Satirical news site the Babylon Bee took aim at media fact-checking and coverage of Joe Biden, running a mocking article in which the claim that 2+2=5, ostensibly uttered by the 2020 Democratic front-runner, was rated as “mostly true.”
The trigger for the satire was a Snopes fact check in which the site stated that Biden’s recounting of a tale about a U.S. military service member who recovered the body of a fallen soldier was “not false,” even though major details, including the location, the date, the branch of the military, the medal, and Biden’s own role, were wrong.
After a series of embarrassing mistakes from its candidate, the Biden campaign has been pushing the narrative that voters don’t care about his “gaffes.” The former vice president himself has said that details don’t matter. Last month, he told voters: “We choose truth over facts.”
Former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson responded sarcastically to Snopes, saying via Twitter: “Ok we’ve got it. When certain people tell a false story; it’s not false. It’s true because parts are true. If @realDonaldTrump does the same thing; it’s a malicious lie. #SnopesLogic #Propaganda.”
The Babylon Bee then ran an article titled “Snopes Rates Biden’s Claim That 2+2=5 As ‘Mostly True.'” It reported, tongue-in-cheek, “Joe Biden recently made a strange claim: that 2+2=5. He was ridiculed for his gaffe after making the statement while speaking at an elementary school. The kids all said, ‘Hey, dummy! The answer is 4, not 5!’
“But the crack squad of fact-checkers at Snopes quickly got to work on Biden’s incredulous claim. Their findings? Biden’s statement was actually ‘mostly true.’
“‘Sure, Biden got some key details wrong,’ said Bob Snopes, founder of Snopes. ‘But the central concept of what he was saying, that two numbers put together make another number, was completely accurate. Sometimes two and two make four. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. It is not easy to become sane.'”
To claim that Joe Biden’s story is false might give readers the misleading impression that the soldier at the center of it doesn’t exist. He does exist, and he did, in his grief, tell Biden he didn’t want the medal Biden pinned on him in 2011. https://t.co/Iji1shihpm
— snopes.com (@snopes) September 1, 2019
The Babylon Bee has been in a public feud with Snopes since early August after the fact-checker scrutinized a piece produced by the satirical site.
Describing its mission, Snopes says on its website: “When misinformation obscures the truth and readers don’t know what to trust, Snopes.com’s fact-checking and original, investigative reporting lights the way to evidence-based and contextualized analysis.”
