Frequently Asked Questions

Who made News Sniffer?

News Sniffer was created by John Leach. He lives in Leeds, in the UK.

Why monitor the corporate media?

The corporate media control how the majority of people see the world. That is a considerable amount power. It needs to be monitored.

So are journalists lying to us?

We don't believe journalists are generally guilty of self-censorship and conscious lying. As Media Lens puts it:

we believe that the all-too-human tendency to self-deception accounts for their conviction that they are honest purveyors of uncompromised truth. We all have a tendency to believe what best suits our purpose - highly paid, highly privileged editors and journalists are no exception.

With Revisionista, do you really expect to find anything more than fixed spelling errors and new facts?

We've already found more than that. Of course the large majority of news article changes are just updates with new information or spelling and grammatical improvements but there is more if you're willing to look carefully. Start with the recommended revisions, which have been voted as interesting by other News Sniffer readers.

I found a 'Have Your Say' comment marked as censored when it still on the BBC website, is 'Watch Your Mouth' broken?

'Watch Your Mouth' had a bug where some comments were mistakenly classed as censored. This was fixed on 29th October 2006 and the entire backlog of comments double checked. There should be no more mistakes like this.

What did you use to write the News Sniffer tools?

The back end stuff was written in the Ruby language. The front end web interface was developed using Ruby on Rails. The database is MySQL and the web server Lighttpd. The blog is Wordpress.