Online rumor mill spins its own myth; Snopes.com is presented by some media outlets as an unbiased arbiter of rumors and hoaxes. But critics say its liberal bias causes it to create urban legends of its own

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 1, 2002 | by John Berlau

The uncertain times after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have given rise to all sorts of rumors. E-mails have circulated about malls that will be attacked on Halloween, about Osama bin Laden being spotted in Utah and Oliver North having warned about bin Laden at the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987. None of these turned out to be true and quickly were debunked on Internet sites devoted to "urban legends."

The most prominent of these is Snopes.com, a Website started in 1995 as a hobby by David and Barbara Mikkelson, respectively a Web programmer and housewife in the Los Angeles area. The site flags rumors with red, green or yellow lights to indicate whether the rumor is false, true or uncertain. The Mikkelsons say the site was getting 2 million "hits" per day just after the 9/11 attacks. Increasingly the establishment media are promoting Snopes as an unbiased arbiter. The site has been featured on ABC's 20/20, as well as articles in Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post and the Wall Street journal, which said "Snopes.com offers more background information and definitive answers on the veracity of popular rumors than any other site we looked at."

Snopes, which features the status of about 100 war-related rumors, did help to quell baseless stories about Arab-Americans cheering the attacks at a Dunkin' Donuts and the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad being involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. It also has good information on some older urban leg ends such as alligators in city sewers. But some observers say the site is colored by a liberal political bias and that the Mikkelsons have been too quick to label politically incorrect news stories as urban legends.

For instance, in October, Snopes listed as false the claim, in its own words, that "several [Internet] domain names related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on America were registered before the attack." CNSNews.com, a news site affiliated with the conservative Media Research Center, had reported in an article by Jeff Johnson that at least 17 domain names such as "worldtradetower strike.com," "attackontwintowers.com" and "wterrorattack200l.com" had been registered prior to the attack, some as early as July 2000. The Mikkelsons wrote that "this is a nothing story, promulgated by those looking for something sensational to write about."

They dismissed any notion the sites could be related to the terrorist attacks, declaring: "Given the prominence of New York, the prevalence of violence and horror in our popular entertainment, the millions of domain names registered over the years and the fact that the World Trade Center had already been attacked in 1993 [in the bombing that killed six people], that a handful of expired domain names used one or more of these elements should be no surprise."

But Snopes left out many facts included in the CNSNews piece that may have given the article more credibility. For one thing, the belief that these sites may have been related to the attacks was not mere speculation on the reporter's part, but the view of renowned terrorism expert Neil Livingstone, chief executive officer of the Washington-based counterterrorism and investigation company Global Options LLC. "This wasn't just some man off the street," says Johnson, CNSNews congressional bureau chief. Livingstone has written on terrorism for the New York Times and Washington Post and appeared on Nightline and Meet the Press.

Livingstone was quoted in the article as saying that terrorists like to take credit for their work and might have wanted to set up Websites for a propaganda campaign when they didn't know how successful the attacks would be. Johnson noted that bin Laden says on one of his videotapes that even he didn't think the strikes would be so successful. One of the main points of the article was Livingstone's outrage that the registration companies apparently didn't report the domain names to the FBI.

Snopes made much of the fact that the few date-related domain names did not refer to Sept. 11, but to Aug. 11 and Sept. 29. However, CNSNews had paraphrased Livingstone as saying these two dates "may have indicated the window of opportunity during which the attackers planned to strike."

CNSNews executive editor Scott Hogenson also says that Snopes mis-characterized the article as saying the sites were related to the terrorist attack when the story only raised the question of whether they might have been related to the attack. He tells INSIGHT, HT he emailed the Mikkelsons three times to correct the record and never received a reply. "They got it wrong, and they didn't even have the ethical fortitude to respond to detailed, accurate, polite queries. I think that's just low class," Hogenson says.

In a telephone interview with INSIGHT, Barbara Mikkelson saw no need to change the status of the CNSNews report from "false" to "undetermined" or to include Livingstone's comments. "I don't know the man, and I don't know his credentials," she says. "Just because somebody's a known terrorism expert does not necessarily mean he will be right about everything."