EXCLUSIVE: Babylon Bee Team Talks NYT Retraction, Life As Media Target

Facing legal action, The New York Times backed away Monday from its claims that the Babylon Bee, a satire outlet, traffics in misinformation.

The Times’ original story, published March 19, labeled the Bee a “far-right misinformation site.” On Monday, the Times removed any reference to the Bee and added this correction: “An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the Babylon Bee, a right-leaning satirical website, and a controversy regarding the handling of its content by Facebook and the fact-checking site Snopes. While both Facebook and Snopes previously have classified some Babylon Bee articles as misinformation, rather than satire, they have dropped those claims, and the Babylon Bee denies that it has trafficked in misinformation.”

This isn’t the first time the Bee has been targeted with the misinformation label, however. Last year, CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan suggested that the site is actually fake news acting under the guise of comedy, as did CNN anchor Brian Stelter. And it took the threat of a lawsuit for fact checking company Snopes to retract its claim that the Bee attempts to “deceive” readers rather than make them laugh.

Even some Christian news outlets have gone after the Bee’s comedy, as when Christianity Today interviewed researchers who claimed conservatives often can’t discern its “falsehoods.”

 The Daily Wire reached out to three senior members of the Bee team — CEO Seth Dillon, Editor-in-Chief Kyle Mann, and Managing Editor Joel Berry — to ask them about the Times dust-up and how they manage to write jokes in between dodging darts from the legacy media machine. 

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Editor-in-Chief Kyle Mann says that, at this point, there’s no question Big Tech, social media fact-checkers, and the media are treating his site very differently than they do left-leaning comedy and satire.

“It happens over and over again,” he says. “The Left ‘fools’ people with satire from Colbert, The Onion, Saturday Night Live, Sacha Baron Cohen, or any other left-leaning comedian, and the Left loves it. If people ever ‘fall for’ a Babylon Bee article, it’s suddenly dangerous misinformation that must be stopped. There’s a clear double standard because of our political leanings and the biases of fact-checkers and Big Tech overlords.” 

Managing editor Joel Berry says it may not just be a product of bias, though. He believes the media’s disconnect with regular people in the real world plays a role, as well. “What I’ve observed is that many in the news and fact-check media are so insulated in their bubbles that they genuinely believe conservatives are more susceptible to believing satire than they are,” he says. “They really do think we’re stupid.” 

Refuting studies like those cited by Christianity Today, Berry says, “You can point to studies they’ve released that seem to prove that conservatives are more likely to believe fake news until you look deeper and find out how faulty and biased those studies are. Some of them really see themselves as heroes protecting feeble minds from believing lies, which makes it so much better when we make fun of them.”

It’s important to note, however, that the misinformation moniker isn’t just a cheap smear—  it’s a tactic that’s based on a deep understanding of the Bee’s business model and how social media oversight currently works.

In recent years, social networks have begun promoting their efforts to stop the spread of fake news. They do this not just by flagging misinformation, but by banning sites and suspending individuals who share it. Because of this, explains CEO Seth Dillon, “If you don’t like [the Babylon Bee], the quickest and surest way to get us deplatformed is to lump us in with fake news. [News outlets such as The New York Times] do that by constructing a narrative that says we’re trafficking in misinformation ‘under the guise of satire.’”

One of the chief ways to do this is by interviewing “experts” who introduce opinion into reporting. “[The media] cite a baseless claim from an expert,” Dillon says, “and then expand on it as if it’s well-supported. This gives the reader the impression they’re reading something factual when they’re not.” 

Mann says he saw this dynamic play out in a different Times piece from October. Only in that case, the “expert” the Times reporter interviewed was, in fact, another Times reporter.

“When the Times ran a piece calling us misinformation disguised as satire,” he says, “they interviewed their own journalist rather than interviewing us directly.” 

Describing it as “circular, self-referential reporting,” Mann points out that Times reporter Kevin Roose never reached out to him or anyone else at the organization, but instead “[cited] [the paper’s] own pieces to prove we’re some kind of nefarious fake news site, when anyone with half a brain can go straight to our website and see we’re just telling jokes.” Mann later adds, “As the reporting on the pandemic over the last year has shown us, ‘experts’ are often anything but, and you can always find some ‘expert’ somewhere to say something to support whatever point you’re making, no matter how outlandish or harmful.”

Dillon says that as a satire outlet, he wishes the Bee could just keep things light and didn’t have to send demand letters or threaten lawsuits, but he feels distortion like that contained in the Times’ story leaves him no choice if the Bee is to survive.

“Publications like the Times, Snopes, etc., are considered ‘reliable sources,’” he says. “So their statements carry weight. If their mischaracterizations of us go unchallenged, then they can put us out of business. It’s that simple. The founder of Snopes, David Mikkelson, once said they don’t have the power deplatform us. But that’s not exactly true. They have the power to determine with their fact checks whether we’re characterized accurately as satire, or inaccurately as deceptive disinformation. And who do you think the social networks look to for accurate characterizations of websites?”

On the flip side, the fact that the heaviest hitters in legacy media are uniformly attacking a satire site that was founded only five years ago speaks to the Bee’s phenomenal success and just how threatening the Left finds effective satire that can demolish in seconds the narratives that took Democrats months, if not years, to craft.

“Sometimes, a joke cuts quicker and deeper than an investigative report or 12-page think-piece,” Berry points out. “We make fun of people who take themselves very, very seriously, and that never gets old.” 

And that brings him to the upside of being a media target. 

After CNN attacked the Bee, the cable channel became one of its ripest target for satire, with headlines such as “CNN Attacks Babylon Bee: ‘The Internet Is Only Big Enough For One Fake News Site’” and “CNN Hires Trump As News Anchor To Recover Lost Viewers.” Berry says he now expects the Gray Lady “will be a fruitful source of jokes well into the future.”

Or as Mann puts it, “We’re just glad the New York Times has chosen to respect the fact that we self-identify as satire. Our pronouns are ha/ha.”

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