If Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal today, Snopes would fact-check it.
Never mind that the satirist’s famous 1729 essay is ludicrous enough to make its tongue-in-cheek intentions known. Snopes, the “the internet’s definitive fact-checking resource,” would find a way to turn it into a fake news controversy.
Its headline would read something like this: “Would it really help poor people to feed their children to the rich?” And Snopes would warn, “We found dozens of instances of social media users who were taken in by this ruse.”
As ridiculous as it may sound — I still remember when Snopes was for debunking urban legends instead of fact-checking satire — that last quote is exactly what Snopes wrote about an article from the Babylon Bee, a popular Christian satire site.
It all started with a real news story. After a Georgia lawmaker claimed that a man at Publix told her to “go back” to where she came from, facts that came out subsequently made the story look like a hoax: you know, a fake story that pretends to be true.
That differentiates it from the Babylon Bee article that lampooned the incident, which was a fake story that was meant to be understood as exactly that. The Bee published an article titled, “Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-Fil-A Employee Told Her To Go Back To Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said ‘My Pleasure.’”
Then Snopes, the impartial arbiter of truth that it is, published a fact-check of the satirical article.
“We’re not sure if fanning the flames of controversy and muddying the details of a news story classify an article as ‘satire,’” the site wrote.
Instead of explaining that the Babylon Bee “is, of course, a satirical web site,” and like “all content originating with” the Bee, the article was “purely satirical, not real news” — which is what it wrote about the older, left-leaning satire site the Onion — Snopes wrote that the Bee’s piece was “an apparent attempt to maximize the online indignation.”
Fact-check indeed. Even though Babylon Bee founder Adam Ford explained the incident in a Twitter thread, and the article has since been updated to be less blatantly antagonistic, this hasn’t stopped others in the media from running with the narrative that the Babylon Bee doesn’t count as satire — because they don’t like it.
BuzzFeed smeared the Bee with an article titled, “A Christian Satire Site Says Fact-Checkers Are Helping Facebook De-Platform Conservatives.” The author remained skeptical, despite the reality that a “fact-check” of an article about CNN spinning fake news in a washing machine had Facebook sending the Bee a cautionary note about demonetization last year.
CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter deleted a tweet from February saying, “Babylon Bee is a fake news site. They call it ‘satire.’”
This week, Jezebel ran the headline, “Snopes Is Fighting With a Right Wing Humor Site, With Satire So Unfunny it Reads Like Fake News.” It also claimed that Babylon Bee caters to the “to the far-right,” which is an odd jab to throw at a site that markets itself to largely Christian audiences, and even Never Trumpers.
I hate to break it to the overzealous, partisan fact-checkers of the world, but satire is satire, even if you don’t think it’s funny.
If you visit the Babylon Bee’s website, there’s a banner for its newsletter at the very top reading, “Fake news you can trust, delivered straight to your inbox.” If you manage to scroll to the “About Us” section, which would seem like a good investigative move before reporting content to Snopes, you can read, “The Babylon Bee is the world’s best satire site, totally inerrant in all its truth claims. We write satire about Christian stuff, political stuff, and everyday life.”
This website is satire; it does not pretend to be otherwise. If that’s too difficult to realize, then you have other problems to worry about.
The source of controversy, though, does not appear to be that critics in the media can’t recognize satire. Instead, they claim that the satire is so terrible that it reads like actual news. Maybe that’s an indictment of the media at large, not the Babylon Bee.
The fact is that satire cannot play a unifying role in our society, as American politics are too fractured for us to agree on many things anymore. That’s why sites like both The Onion and the Babylon Bee are so important. If we want to critique society, we have to be willing to satirize both sides.
Karen Swallow Prior, an author and English professor, wrote about why satire is so difficult in On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books.
“It’s hard to do satire well in an age like ours because satire depends on an agreed-upon norm from which the object of satire deviates,” Prior told me in an interview. “And in a fractured culture like ours, there are very few agreed-upon norms. So different subcultures and splintered communities can do satire for one another, but it’s hard for it to work across the board.”
It’s especially difficult if one voice is told it doesn’t have the right to attempt satire, and fact-checkers such as Snopes use their supposedly impartial platforms to spread their bias. The Babylon Bee won’t make everyone laugh, but that’s just the point.
“That’s what makes satire hard today. But our sub-communities and subgroups, they all have their agreed-upon standards, so it can work for the group,” Prior said. “But as far as its ability to change our society as a whole, I’m beginning to doubt that.”
Note: After this article’s publication, the Washington Examiner received the following statement from Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon regarding the Snopes article: “On the legal side, we are still demanding revisions from Snopes, as their most recent fact check — as well as some of their older fact checks — still contain knowingly false, defamatory statements. An email sent to them yesterday gave them 24 hours to remedy, so we’ll see what happens.”
