Snopes has revised its entry on the German prostitution/unemployment hoax and rightly updated its debunking status from “undetermined” to “false.” Meanwhile, no corrections from Lileks, Johnson, or the Captain or the Professor. Feh.

I was about to say “score one for the MSM,” as thus far only one MSM source, the Daily Telegraph, had been dumb enough to run this bogus story. However, I received an email this morning from a reader who advised me that “Fox” (a local Fox affiliate?) had run the bogus story also.

UPDATE: My correspondent emailed back to inform me that the offender was David As[s]man of FoxNews, and that the segment was The Asman Observer. You can watch the video at the foxnews.com web site by clicking “Opinion” on the right-hand sidebar and then scrolling down to “Asman Observer.”

UPDATE x2: The transcript is now online, and appears to be even worse than the Daily Independent’s hatchet job, naming neither the woman allegedly denied benefits nor even the attention-grabbing attorney (Mechthild Garweg) who sparked the phony controversy. No one is looking very good coming out of this.

UPDATE x3: Chris Johnson appears to have removed his entry. Probably not a bad idea, given how the comment thread was going.

UPDATE x4: Professor Bainbridge has updated his entry with a link to my debunking.

UPDATE x5: Don’t look now, but I’m a Playful Primate. On second thought, do look now, ‘cuz if past performance is any indication of future earnings, it won’t last.

It pains me to add James Lileks, whom I generally respect, to the long list of right wing bloggers who were all too eager to believe the phony story about unemployed German women being coerced into prostitution. I have little choice but to give Lileks a bigger dunce cap than most, having run with the story almost a full week after Snopes, Amp, Sadly and I had thoroughly debunked it. Naughty, naughty. I’ve emailed Lileks to show him the error of his ways, and will advise you of any response I get.

Hat tip to Sadly No, who, sadly enough, does not seem all that saddened by Lileks’s gaffe.

Much has been made of Germany’s alleged policy of penalizing unemployed women who are unwilling to consider entering the world’s oldest profession. As is often the case of such stories, this one has less than meets the eye. As promised/threatened, I’ve translated the Tageszeitung’s recent article below.

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I’m taking this story by Clare Chapman of the Daily Independent (h/t: Captain Ed, see also Michael Williams, Todd Zywicki, Donovan, Professor Bainbridge, John Weidner, Kip, Pejmanesque, Low Earth Orbit, Lawrence Auster, Ann Althouse and the Daily Pundit) with a very large grain of salt, as my sources on the ground have informed me that the lawyer involved, Mechthild Garweg (whose first name Chapman misspells “Merchthild”), is Germany’s answer to Gloria Allred. Here is a somewhat more informative article, albeit in German. I’ll translate the key provisions later if I get some spare time.

UPDATE: Done.

FINAL PENULTIMATE UPDATE: Snopes is reserving judgment, but I’m not. This story is officially bunk, with pieces of it cribbed from another story about an unemployed woman in Berlin who was inadvertently referred to a “bartending” job at a facility which, unbeknownst to the agency, was in fact a bordello. Unlike Clare Chapman and her rag of a newsper, the unemployment agency has already apologized for their error. Kudos to Amptoons for swatting this down early as well.

All further blogger speculation on this subject should end immediately, and if the Daily Telegraph wants to retain a shred of credibility, s should Clare Chapman’s career and that of her editor. Such “fake but inaccurate” sensationalism has no more of a legitimate place in the British media than Dan Rather and Mary Mapes have in ours. I’ve refiled this entry under Media Lameness, Morons and Urban Legends.

FINAL FINAL UPDATE: Snopes has upgraded/downgraded the status of this story from “undetermined” to “false.”

One of the most annoying argument tactics involves the smug use of words like “myth” or “urban legend” to describe another person’s opinion or recitation of facts, or stronger words like “facts” to describe one’s own. Typically, such non-arguments take the following format:

Myth: [Insert your opinion here.]
Reality: [Insert my opinion here.]

What’s perhaps the most annoying about this type of non-argument is that it applies one standard to those who assert certain facts, and another to those who choose to question them. The unspoken message is “don’t believe that other guy without first checking out the facts for yourself, believe me without first checking out the facts for yourself.” And thus, hamhanded efforts abound to “debunk” all sorts of “urban legends,” some of which are ULs indeed, others of which are substantially true but get a minor detail wrong (e.g., Al Gore falsely claimed a role in “creating” the Internet, not “inventing” it), and others of which are 100% accurate.

A blogger I normally trust, Dean Esmay (hat tip: Patterico) walked into this very trap today with his post on Ebonics. His arguments for a “compare and contrast” teaching approach to cross-dialectal learning are interesting, and may even be right, although it should be noted that it’s not nearly the slam dunk he makes it out to be. Those theories are what they are. Where Dean completely screws the pooch is on his recital of the alleged history of Oakland Unified Unified School District’s infamous 1996 resolution on Ebonics. On that, he writes:

There is an urban legend that is pervasive in American society. This urban legend goes like this:

In the 1990s a school district in California announced that they would begin teaching “Ebonics” in the classroom. The kids would be taught this non-standard language, given lessons in it, and taught to regard it as equal to English.

Still to this day most people believe that there was such a program to “teach Ebonics to children.” But it never existed. It is an urban legend, one of the most widely sprad [sic ] urban legends in America.

There’s one problem: aside from the technicality of the program never “existing” (Oakland withdrew it before it was implemented) this “urban legend” is true.
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O-oh he-ell, o-oh hell,
O-oh he-ell, o-oh he-ell!
Barney’s the ki-ing of I-is-ra-el.

UPDATE: Police nabbed your dad, police nabbed your dad. Police nabbed your dad, protect us from the police, my dad.

UPDATE x2: Now bring us some friggin’ pudding, now bring us some friggin’ pudding…

Between this link and this one, I think I may have found a new calling.

A little over a month ago, Kevin Roderick rightly noted that Snopes’s purported debunking of Annie Jacobsen’s story did not seem particularly convincing. Despite agreeing with their conclusion, Kevin rightly noted that it appeared to be based on relatively few sources, at least when compared to several blogs that had followed the issue more closely.

I find Snopes entertaining and think that Barbara and David Mikkelson do a great service aggregating rumors and sifting the media reports, but their weak spot is the conclusions. Unfortunately, too many reporters cite Snopes as the authority on whether a rumor is true, instead of just another opinion based on reading the Web (i.e., no special expertise or sources). On many topics, their judgment doesn’t seem any more informed than a typical journalist or blogger (and as Cathy Seipp showed in a recent CityBeat column, Snopes — like everybody else — sometimes lets political bias color its take.)

I agreed wholeheartedly, and cited an additional example in the comments, namely the semi-debunking of the faux myth that Al Gore claimed to have “invented” the Internet. Read the heading, and you’ll see that the story is “false.” Only if you read the entire article defensively do you learn that the rumor is in fact substantially true, and “false” only in that he didn’t actually use the word “invent.” Rather, as the Mikkelsons eventually acknowledge, he claimed to have “taken initiative in inventing” the Internet – an equally ludicrous and baseless claim. But it’s a safe bet that most readers don’t read down that far.

Today, though, it looks like Kevin may have forgotten his earlier observations. Today, he linked favorably to the Martini Republicans’ attempted debunking of Zell Miller’s speech. Both Kevin and Alex’s attempted debunkies relied entirely on this Snopes entry, one which had itself been debunked within hours of the speech.

The heading on Kevin’s prior entry read “Snopes speaks, but so what?” That should have been the heading this time, too.

UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge takes another, more novel approach: pay attention to what John Kerry actually said on the Senate floor about the weapons systems in question. He finds Kerry bashing several of the weapon systems mentioned by Miller, while finding no references to others, and presumably none in support of any of them. Since this results in less than full vindication for Miller (it only mentions some of the weapons systems at issue), the professor declares a “draw” between Miller and his critics. I don’t think that’s right. Partial vindication for one side, vs. none at all for the other is not a draw; it’s a shut-out.

Lonewacko rightly takes Snopes to task for labeling as “false” the undetermined allegations that Annie Jacobsen and her husband witnessed a terrorist dry run on Northwest Air Flight 327 on June 29. Snopes’s research is much more cursory than what I’ve seen on a number of blogs, enough so that Kevin Roderick, who agrees with their conclusion, was unimpressed by the Mikkelsons’ pronouncement. Similarly unimpressed is Patterico and, I suspect, Michelle Malkin, Spoons, and just about everyone else who hasn’t decided that Annie Jacobsen was the real terrorist. The original Snopes entry said nothing of the fact that 13 of the 14 terrorist/musicians/cads/whatever were traveling on expired visas, so Barbara Mikkelson updated it yesterday in an attempt to swat that issue down. Quoth Ms. Mikkelson:

Much has been made of the discovery that the Syrian musicians were supposedly traveling on “expired visas.” This claim stems from a misunderstanding of what the expiry date on a U.S. visa signifies.

She then goes on to explain that technically speaking, a visa “expires” on the day it can longer be used to enter the country, which is not necessarily the same as the “exit date,” by which the holder is required to leave. Based on this, we are asked to assume that as of June 29, only the expiry dates, not the exit dates, had passed. She cites no sources to corroborate this, however. The only external source she does cite is to a U.S. State Department page that explains this aspect of U.S. immigration law generally, and which says nothing about Mehana et al. in particular (nor could it, as the page was last updated in May, 2003).

On the other hand, this article by Audrey Hudson of the Washington Times, which has been quoted extensively by several bloggers but ignored by Snopes, quotes Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Dean Boyd at length. In it, Mr. Boyd confirmed that 13 of the 14 musicians had entered the country on May 30, and that their visas had expired on June 10. If, as Snopes asks us to believe, the visas had really just “expired” with respect to their entry dates, and the men were lawfully in the United States at the time, one might think that Mr. Boyd would have brought this non-technicality up. He did not. Instead, he had this to say:

“The bottom line is there should have been an ICE agent called in to participate in the questioning, but there wasn’t. We believe if an ICE agent were there, they could have detected the visas had expired.”

Conspicuously absent is a further elaboration along the lines of “but then again, they weren’t trying to enter the country, so ICE would have also ‘detected’ that there was nothing wrong.” Everything he said – or at least, everything Hudson saw fit to include in the article – indicates that ICE has confirmed that at least 13 of the 14 had visas that had “expired” in every sense of the word, just as you probably understood the term yourself before reading this blog entry or Snopes’s.

Either Audrey Hudson or Barbara Mikkelson fell down on the job.

UPDATE: Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha does Snopes one better by falsely claiming in a letter to the Washington Times that Mehana and his musicians had previously performed at the kennedy Center, the Lincoln Center and Juilliard. Hat tip: Michelle Malkin. When Jacobson called him on it, he denied having made that claim. O-kay.

UPDATE x2: Audrey Hudson now reports that a second passenger (h/t: Political Musings) has corroborated Annie Jacobsen’s allegedly false report. Advantage: Not Snopes.

Appararently, I’m not alone in my skepticism over the sexless “infertile” couple from Lübeck, Germany. Snopes (hat tip: Lachlan Greer) is on it, and they’re skeptical, too. So far, they’ve been unable to locate anyone at the University of Lübeck who can corroborate the story. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for a response to my own inquiry to the clinic spokeswoman, which I suspect will remain unanswered.