Chalk one up for “fake” news.
The Babylon Bee, the conservative news satire website, announced on Monday that it has forced The New York Times to retract a smear it engineered back in March.
As The Free Press reported in April, the Times nonchalantly cited the Bee as a purveyor of “misinformation” in one sentence in a lengthy article that was purportedly about political cartoonists. “The Babylon Bee, a right-leaning site, sometimes trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire,” the Times reported.
As the right well understands, the left has weaponized the term “misinformation” to suggest that reporting by conservative media and comments by conservative figures that they don’t like or which undermine their causes is trafficking in deliberate lies.
The irony is that the Times and other major media routinely spouted lies and misleading reporting about former President Donald Trump for years, and that, in the case of the Bee, the alleged “fact-checkers” at outlets like Snopes and USA Today treated the Bee’s comedic stories as if they were real news.
The Bee publicly objected to the Times’ characterization. Its leader noted that the Times had singled out the website as the only example of such misleading practices. And it maintained that it is openly, and proudly, satirical in nature.
The Times capitulated somewhat. It tweaked the sentence: by changing it to indicate that the Bee had fought with Facebook and Snopes over whether it was actually satire.
Bee CEO Seth Dillon maintained that the Times’ “false and defamatory” cloud of misinformation remained.
The Bee threatened legal action. And the Times’ tune changed last week.
In a tweet on Monday, Dillon included an email from the Times’ legal staff that noted the lawyers had “carefully reviewed” the Bee’s claims and subsequently “removed the reference to the Baylon Bee from the article and appended a correction.”
Dillon also tweeted: “This latest correction … no longer mentions the Bee as an example of a far-right misinformation site that pretends to be doing satire. And it notes that neither Snopes nor Facebook maintain that we’re misinformation.”
“This is huge. The NY Times was using misinformation to smear us as being a source of it. That’s not merely ironic; it’s malicious. We pushed back hard and won. Thanks to everyone who voiced and offered their support. We don’t have to take this nonsense lying down. Remember that.”
Yes, remember indeed.
Other News: “Get It First, But First, Get It Right” NYT Changes Story, But Cannot Change History
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