Failed Daily Caller 'Writer' Throws Temper Tantrum, Exposed as Liar After Being Debunked by snopes.com
Real reporters acknowledge and correct their mistakes, but some pretenders just throw hissy fits when they're called out.
David Mikkelson
Updated: Jun 19, 2016
TL;DR version: One Daily Caller "writer," tired of seeing his slanted and factually-challenged output debunked here at snopes.com (such as his misleading reporting about Washington state schools teaching transgenderism to kindergarten students and a DHS subcommittee report on violent extremism) attempted to shoot the messenger (a common logical fallacy). Instead of acknowledging and correcting his mistakes, he tried to deflect attention from them by attacking the person who had the temerity to point them out, our own Kim LaCapria.
Usually we don't bother responding to such blather (our long-established reputation as the Internet's oldest fact-checking site speaks for itself), but this instance provided an opportunity to deliver an informative object lesson on bad reporting (and the importance of fact-checking) too good to pass up.
In his rant, said writer (whom we'll spare a bit of embarrassment by not referring to by name) exhibited all the same flaws that have plagued his usual "reporting" — misrepresenting source material, eliding or ignoring relevant information, selective quoting, cherry-picking, lack of context — right from the very outset:
Snopes’ main political fact-checker is a writer named Kim Lacapria. Before writing for Snopes, Lacapria wrote for Inquisitr, a blog that — oddly enough — is known for publishing fake quotes and even downright hoaxes as much as anything else.
The Inquisitr is actually a news and media website, not a blog. And while it may be true that some Inquisitr contributors have occasionally fallen for fake news stories and other hoaxes (of which we've debunked our fair share), what does that have to do with our Ms. LaCapria? Did our Daily Caller writer point out a single instance of Kim's publishing "fake quotes" or "downright hoaxes" as real news while working for the Inquisitr? Or any instance of her claiming as fact something that wasn't true in any of her Inquisitr writing? Answer: no.
He then moved on from this weak attempt at invoking the association fallacy to setting up a straw man fallacy:
While at Inquisitr, the future “fact-checker” consistently displayed clear partisanship ... She once wrote: “Like many GOP ideas about the poor, the panic about using food stamps for alcohol, pornography or guns seems to have been cut from whole cloth — or more likely, the ideas many have about the fantasy of poverty.” (A simple fact-check would show that food stamp fraud does occur and costs taxpayers tens of millions.)
A simple reading of the linked article would have shown that Ms. LaCapria wasn't addressing welfare fraud, but rather legislative efforts to further restrict the kinds of things welfare recipients could spend their benefits on, based on common claims that such benefits were being used to purchase items such as pornography, alcohol, guns, tattoos, and nail salon services — despite scant evidence that this was much of a real-world problem