Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers?

I would have agreed with this article until the forbes story broke.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dail...

It makes snopes look worse run than a college newspaper.

I also agree with the forbes article in that we need much much tranparency and openess from our fact checkers.

Oh please, this is a typical bullshit story from a site with famously loose editorial oversight itself.

It was with incredible surprise therefore that I received David’s one-sentence response which read in its entirety “I'd be happy to speak with you, but I can only address some aspects in general because I'm precluded by the terms of a binding settlement agreement from discussing details of my divorce.”

This absolutely astounded me. Here was the one of the world’s most respected fact checking organizations, soon to be an ultimate arbitrator of “truth” on Facebook, saying that it cannot respond to a fact checking request because of a secrecy agreement.

In short, when someone attempted to fact check the fact checker, the response was the equivalent of “its secret.”

It is impossible to understate how antithetical this is to the fact checking world, in which absolute openness and transparency are necessary prerequisites for trust. How can fact checking organizations like Snopes expect the public to place trust in them if when they themselves are called into question, their response is that they can’t respond.

What's so astonishing about it? A divorce settlement in which the parties agree not to talk about each other in public isn't scandalous, and it's not like these people are on the public payroll; rather, they provide a service, have built a good brand from the overall high reliability of that service (notwithstanding a lack of total perfection), and the market has been largely satisfied with the quality of the offering. Divorces happen and they're sometimes bitter and contentious. So what?

I don't really care how Snopes is run as long as it consistently provides a high quality of information, while being aware of variations in the quality of their output from time to time. I have certainly found it a more reliable source of information, on average, than the Daily Mail or indeed Forbes over a period going back to its founding.

There's a lawyer's saying that when the facts are against you, you pound on the table. The Guardian won't even repeat, let alone attempt to refute, anything published in the Daily Mail.

Just let that sink in for a moment: the Guardian is unable to dispute the Daily Mail on a factual level on this one. Instead they talk about everything and anything else rather than discuss the actual subject matter in the reports. "Nothing to see here, move along!" But even a stopped clock can be right twice a day. And this would hardly be the first real news broken by a tabloid.

We live in interesting times. I just hope they're not the "interesting times" from that fictitious Chinese curse.