Leftist fact-checking website Snopes was forced to retract 54 articles after the co-founder was outed as a plagiarizer. BuzzFeed News exposed the co-founder for plagiarizing between 2015-2019.
Snopes has been sketchy from day one. Mickelson, who founded the fact-checking site in 1994 alongside his wife at the time, with their playful pet rats, is suspended.
In 2016, Snopes hired fact-checkers that included an embezzler, a porn actress, a “Domme”, and a pot-smoking escort.
David Mikkelson is the co-founder and executive editor of Snopes, “handling everything from researching and writing articles about urban legends to managing the site’s technical infrastructure.”
Under his own name, a pseudonym “Jeff Zarronandia,” and the generic “Snopes Staff” byline, Mikkelson plagiarized articles from news outlets like the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, and The Guardian, BuzzFeed News reports.
BuzzFeed News alleged they had obtained emails and Slack messages that incriminated the Snopes co-founder.
In one Slack message from January 2016, Mikkelson detailed his strategy for copying and then quickly rewriting articles after publishing. “Usually when a hot real news story breaks (such as a celebrity death), I just find a wire service or other news story about it and publish it on the site verbatim to quickly get a page up. Once that’s done, then I quickly start editing the page to reword it and add material from other sources to make it not plagiarized,” he wrote.
OOPs!
Mikkelson released a statement on the plagiarism charges apologizing. He’s sorry now.
Doreen Marchionni, Snopes vice president of editorial and managing editor, suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties pending “a comprehensive internal investigation.”
She strongly condemned it, blah, blah, blah.
He remains an officer and a 50% shareholder of the company.
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