The joke police are back!
Reporters and pundits are again debating whether the Babylon Bee, a conservative satirical website, should be allowed to operate unchecked given today’s heated political climate.
“A post from a satirical website has been shared more than 500k times saying the DNC called for the flag to be at half-mast because of Soleimani,” Daily Beast contributor Cindy Otis tweeted this weekend. “Some family members just called bc their Republican friends on FB are circulating it like it’s legit. We have a lot of work to do, all.”
The Babylon Bee article in question is titled: “Democrats Call For Flags To Be Flown At Half-Mast To Grieve Death Of Soleimani.” It is quite clearly a joke. And a funny one.
Otis added, “You’ll see it’s also circulating on Twitter. Many accounts sharing it as funny satire, some sharing it because they say it’s satire but still close to the truth, and others that appear to not know at all that it’s satire.”
Her concerns were echoed elsewhere by CNN disinformation reporter Donie O’Sullivan, who tweeted, “To put this in perspective, this is the same number of engagements the top NY Times and CNN stories on Facebook had over the past week. A lot of people sharing this ‘satirical’ story on Facebook don’t know it is satire.”
O’Sullivan, who, by the way, happens to be a fan of the satirical site the Onion, added, “Having a disclaimer buried somewhere on your site that says it’s ‘satire’ seems like a good way to get around a lot of the changes Facebook has made to reduce the spread of clickbait and misinformation.”
If it was just these two Twitter users complaining about the Babylon Bee, this would not be worthy of comment. But their remarks follow a monthslong effort by reporters, commentators, and entire news organizations to warn readers of the supposed threat that the Christian satirical website poses to the republic.
“The line between misinformation and satire can be thin, and real consequences can result when it is crossed,” the New York Times warned of the Babylon Bee in August 2019. “On social media, parody can be misconstrued or misrepresented as it moves further and further from its source. And humor has been weaponized to help spread falsehoods online.”
An article from Harvard’s Nieman Lab, of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, published at around the same time cautioned, “Maybe you know that article is satire, but a lot of people can’t tell the difference.”
Snopes, which has published numerous “fact-checks” of the Babylon Bee’s satirical work, has gone so far as to promote a junk study “proving” the conservative comedy site is a public risk.
The “fracas” between the Babylon Bee and Snopes, Poynter argued in March 2018, “highlights the notoriously thin line between satire and misinformation. Even if a story’s intention is to entertain, the effect could still be misinformation if the headline is believable enough.”
The media-led campaign to warn the public of the dangers posed by the conservative parody site is rich, considering it comes at the tail end of the decadeslong fad of satirical political shows hosted by “news anchors” such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Indeed, after 15-plus years of living in the shadow of beloved and acclaimed then-Comedy Central hosts, it is laugh-out-loud funny that members of the press are getting bent out of shape now over a single conservative satirical website.
Political satire was not a threat to democracy during the first decade of the war on terror, back when Stewart fed his viewers a steady diet of deceptively edited interviews. Political satire was not even a threat when voters said they got their news from Stewart and the number of the shows that parodied his format. Polls that showed voters relied on the former Comedy Central host as a source of actual news information, despite his obvious gimmick as a partisan activist, did not inspire panic or anger in the press. Quite the opposite, actually. The Newseum even honored Stewart in 2019 with his own display, praising the “news” anchor for becoming the “go-to source for information for a new generation of news consumers,” adding that many “viewers considered Stewart a more trusted source for news than actual broadcast journalists.
I guess you could say it is different, what the Babylon Bee does. For example, the Bee does 100% fewer selectively edited hit jobs. Another big difference is that the Babylon Bee mercilessly ridicules Democrats and liberals. That makes its work no laughing matter, according to members of our distinguished press.
