Peter Hasson at the Daily Caller made the Drudge Report on Thursday underlining how Snopes.com, "a left-leaning fact-checking website given preferential treatment by Facebook and Google, botched its fact-check of a viral meme that was mocked within political circles for spreading false information."
The meme tweeted out by @LibsInAmerica showed a picture of President Trump celebrating with his aides and GOP members of Congress after the House’s vote to repeal Obamacare in 2017. Thirty-three people in the photo Snopes used had a red X over their face, though it cropped out a 34th person included in others.
The caption accurately claimed the photo's location and cause for celebration, but falsely claimed that “Everyone with an X has since been voted out of Congress.” Politico reporter Jake Sherman and others mocked it as more inaccurate than accurate. Sherman called it "insane fake news."
Sherman added Reps. Rob Bishop and Morgan Griffith were also re-elected. Blake Farenthold left Congress before the election on ethics charges. But guess what?
Snopes fact-checker Bethania Palma, a former writer for liberal website Raw Story, fact-checked the meme three weeks later and claimed it was accurate.
Palma rated it “True” that “The Congressional seats of almost three dozen Republicans who voted to repeal Obamacare were lost to Democrats in 2018” — a different claim than what the picture alleged, much less its “primary” claim.
“In the meme, red ‘X’ marks were drawn through the faces of 33 lawmakers who purportedly were rejected by voters in the 6 November 2018 midterm elections,” Palma wrote.
Both that claim and Palma’s summary of it were inaccurate.
Not everyone in the photo with an “X” over their face was a lawmaker — a fact left out of Palma’s fact-check. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma, for example, had an “X” over her face even though she’s not an elected official.
After The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to Snopes for comment, the website edited its article to claim “the persons actually pictured in the accompanying photograph are difficult or impossible to identify.” Hasson said that was also wrong. Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson did not apologize for the error in an email reply. He defended it:
“The overall point offered by the meme in question is that some 33 Republican members of Congress who voted to repeal the ACA lost their seats. And as our fact check documents, that point is correct,” Mikkelson wrote.
“The meme isn’t really about the specific persons who appear in the accompanying photograph, as they weren’t identified by name and are largely unrecognizable to viewers as shown due to the small size of the photograph and the fact that their heads are obscured with red X’s,” Mikkelson insisted.
“Our audience is intelligent enough to understand the difference between a literal representation and a symbolic one,” he added, denying that the fact check was misleading.
Hasson ended on the most disturbing note: "Google News highlighted Snopes’ misleading fact-check on its home page on Wednesday alongside other fact-check pieces."
We have rated this Snopes.com "fact check" as Fully Fake. For similar analyses, please visit our Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers page.
