting their findings on snopes.com.

In their statement they claimed the corporate office of State Farm pressured Gregg into taking down the sign, when in fact, nothing of the sort ever took place.

I personally contacted David Mikkelson (and he replied back to me) thinking that he would want to get to the bottom of this, and I gave him Bud Gregg's contact phone numbers. Bud was going to give him phone numbers to the big exec's at State Farm in Illinois who would have been willing to speak with him about it. He never called Bud.

In fact, I learned from Bud Gregg that no one from snopes.com ever contacted anyone with State Farm.

Yet snopes.com issued a statement as the 'final factual word' on the issue as if they did all their homework and got to the bottom of things. Not!

Then it has been learned the Mikkelsons are very Democrat and extremely liberal.

As we all now know from this presidential election, liberals have a purpose agenda to discredit anything that appears to be conservative.

There has been much criticism lately over the internet with people pointing out the Mikkelsons liberalism revealing itself in their web site findings. Gee, what a shock!

So, I say this now to everyone who goes to www.snopes.com to get what they think to be the bottom line facts:

Proceed with caution. Take what it says at face value and nothing more. Use it only to lead you to their references where you can link to and read the sources for yourself.

Plus, you can always Google a subject and do the research yourself.

It now seems apparent that's all the Mikkelsons do.

After all, I can personally vouch from my own experience for their 'not' fully looking into things. Gary McCaleb 2255 Western Park Dr. Dallas, TX 75211-7748

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