The individual - who is also the co-founder of Snopes, put his pseudonym on some of the source information and claimed to have been the author. So that individual - who is also the co-founder of Snopes, lied.

But Snopes didn't lie. In fact when the other officers of Snopes realized what was going on they did an internal investigation, and suspended their own co-founder from publishing anything on the platform, and issued the apology to the public.

They didn't say it was theirs, he used it without attribution - that is called plagiarism. When THEY found out that HE had plagiarized someone else's work, THEY immediately initiated an investigation, suspended HIM from editorial work, and apologized publicly to US and privately to the authors whose work had been used. This apparently happened a few times over the years compared to many thousands of articles.

So, is it your opinion that the entire organization should be condemned for the actions of one?

The plagiarism was pointed out to Snopes by Buzzfeed. Only then did they perform a investigation. What’s so refreshing about that. I like Tucker usually but don’t buy his antivax crap and don’t rationalize it.

Generally I think Snopes is a reliable fact checker and use them sometimes. But they have a political bias that makes their political fact checks suspect. No I don’t think the entire organization should be condemned but neither do I find it refreshing when the lie occurred right under their nose. FOX has fessed up too, most notable their cash cow Bill O’Riley got his walking papers.

Guilt by association?

"But lying by trusted snopes is refreshing because they admitted it after they got caught."

THEY did not lie, THEY did not get caught, THEY did not plagiarize. They caught the plagiarizer and THEY took action against him. Yet, it appears you are proposing that Snopes lied, I would very much like to see any evidence you have to support that.

I follow several fact checking sources and have found snopes a reliable source in this time when lying seems to be the norm.

Snopes is a left of center fact checking site that has received donations from Facebook and others: Snopes - Media Bias/Fact Check
FYI: The least biased fact checking site is TruthOrFiction.com, TruthOrFiction.com - Media Bias/Fact Check

Ok, so Snopes comes out with their mea culpa after their hand was caught in the cookie jar. They did not discover the gross plagarism, it was found by outsiders and brought to their attention. The editors at Snopes should have, at the very least, been running periodic checks with plagarism checking software. It is one thing to vigorously "fact check" your own work, and quite another to fall on your sword after you have been caught. And why did their co-founder find it necessary to write under a pseudonym?

Snopes describes themselves as a 'fact check.' nothing could be further from the truth-i found this out years ago. it's hardly a reliable source :shocked:

That great philosopher Andy Rooney once said “people will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe.” I like that but then I liked Andy Rooney. Lots of opinions but few real facts that people want to believe.

Snopes isn't the definitive arbiter of truth. I've seen them be biased many times. They lean left. Check all sides dot com for biases.

I too use a number of legitimate fact-checking sources and the fact that Snopes, unlike a lot of people and wacko conspiracy spreading media sources, is willing to admit when they were wrong - is nothing but a positive. The really ironic & hypocritical part, is in the fact that a lot of the critics of Snopes (and other legitimate fact-checking sources), will totally believe/buy the most outrageous nutcase conspiracies from sources like q-anon, Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, Etc, - in their entirety. If only there were an effective vaccine, against being so gullible and believing lies, without doing further serious research. lol

Exactly. They are anything but reliable or objective. They simply got caught this time and couldn't talk their way out of it

That’s nice to see. It is so common in journalism. Read half a dozen news stories about the same event in secondary-level newspapers and the story on which they base their stories and you will usually find several at least that use phrases or sentences without quotation marks or citing sources. This happens in movie reviews, too—if not with exact words, then with opinions.

I did a lot of scholarly writing in my academic career, and I was always scrupulous with sources. But now I use Ancestry a lot, and I often add photos of paintings of people found online without giving credit. If I include an article from Wikipedia or Geni on some ancestor’s page, I usually give credit by pasting in the link, but sometimes I forget.

I knew a novelist, the late John Gardner, who had a photographic memory and could quote an entire page of some book he read once at will. He got into big trouble in his biography of Chaucer for plagiarizing sentences here and there. However, I believe he had read those sources. They entered his mind, and he didn’t realize he was using what someone else wrote.

Then there is Martin Luther King, who, when he was in divinity school, didn’t feel he had time to research and write his own papers for class, so he went to the library archives, found papers written by other students decades before, and turned some in as his own work. I guess that’s how some people get to be a Reverend Doctor.

Have you ever forwarded some meme on Facebook? Do you know who created the meme? Do you know who took the photo behind that meme that had nothing at all to do with the meme? If you shared it, that’s double plagiarism.

It’s important to give attribution where attribution is due.

Be careful using Wikipedia. They publish just about anything that someone wishes to upload to them.