My father always told me: "If it's too good to be true, then it's probably not." That's certainly the case with an article we're reviewing from CNN.com.de. Read onward!
UPDATE 01/31/2017: Categorizing madworldnews.com as “Real” never felt quite right with us. At the time of the initial review, we had a binary grading system: either a site was real, or it was satire. Mad World News didn’t quite sit comfortably in that either-or system. Where do we place highly opinionated commentary sites that commented on real news? But now…
politicot.com and newslo.com are the reason why God invented Ad-Blockers . . . But is the site real or satire? Wade through the ads with us and let's find out!
As of this writing, the first three posts you see when visiting DailyBuzzLive are: Kids Are Smoking Bed Bugs To Get High Energy Drinks Contain Ingredient Extracted From Bull Urine And Semen Man Spends 3 Days In Jail For Wearing Saggy Pants To Court Well . . . Kids are not smoking bedbugs; Red Bull does not contain bull spunk;…
Mirror-site for snoopman.wordpress.com. Snoopman is less satire, more conspiracy theorist. But plenty of folks, with varying degrees of conspiracy-isms, pass on Snoopman articles as facts. Editor’s Note: Someone from Snoopman offered a ‘defense’ of sorts for their site, which you can read in the comments below. Again, Real or Satire has, technically, a binary system (either, or) and a site…
Not even sure what the point is for hollywooodreporter.co, or the other sites connected to it. Doesn't matter; it's all fake -- and only barely funny.
As of this writing, 800whistleblower.com has this image on the landing page: — which asks you to visit www.Wistleblower411.com. Click THAT link fires off a series of 2 or 3 redirects in rapid succession, before landing on a page asking you to disable search tracking. We want to mark them as ClickBait — and likely dangerous for your computer’s well-being…
There's no easy find for News Chicken. But there are clues to the site's legitamacy once you look at some of their original -- er, sorry, "original" -- stories.
Thought Catalog is a site for op-ed pieces. They also tend to repost — and resell — Reddit posts. From their About page: The more worldviews and rhetorical styles on the site, the better. We want to tell all sides of the story. Whether or not they are vigorous with fact-checking is another — and likely, moot — question; the…
From their About page: The Daily Currant is an English language online satirical newspaper that covers global politics, business, technology, entertainment, science, health and media.
NBC Claims All Americans Will Be Implanted With Microchips For Obamacare Wrong. theuspatriot.com is full of anti-Obama, anti-progress, anti-Left, anti-Democrat non-news, that either they are being satirical, or they are just being assholes who are pushing wholly incorrect — and already disproved — information. But we’re nice over here at Real or Satire, so we’ll err on the side of…
allenbwest.com is ‘real’ for the sake of our purposes here, meaning, it’s not satirical. Fond of citing the New York Post, another in the Murdoch sensationalist crop, it’s more an anti-Obama mouthpiece than anything else. This was the article that was submitted to us: http://allenbwest.com/2014/07/abject-disdain-military-troops-get-pink-slips-combat/ Basically, it’s blasting Obama for firing over 100 military personnel, including some generals. But the…
So this was the story that came to us for Big American News was — Dead Ebola Patients Are Rising From The Dead — with this for the accompanying photo — — which is from this mercifully short-lived 2008 TV show: So . . . it’s safe to safe this is satire. But, in case you want more proof, this…
UPDATED REVIEW 1-10-2017: Our previous review of addictinginfo.org came when we had a simple binary ranking system. Our conclusion has been updated to match the new system. You’ll be seeing a lot of updated reviews as we continue to comb through the database. Sometimes, a news story has enough “clickability” on its own merits that it doesn’t warrant much alteration.…
WARNING: WorldNetDaily (WND), not to be confuzzled with World News Daily, is an American web site that publishes political content from the perspective of U.S. conservatives and the political right. So expect heavy coloring. They are likely the source of many ultra-Right folks’ conservative conspiracies, e.g., Obama’s birth certificate non-issue. But we wouldn’t call WND ‘conserva-nutjobs’ or anything of the…
A mirror-site to snoopman.net.nz. Not much more can be said about it. And if you’re here because of the Lorde-Grammy-Censor story: No, Lorde didn’t give a long anti-whatever speech at the Grammys. The story is listed under Snoopman’s Satire, Sarcasm, and Snoofs category.
The definition of specious: 1. Having the ring of truth or plausibility but actually fallacious: a specious argument. 2. Deceptively attractive. So it’s in the website title.
True Activist is another tough one to categorize, using our binary system. It’s not satire, but it’s not exactly real news, in the sense that you and I think of news. It’s a repository of blogs and stories that fit its philosophical views. Same as Real Farmacy. Their process seems to be: Find an article that fits our view; Reshare…
Real Farmacy is difficult to categorize. They’re not satire, but they’re not exactly real, either. Or, should I say, they’re not exactly factual. Oh, they’ll post mostly-real; or real stories, but it’ll be a story that’s 10 years old (see below); or it will be a mostly-true story with misleading headlines, which isn’t something that is entirely new to anyone…
The article submitted to us from PoliticalEars.com was this one: THREE OF FIVE DETAINEES SWAPPED ARE NOW ISIS LEADERS However, it’s basically a copy of this report from our good friends at National Report: Terrorist Exchanged For Bowe Bergdahl Now Top ISIS Commander Political Ears hadn’t noted its sources — likely because someone had already called them out on sourcing…
