Snopes and George Soros: the connection

FINAL UPDATE, APRIL 15, 2024

See the update at the end of this article for my final word on Snopes.

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

Shall I make it simple? There is no connection.

Not simple enough? Okay, how about this: There is no connection between George Soros and Snopes.com.

Still too complicated? Okay, then try this on for size: If you believe that Snopes.com is financed by George Soros or anybody else, then YOU ARE AN IDIOT.

Sometimes I am amazed at how easily and thoughtlessly people pass on falsehoods whose only purpose is to sully the reputation of an honorable or successful person (or group of people). We used to call it gossip, now we call it email lore. (And sometimes we call it political discourse.)

I received one of those endlessly forwarded emails tonight, asserting breathlessly and longwindedly (can you be"breathless" and "longwinded" at the same time? and is "longwindedly" a real adverb?) that the Snopes.com website is financed by shady left-wing sources, that most of those sources have tried to hide their identities, and that one of the sources is controversial kazillionaire George Soros.

I sure get tired of this crap.

Emails like this are written in such a way as to get you outraged enough to feel a moral obligation to "forward this message to everyone you know." They often appeal, in the final paragraph, to your sense of dignity, patriotism, or just-plain-guilt. If they succeed, then, prompted by both outrage and the guilt, you will forward it to everybody in your Address Book.

Don't you wish you'd stopped to do some fact-checking first?

In the case of snopes.com, I know the Snopeses. David and Barbara Mikkelson are personal friends of mine. We were chasing urban folklore together back before Web browsers existed, back when we had to crawl through the untamed wilds of the Internet with nothing but a machete and a keyboard (and I carried an axe), relying on text-based tools like archie and UseNet newsreaders. We were stuffing and mounting urban legends before any of you found your first free AOL CD in your mailbox.

I watched as David and Barbara put things in place so that they could have a go at making money from urban folklore, by carefully detaching themselves from alt.folklore.urban and starting, maybe not the first, but definitely the most successful, commercial urban-folklore website, Snopes.com.

David and Barbara could not be successful if they didn't remain detached and independent—unencumbered by financial or political relationships with ANYBODY. I mean, duh.

But don't take my word for it. Read what they themselves have to say about it:
http://www.snopes.com/info/aboutus.asp
and http://www.snopes.com/info/faq.asp
If that's not good enough for you, then read what two other professional folklorists have to say about it:
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/s/snopes.htm
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/internet/a/snopes_exposed.htm

You can call the Mikkelsons liars if you want. You can call me, Rich Buhler (TruthOrFiction) and Dave Emery (About) deluded if you want. But at least we went to the trouble of searching out the truth. We're not stupid enough to believe something just because it landed in our Inboxes.

Besides, like I said, I know the Snopeses. Personally. Do you?

UPDATE, June 14: Here's another analysis of the question, written in April 2009 by Viveca Novak at FactCheck.org. For those of you not familiar with FactCheck.org, it's a highly regarded website, billing itself as "a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center." You can accuse them of political bias if you want (Hey! Did you know that the Annenberg Foundation gives financial support to National Public Radio? Does that make them liberals?), but their work has always been credible, well-researched and impartial, as far as I can tell.

UPDATE, April 15, 2024: The years have not been good to Snopes. Everything I said in this article was true, back in 2012. And, in case you're wondering, Snopes is still not funded by George Soros. But Snopes today is nothing like Snopes back then. A lot has happened, mostly bad. Neither David nor Barbara are associated with Snopes today, and other fact-checking websites have picked up the torch which Snopes so clumsily dropped. For more information, see Chantel Tattoli's article at Fast Company, "Inside Snopes: the rise, fall, and rebirth of an internet icon."

Olympics 2008: Made in China. A cheap, low-quality imitation of the real thing.

(Yeah, yeah, I know this is old news. It just so happens that this blog entry is a rerun. I originally posted on Facebook on Monday, August 25, 2008. It's worth keeping around, and giving wider distribution. Blogspot seems to have a longer memory than other places on the Internet, so this seemed like a good place to repost it for posterity. How long does "posterity" last on the Internet?)

Okay, so let's see what the Chinese Olympics organizers (and the Chinese government) did to the Olympics. Please do not extend this criticism to cover all Chinese people. You may, however, wish to draw analogies to Chinese industries and Chinese businesses as they attempt to engage the rest of the world.

1 - They controlled the images you saw on TV. If they didn't want you to see something, you didn't see it. They gave the video feed to NBC, and NBC distributed it without questioning what they were seeing. It was like a really crummy magic show, where it's obvious what the magician doesn't want you to see. During the road races, ugly parts of the city were hidden behind giant screens. In other aerial shots, the helicopter-borne cameras were carefully aimed, never pointing at the ugly stuff. And between the Chinese meddling and NBC's editing, we missed out on an awful lot of the competitions, those that didn't feature either Chinese or American athletes excelling.

2 - They faked it. The televised version of the opening ceremonies included an unbelievable amount and complexity of fireworks, and it turned out that most of those unbelievable fireworks weren't to be believed after all. A lot of them were CGI (computer-generated imagery, also known as animation) and a lot of them were prerecorded ahead of time and spliced into the video feed. (See also item 1, about who controlled the video feed.)

3 - They faked it even more. They pulled a "Singing in the Rain" trick at the opening ceremonies, splicing the beautiful voice of one little girl onto the beautiful face of another little girl, who became known as "the face of China." It was lip-syncing, pure and simple. The Chinese Olympics organizers (and the government?) acted like it was no big deal and didn't really matter. Ask Milli Vanilli if lip-syncing "doesn't really matter." Or go watch "Singing in the Rain" again and decide if it "doesn't really matter." It's dishonest. And it's symbolic of China's modus operandi.

4 - They cheated. Not only that, but the national government was complicit in the cheating. When questions were raised about the ages of some of the gymnasts (and the number of gymnasts of questionable age keeps rising), it was the Chinese government that attempted to settle the question by issuing the girls passports with altered birthdates.

5 - They plagiarized. Or they stole. However you want to put it, the Chinese copied the arrangements of more than 200 national anthems, which had been written for the Athens Olympics in 2004, and rerecorded them with a Chinese orchestra. They did this "without attribution, permission or compensation." And then they lied about it, insisting that the anthems had been arranged by a Chinese composer. The Washington Post and the Salt Lake Tribune have both written articles about this. Somebody did a very technical side-by-side analysis of the arrangements and concluded that the Athens and Beijing arrangements are nearly identical - except that the Beijing ones are missing some of the original arranger's dynamics. In other words, they were not-very-good copies of the original. Once again, this is symbolic of the way China seems to do everything.

6 - They scalped, and they stole. Some Chinese websites were selling nonexistent tickets for hundreds of dollars, and the victims didn't find out until they got to China that they'd been scammed. The official Chinese Olympics officials say that the websites were bogus and there's nothing they can do about it, but based on everything else I've seen about these Olympics, I have my suspicions. I don't think it was just lowlifes and hackers running the scams.

7 - They padded the house. This may be even worse than item 6. At some of the venues, they hadn't sold enough tickets - REAL tickets, that is - to fill the stands, so they conscripted people off the streets and filled the stands with all these people who either didn't want to be there, or who got in for free, in order to give the impression that they had a full house at all events and that the average Chinese person really wanted to be there.

8 - They bullied. That is, the government bullied. They took all the undesirable people off the streets and even out of the city, and hid them away where the athletes, the spectators, the visitors and the journalists couldn't see them and wouldn't find them. They shut down Internet sites that tried to send out information that wasn't favorable to the country, the government or the Games. They effectively shut down free speech, even by the athletes, for the duration of the Games. To build the venues, they displaced hundreds, thousands, of residents, and demolished their homes, without even arranging for them a new place to live.

9 - I'm not worried about the medal count. The Olympics have always been heavily nationalistic, even in the days of ancient Greece. It seems that the hosting nation has always enjoyed a home-court advantage, and the ideal of amateurs competing was only ever an ideal. But the athleticism was real. I really can't fault the Chinese athletic machine any more than I can fault the Russian, American or (do you remember?) East German athletic machines. I saw some true athleticism from the Chinese athletes, and from all the athletes, really. And it seemed like I saw unsportsmanlike conduct from everyone except the Chinese athletes. The Chinese athletes, like the Japanese and the Russians, were a class act. I put this point here just so nobody thinks I'm only griping because China got more gold medals than anybody else.

In conclusion: I will admit that the 2008 Olympics, as portrayed on NBC, were visually stunning. But it was all a facade - no more than skin deep. Worse, it was fake. Not all of it, but enough of it to matter. The Chinese were dishonest in their execution of the Olympics - repeatedly, blatantly, arrogantly, and disingenuously. What's really incredible is that, for as long as the Olympics lasted, the world bought it. They let it happen.

One American blogger told a story that is symbolic of the entire Beijing Olympics and, by extension, everything about China. According to this reporter, one entire city block was hidden behind and beneath a vinyl cover, which was draped over a metal framework. The cover was painted to look like a high-class block of office buildings, complete with painted people looking out of the windows. It looked very realistic from a moving vehicle, from a distance, or in photographs. It was a perfect symbolism for the Games: a thin trompe l'oeil screen fashioned to look beautiful on the surface, while all the ugliness still existed underneath, where you weren't allowed to look.