Apology from Members of Snopes Senior ManagementAn internal review prompted by a BuzzFeed investigation found dozens of stories by our co-founder that appropriated material from other news organizations.
Doreen Marchionni
Vinny Green
Published 13 August 2021
In late July/early August, members of this company began a comprehensive internal investigation into allegations of plagiarism leveled against Snopes Founder/CEO David Mikkelson after a journalist got in touch with us about his own research for a story. ...
We want to thank Jones for his reporting. It’s an example of dogged, watchdog journalism we cherish. Our staff has moved quickly to fix the problem, and we now want to share with our community what we have done:
*Marchionni suspended Mikkelson from all editorial production pending a final outcome to the internal review and removed his access to our content management system, WordPress, for story production/publishing.
*Expanding on Jones’ findings for BuzzFeed, Green flagged all 140 news articles under the generic bylines for review and identified other possible issues beyond Buzzfeed’s findings.
*A staff reporter, who also works as an adjunct journalism professor, examined each flagged post for plagiarism. Marchionni then verified her initial findings with the help of plagiarism detection software.Our internal research so far has found a total of 54 stories Mikkelson published that used appropriated material, including all of the stories BuzzFeed shared with us.
*On Snopes.com, the offending content will be removed while the page itself will remain accessible. ...
Read entire thing at Snopes