A Babylon Bee in their bonnets

The subject of the New York Times article is not the satirical website the Onion. It is not New Yorker humorist and inexplicable viral goldmine Andy Borowitz. It is not the satirical “news” programs that dominate streaming services and late-night television.

The newspaper’s target is the Babylon Bee, a Christian satirical website that launched in 2016 amid little fanfare and boasts now roughly 15 million monthly page views. For the New York Times and other newsrooms of equal size and influence, the success and reach of the conservative comedy group represent a real problem for the health of American democracy. Satire, you see, is dangerous because people cannot be trusted to know what is real and what is fiction.

Or some satire, it seems.

Do not be fooled into thinking the news media’s newfound concerns for satire have anything to do with protecting the public from falsehoods. The alarms that sound now for the Babylon Bee stem from transparent partisan politics.

The Babylon Bee launched the same year that Hillary Clinton lost a winnable election to Donald Trump. Her defeat triggered a party-wide nervous breakdown, leaving both Democrats and their allies in the press in perpetual pursuit of ways to explain how Trump won the presidency.

They blame Russia, which they concede now is a grave geopolitical foe. They blame Facebook, which they previously credited with helping President Barack Obama win two terms in office. They also blame “fake news,” a term that started out narrowly enough to mean disinformation cooked up by activist bloggers and trolls but now means anything that is disagreeable or can be misconstrued, including political commentary and even satire. This means the Babylon Bee.

It’s equal parts amusing and infuriating for the Babylon Bee’s leadership.

“When it comes to the bias of the corporate press, nothing has been more illuminating for us than the recent attacks on our brand of humor by supposedly impartial fact-checkers like Snopes and news organizations like CNN,” Babylon Bee Editor-in-Chief Kyle Mann told the Washington Examiner.

He adds, “While we’d always been ready and willing to give outlets like these the benefit of the doubt, it’s undeniable now that we are often singled out because we make fun of the ‘wrong’ targets.”

That the news media’s warnings about the Babylon Bee come after nearly two decades of reporters and news commentators fawning over the likes of former Comedy Central host and faux newsman Jon Stewart has not been lost on the conservative group’s top brass.

“The hypocrisy is blatant,” said Mann. “When liberal late shows and satire sites fool people, they say it’s because the satire is hitting close to home. When our satire is mistaken for real news, they say we’re a dangerous threat to democracy that must be silenced.”

Mann says his critics need to pick one: “Either progressive humor should be under the same scrutiny we are, or they need to admit that we’re simply cutting too close to the bone for their comfort.”

Mann claims the Babylon Bee is being “singled out” by the press. He’s not wrong.

Since its debut, reporters and news commentators have gone after the website with a seemingly relentless stream of criticism, fact checks, and analyses highlighting the perils of online humor.

An article from Harvard’s Nieman Lab, of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, cautioned in 2019, “Maybe you know that article is satire, but a lot of people can’t tell the difference.” Snopes, which publishes copious “fact checks” of the Babylon Bee’s satirical work, including an article titled “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication,” has gone so far as to promote a junk study “proving” the conservative comedy site poses a public risk. Snopes’s bizarre crusade against the Babylon Bee goes well beyond mere criticism. A “fact check” last July outright accused the conservative group of intentionally deceiving readers, an allegation that threatened the Babylon Bee’s standing on Facebook and all the web traffic that goes with it. 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,” Poynter cautioned, “the effect could still be misinformation if the headline is believable enough.”

Then there’s all the online media commentary aimed at the alleged dangers of the Babylon Bee’s humor.

“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 in January. “Some family members just called bc their Republican friends on [Facebook] are circulating it like it’s legit. We have a lot of work to do, all.”

The article in question is titled: “Democrats Call For Flags To Be Flown At Half-Mast To Grieve Death Of Soleimani.”

It is clearly a joke.

Her fears 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 is himself a fan of 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.”

His CNN colleague Brian Stelter said earlier that the Babylon Bee is a “fake news site,” adding derisively that “they call it ‘satire.’”

It is impossible to ignore that the press has never gone after the Onion or even Borowitz with anything near this level of intensity. The press rarely, if ever, worried about political satire during the first decade of the war on terror, back when Stewart the media darling spoon-fed his viewers a steady diet of deceptively edited interviews. Political satire was not as grave a threat to democracy when voters said they got their news from Stewart and the many copycat shows that cropped up around his critically acclaimed program. Polls showing voters relied on the former Comedy Central host as a legitimate source of news information despite his obviously partisan lean did not inspire panic or anger in the press. On the contrary, the news media adored Stewart, even as he gained a reputation for intentionally misrepresenting the facts. The Newseum actually 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.”

Many “viewers considered Stewart a more trusted source for news than actual broadcast journalists,” the Newseum said in a press release that hailed him as an indispensable contributor to the core mission of the free press.

The conversations today about the pitfalls of satire were conspicuously absent during the height of Stewart’s popularity. What changed?

It’s simple, says Babylon Bee senior writer Frank Fleming. Donald Trump won the White House.

“I think why we’re being targeted now is that after Trump was elected, a lot of the Left seem to be doing whatever they can to avoid self-reflection,” Fleming told the Washington Examiner.

He added, “It’s a tough pill to swallow that people have a rational reason to prefer Trump over them, so many of them are turning to external explanations like ‘people are getting tricked by Facebook ads’ or ‘people are getting tricked by the Babylon Bee.’ But I feel like that’s getting cause and effect backwards.”

Fleming, who stresses that the website is not trying to trick anyone, notes that no one ever seems to cry “fake news” whenever one of its articles mocking Trump or his Cabinet goes viral.

“No one loved the Democrats up until they saw an inaccurate meme, but when people have strong negative feelings toward a person or group, they’re more likely to be credulous toward more negative information about that person or group,” he said. “The real question the Left need to be asking is what about their behavior and policy proposals have turned people so strongly against them, but it’s a lot easier to pretend their problem is the Bee tricking lots of people.”

Mann has a blunter assessment of the matter.

“The more zealous a movement is, the less that movement can abide mockery and humor. Since the Left is now a religion, its prophets and priests want to silence the heretics that mock their faith,” he said.

Mann added, “They’d do well to learn how to laugh at themselves, as we Christians have had to do while being the butt of the joke for the last several decades.”

Becket Adams is a senior commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.