The Babylon Bee scored a minor victory this weekend.
The New York Times has agreed to remove language from a March 19 report characterizing the conservative satire website as a “far-right misinformation site” that “sometimes trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire.”
This is obviously a lie. The Babylon Bee just publishes jokes. It’s no different from the Onion or the New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz, except that, unlike the former, its jokes are tailored to a right-leaning audience and, unlike the latter, its jokes are actually funny. For some reason, members of the legacy press hate this.
Following the publication of the March 19 article, titled, “For Political Cartoonists, the Irony Was That Facebook Didn’t Recognize Irony,” the Babylon Bee sent the New York Times a demand letter accusing the paper of record of defamation.
This weekend, nearly three months after the fact, the conservative group got a response from the New York Times’s senior counsel.
“We have carefully reviewed the the [sic] concerns raised in your letter and, in response to those concerns, we have removed the reference to the Babylon Bee from the article and appended a correction,” attorney Dana Green said.
The New York Times article now bears an editor’s note, which reads:
For the record, this is what the newspaper originally reported:
But satire kept popping up as a blind spot. In 2019 and 2020, Facebook often dealt with far-right misinformation sites that used “satire” claims to protect their presence on the platform … For example, The Babylon Bee, a right-leaning site, frequently trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire.
The New York Times report offered no additional examples of right-wing misinformation sites. Only the Babylon Bee is mentioned by name. Adding to the shoddiness of the reporting is the fact that, in alleging that the Babylon Bee is a depository of far-right misinformation, the March 19 article includes a hyperlink to an Oct. 11 New York Times report recognizing the group as a legitimate satire website.
New York Times editors apparently don’t read the New York Times.
Also, the irony of the paper of record publishing an outright, since-detracted falsehood in an article warning of the dangers of online falsehoods can’t be missed. It’s a joke worthy of a professional satire site.
We’ve written before about the press’s bizarre fatwa against this harmless conservative satire group. This has been going on for some time now, and it’s all because the Babylon Bee tells jokes from a right-leaning perspective.
It’s good the New York Times finally updated its reporting. But the fact that the original false claim was even published is just further proof that the national media, the same institution that canonized fake newsman Jon Stewart as a fearless, trailblazing advocate for the truth, positively hate it when the jokes are aimed in the other direction.
