this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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The media bias research seems more, deeply unserious and fundamentally flawed rather than malicious to me.
Fact checking has the problem that it's annoying as fuck on top of all. I don't think that Snopes is actually all that evil.
PolitiFact seems a lot more clearly biased. Billionaire funded too.
The malice is in the worldview they are regurgitating. Creating this idea of objective untouchable journalism means every story that really matters, that they or their peers fuck up or skew is protected from criticism. So something like snopes backs up something like politifact which reinforces NYT, which regurgitates the state dept. The whole field is arrayed to lend itself credence and make us look insane.
I really don't spend enough time on snopes to say how much of that is going on.
I never use snopes, I don't think its specific quality matters much. Its the institutional legitimacy and the rhetoric that matters
One memorable snopes moment in the last years was Zionists getting mad at them for how they covered South Africa's Genocide case against Israel.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/01/22/israel-hamas-what-is-genocide/
I don't think that's NYT/state department line.
That's not how western propaganda works. They do not all follow the exact same line of thinking every time. That's why it works. You let some variance exist, you create a self-reinforcing system in which no one consciously thinks they are lying or obfuscating, but all stick to certain parameters. Its a deluge, not a trickle of approved information. Like with Assange they eventually started saying "hey this is bad, don't do this", but after they either stayed silent, hide the importance of his revelations, or did the damage to him themselves.
The machine does not need them to be in lock-step, in fact that HURTS the propaganda model. Snopes reinforces the NYT line by treating objective journalism as possible let alone the norm. It does not have to have the same prescriptions as NYT to do that. Also Zionists get mad at everything
With PolitiFact it's very obvious in what ways they are deceptive even from just reading individual articles. Not every single one of them but there is a clear pattern of deception. Articles regularly will have internal contradictions, or they put two separate statements in the headline, debunk one of them and call the whole thing mostly false. I don't think it's the same with Snopes.
I don't rely on either myself but I think it's good to know whether I should tell other which of these pages to stay clear of. With PolitiFact I think that's obvious, with Snopes I'm not sure whether Snopes isn't actually preferable for people low media literacy. With all the AI slop, having people checking in with institutions isn't all bad. It's unfortunate that those institutions are bourgeoisie but it might still be better than a purely slop based media diet.
Snopes is good for non-political stuff, especially the farther back you go. They used to do actual internet journalism history stuff, like where certain copypastas came from and diving into old forums.