For Snopes.com, Debunking The Bambi Hoax Was All In A Day's Work

from the suspending-disbelief dept

Mark Glaser's latest piece is a good interview with one half of the couple who runs Snopes.com, the ever-popular site for debunking urban legends and various hoaxes, talking about how they debunked the "Bambi Hoax" that everyone was talking about earlier this month. If you happened to miss it, there was a story (covered widely by the press) that someone in Nevada had set up a "game" where men could pay $10,000 and then shoot paintballs at naked women out in the desert. The press bought it, completely, but the husband and wife team at Snopes realized that it was improbable, at best, and worked out that the whole thing was a scam to sell videos off of someone's website. The interview also talks about how, in some areas, people are now more skeptical of things online (especially images), but if they want to believe something, they ignore all the signs that it's a hoax. The best line is that the way most reporters check to see if something is a hoax is to simply call up the person involved and ask them if they're being honest or not - which isn't likely to reveal very much.