Okay, you smart-asses! 😉
After several submissions for Real or Satire, I guess it’s time to give ourselves an entry.
Real or Satire is, as best we can determine, real.
You’re welcomed to submit URL of a news story. If it’s from a source that we’ve already researched and verified, then you’ll receive a verdict: real or satire*.
If the news article is from a source we’ve yet to identify/research, we urge you to submit it and we’ll add it to our ever-growing list once we’ve researched the originating source.
We’re not just going to throw up a verdict for an entry and ask that you accept it as fact — although that would be deliciously ironic — so we will always try to provide as much evidence as is needed to justify a verdict, whether a site should be taken as factual or meant to be satirical.
Should this site be taken seriously? Sure!
Although you can certainly take our commentary with a grain of salt (in an open wound!) because, ultimately, we’re just trying to have fun.
Now . . . that’s not to say that we don’t get hornswoggled from time to time, that a previous verdict isn’t corrected. Some sites are genuinely difficult to label. In some cases, I wish the site was called ‘Real or Fake,’ because to call some of the fake news sites as “satire” is to besmear the art-form with the filth of lesser minds. But needs must, so “Real or Satire” it is.
We had fun making this site. We’re having fun maintaining the site. And I hope you’ll have fun using the site.
– Real or Satire
*Editorial Update: After our first year up and running, we quickly realized that our binary system of “is it or isn’t it” wasn’t cutting it. We quietly added ClickBait, Green Ink, and Undetermined as judgment categories but even those categories grew short of what was needed.
Ever since the most recent U.S. primaries, people had been submitting political sites to Real or Satire. And could we, in good conscience, mark a news article simply as “real” when it is clearly manipulating the story to satisfy an agenda?
Instead, we created another category — biased — for articles that are real, but have an obvious political bias. We encourage our readers to always review sources and try to dig deeper in any topic, even from a source we mark ‘real’; however, this suggestion is doubly so for sites we judge to be biased.