What do you do when someone sites an incorrect fact on FB?

catahoula
Fri, 17 Feb 2017 01:06:02 +0000

I’ve looked at it, mom2and.

The claim Snopes fact checked was framed as…
quote successfully defended an accused child rapist and later laughed about the case.



… and Snopes devotes 18 or so paragraphs of analysis (along within excess of 26 paragraphs of quoted material) to arrive at a finding of ‘Mostly False’.

A pretty beefy analysis for a claim containing only two points, one of which is indisputable. Yet only a single, lonely paragraph addresses the arguable point - that she laughed about the case.

the audio on these tapes is difficult to understand, but (irrelevant) can be heard describing the case as “terrible.” She did audibly laugh or chuckle at points, not about “knowing that the defendant was guilty” or “getting a guilty guy off” (which makes little sense, given that the defendant pled guilty) but rather while musing about how elements of the case that might ordinarily have supported the prosecution worked in the defendant’s favor (i.e., observing that the defendant’s passing a polygraph test had “forever destroyed her faith” in that technology)

Annenberg FactCheck.org, in their review, provided a transcript of the relevant comments (along with no editorial comment to difficulty in composing them.) Two of them follow:

Of course he claimed he didn’t. All this stuff. He took a lie detector test. I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs. (laughs)

I wrote all that stuff and I handed it to Mahlon Gibson, and I said, “Well this guy’s ready to come up from New York to prevent this miscarriage of justice.” (laughs)

While reasonable people can disagree to a conclusion she didn’t laugh about the case, I don’t believe one can reasonably defend snopes effort as impartial.