- Snopes nitpicks Gateway Pundit article to rate it ‘mostly false’ when it is completely accurate
- MacGuill’s only point is to argue about whether urinals are banned in all buildings, or just the ones currently under renovation and all others moving forward
- Snopes has a history of nitpicking to declare things false that are actually true
OUR RATING: Major Negligence. MSNBC-level basic journalistic negligence
Indicted Outlet: Dan MacGuill | Snopes | Link | Archive
Snopes, the falsely labeled fact check site that has, instead, functioned primarily as a satire fact check site for many years, debunked this article from the Gateway Pundit about Portland banning urinals.
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Here’s Snopes comedy writer Dan MacGuill rating the Pundit story “Mostly False”
…GROSSLY EXAGGERATED A DESIGN CHOICE MADE TO ACCOMMODATE GENDER-NEUTRAL BATHROOMS.
It’s not a policy, it’s not a urinal ban, it’s just a mere “design choice.”
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but when I piss, I seek out the premier ‘design choice’ for the recipient of my live streams.
Major Violations:
And read this well crafted paragraph for the fine fact-checking journalism at the premier site in the International Fact Check Network:
Portland city officials have indeed decided not to install urinals in any bathrooms in the Portland Building, which was under renovation as of September 2019. However, The Gateway Pundit’s article was misleading and illogical in characterizing that decision as a “ban” and also inaccurate in claiming that the urinal policy applied to all public buildings (or even more than one) in the city.
So, let’s recap:
- Portland banned urinals in new buildings
- The Gateway Pundit reported on this and said exactly that
- Snopes nitpicks and says that reporting is ‘mostly false’ because they’re not actually ripping out ALL urinals in ALL buildings
Now you might be tempted to give Urinal Dan at Snopes a pass for his jaundiced reporting here, because perhaps the original Pundit article, authored by Brock Simmons, did not appropriately split the hair of whether or not the new sitting-piss-only policy applies to current or future buildings.
But thankfully we can read, and so Urinal Dan’s reporting becomes even more suspect. Here is an excerpt from the original article [2] at the Gateway Pundit by Simmons:
The city of Portland (where else) is now banning urinals in city-owned buildings and spending taxpayer money to remove them. The first urinal-free building is appropriately called The Portland Building, where countless paper-shuffling city bureaucrats congregate to waste oxygen and demand pay raises.
So Simmons is pretty clear in his writing that they are not ripping out urinals in every building, which is Urinal Dan’s expressed concern in his breathless debunking article. Instead, there is clearly a new policy that for future buildings and for renovations, urinals will be removed to suit progressive politics.
This is frankly standard fare among fact check network sites that love to serve as the semantics police for right-leaning outlets. By debunking articles, they ultimately affect the cashflow of outlets by having Newsguard come in and demonetize such outlets. By splitting hairs among conservative news outlets, they can get away with this form of commercial defamation and slander on a wholesale level. It is not merely a matter of Urinal Dan being slightly confused, a slow reader, having a bad news day, or being otherwise preoccupied with astrology.
Is the story “mostly false”? No. Snopes’ statement is entirely without merit. If anything, the story is completely accurate with the caveat for those who struggle with reading like Urinal Dan, that they aren’t ripping out all urinals at this very moment.
OUR RATING: Major Negligence. MSNBC-level basic journalistic negligence
Bibliography:
2 ] https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/09/portland-bans-urinals-in-public-buildings/
4 ] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/portland-ban-urinals-buildings/
