An old friend, who has become unaccountably far right-wing, sends me more-or-less teasing excerpts from RightWingWorld from time to time. Today it was an account of a published story about one of the left's icons, taken from a book by an author I'd never heard of, from a right-wing publisher - a story which if untrue would be clearly libelous. I did a little searching and it looks as though the book came out last fall; the National Review pumped it immediately; it never caught on; but now there seems to be a broader-based effort by the right to talk it up and give it traction. But I can't find anyplace - and maybe I'm just not searching hard enough - where someone has debunked it.
It's a story I doubt, logically and instinctually, and I can understand why ignoring it publicly may be the best response. My answer to my friend just listed the many reasons why I thought it was suspicious. But I would have liked to have given her more of a hard-fact response, and wonder if there is a debunking site, for fact-checking (right or left). Not so long ago, I might have sent it to Google Answers, but last I heard they had gone out of business and yielded their ground to Yahoo (whose Q&A service seems to lean to the right).
How do you check out a mudslinging piece, without just giving it greater strength by mentioning it?