The satirical, right-leaning, Christian-oriented Babylon Bee recently turned five, and it’s carved out the most confounding niche in online media.
Confounding, at least, to its liberal critics.
The website has ended up in the critical crosshairs of those notorious “fact-checkers.” Here’s a recent example. Reuters had to fact-check one of the Bee’s posts – its headline: “Pelosi Thanks Millions of Babies For Sacrificing Their Lives For Women’s Rights” – after some commenters on Twitter took it for real. Reuters’ “verdict”: “This is a satirical article which comes from Babylon Bee, which clearly identifies itself as a satire site.”
Duh.
What liberals don’t get about the jokes is that they make it easy for the Bee, which lets people in on them by claiming it’s “fake news you can trust.”
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That headline under Reuter’s microscope, for example, was a spin on Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s asinine “thank you” to the late George Floyd for “sacrificing” his life for the cause of racial justice.
But the Bee may look to cash in after the esteemed New York Times tried to spin some of its own anti-Bee spin.
In a long article in March that was about the plight of political cartoonists today, the Times cited the Bee in one throwaway sentence, noting, “The Babylon Bee, a right-leaning site, sometimes trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire.”
When the Bee’s lawyers got involved, the Times tweaked the sentence. But the Bee’s leaders said the change was minor and the intent still remained.
And now a lawsuit may make the Times and others realize that slapping the “misinformation” label, which routinely gets people canceled on social media, onto Bee content is no laughing matter, Bee CEO Seth Dillon said during a recent Fox News appearance.
“Cancel culture is a funny thing. The way that it works most of the time is, you know, somebody says something that they shouldn’t have said. They tweet something regrettable, they tweet something politically incorrect that you’re not allowed to say or think anymore. And then an outraged mob forms and tries to get that person fired or canceled,” said Dillon.
“It’s a little different for us.”
“These liberal media outlets and personalities have tried to create this narrative about us where we’re not actually a satire site, but a disinformation site and where we’re putting out fake news on purpose to mislead people,” Dillon continued.
“They put this stuff out there and if they can get it to stick, then then we have no platform remaining. There’s not going to be anybody who wants to host our stuff. … It’s an effort to try and cancel us.”
Dillon has attacked the Time for its “false and defamatory” treatment of his company – and he noted the irony of the approach of a paper that sold the American public every half-baked anti-Trump theory it could find.
“They’re using misinformation to smear us as being a source of misinformation,” Dillon told Fox. “They are, in fact, the ones trafficking in misinformation under the guise of journalism.”
“We are contemplating and discussing with our counsel what the next move should be,” he added.
“Should we sue them or not. And that’s an open question. We’re exploring our options.”
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Check out our ‘Cancel Corner‘, a section we launched in February, where we report on the latest Cancel Cases and stories from around the globe.