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Snopes, The Bee, and fact-checking as a power play

Snopes, The Bee, and fact-checking as a power play

Last updated on: July 30, 2019 at 7:53 pm by Jane the Actuary

Snopes, The Bee, and fact-checking as a power play 2019-07-30T19:53:07-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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By “the Bee,” I mean, for those for whom it’s escaped their notice, the Babylon Bee, a satirical site which, according to Wikipedia, was launched in 2016. It’s has it its sights items related to evangelical Christianity, targeting Prosperity Gospel hucksters such as Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copland, and Creflo Dollar (“Joel Osteen, Benny Hinn To Speak At First Annual HeresyCon“, “Creflo Dollar Debuts New Pulpit Made Entirely Of Hundred Dollar Bills“, etc.), denim-skirt-wearing Independent Baptists (“Nike Releases Floor-Length Denim Basketball Skirt For Female Baptist Athletes“), underpaid youth pastors (“Bible College To Offer Course On Panhandling For Future Youth Pastors“) and over-hip worship leaders (“Worship Leader Rushed To Hospital After Face Gets Stuck In Passionate Expression” and “Worship Leaders With Ripped Jeans Show Significantly Higher Levels Of Authenticity, Study Finds“), Jordan Peterson (“Jordan Peterson Granted Honorary Christian Status” and “Jordan Peterson, Marie Kondo To Host New Show ‘Get Your Bloody Darn House In Order’“) and progressive Christians (“Gideons Announce Daring Plan To Sneak Bibles Into Progressive Churches” and “New Progressive Bible Prints All References To Pride In Rainbow Colors“), to list a few topics. They’re not above skewering Trump and, more specifically, his evangelical supporters (“As Sign Of Reverence, Evangelical Leaders To Begin Writing President’s Name As ‘Tr-mp’” and “Trump Spends Afternoon Shouting From White House Balcony During Twitter Outage“) as well as plenty of targets among the Democrats such as Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Pelosi, etc.

And one of their favorite running jokes is the perpetual cheerfulness of Chick-Fil-A employees, as exemplified by the classic “Man Robbing Chick-Fil-A Impressed By Level Of Customer Service“, which begins

A man robbing the Chick-Fil-A restaurant on Mission Gorge Road Friday afternoon admitted afterward he was “pretty impressed” by the level of customer service he experienced while cleaning out the registers of cash.

The man barged into the restaurant with a handgun and fired a warning shot into the air, causing terrified customers to dive for cover. Strangely, however, Chick-Fil-A workers simply asked if they could help him and cleaned up the mess he’d made. “It’s no trouble sir—it’s our pleasure,” they insisted to the baffled criminal.

So it was no surprise that when Georgia State Representative Erica Thomas claimed that a white man told her to “go back where she came from” before subsequently recanting (and, if the eyewitness is correct, she herself was the one uttering those words, to the Cuban-ethnicity man – see this link which I selected for its telling of the facts and and its appearance at the top of the search results, rather than for its point of view), the Bee satirized the event by retelling the story with a few modifications and with the characteristic Chick-Fil-A elements:

In light of the information, Thomas walked back her claim a bit. “He definitely said something to me. I initially thought it was the ‘go back to your country’ thing, but now that I think about it, it may have been ‘my pleasure.'”

Even after the clarification, the Chick-fil-A employee still wrote Thomas an apology letter for any misunderstanding, and the restaurant manager gave her coupons for a week’s worth of free chicken biscuits.

Was it the most clever piece they’d ever written? No. It’s in the nature of these sorts of sites that sometimes the articles give you a nice laugh and sometimes they’re “meh” – regardless of whether they skewer a target that justly deserves skewering or not. But it’s indisputably satire.

But that didn’t stop Snopes from “fact-checking” it — something they’ve done on multiple prior occasions, always with the claim that their readers are asking then to explain to them whether the claim is true or not.

Now, to be fair, the Bee isn’t the only satire site which Snopes has “fact checked.” They “fact checked” the statement that Russian military plans performed a flyover during the DC July 4 parade, which originated in an article at the “Borowitz Report” satire site, on July 5th, as well as, on June 24, a statement from the Borowitz Facebook page, and a few similar instances in prior years. But their “fact checking” against the Bee has been persistent, with six instances this year, and repeated instances in prior years, beginning with a “fact check” on May 30, 2017, about Katy Perry, in which it simply said that the article was satire. Harmless? No big deal?

Actually, this is not harmless, as the Bee depends on the ability to advertise via Facebook for its revenue, and has enlisted Snopes to flag articles and sites as promoting “fake news” with the objective of preventing those sites from advertising/distributing their content on Facebook. In March of last year, an article so far removed from reality (that CNN “spins” its news in literal washing machines) as to reader any claims that they were responding to reader queries, thoroughly implausible, was classified as “false” and the site received a notification from Facebook that they would be subject to this crackdown for any further offense. (Facebook subsequently backed down.)

Which brings us to Snope’s latest “fact check” article, in which they reach far beyond a bland “this is actually satire” to very direct and pointed criticism of the Bee. As Chrissy Clark at The Federalist writes,

The subhead of the Snopes “fact-check” reads, “We’re not sure if fanning the flames of controversy and muddying the details of a news story classify an article as ‘satire.’”

Next, Snopes said the Babylon Bee made up a fictionalized story about a real-life news event instead of making a satirical point.

“While this real-world incident stirred up a good amount of online anger, it wasn’t quite outrageous enough for the entertainment website Babylon Bee,” Snopes said. “In an apparent attempt to maximize the online indignation, this website published a fictionalized version of the story, changing the location to Chick-fil-A, a fast-food restaurant known for its CEO’s opposition to same-sex marriage.”

Snopes called the satirical article, which obviously pokes fun at a real life event, a fictionalized version of the story. “The Babylon Bee has tried to fool readers with its brand of satire in the past,” it said.

Demonstrating a lack of objectivity, the article continued, calling the Babylon Bee a “ruse,” which literally means “an action intended to deceive someone.”

And in case you wonder why I am not quoting from Snopes directly, it’s because in the meantime the site removed all of this inflammatory language.

What’s more, The Bee has written a message to its subscribers (reprinted at Hot Air) that says, in part,

For better or worse, the media, the public, and social networks all look to Snopes for authoritative answers. By lumping us in with fake news and questioning whether we really qualify as satire, Snopes appears to be actively engaged in an effort to discredit and deplatform us. While we wish it wasn’t necessary, we have retained a law firm to represent us in this matter.

And the Bee is hardly being oversensitive; it is the nature of the media business that for Snopes to have been given this level of power over news and entertainment outlets means that this is no petty squabble. I don’t know why Snopes is behaving this way, given that they “fact check” articles such as the above-mentioned hundred-dollar-bill pulpit, as well as the “washing machine” article which, again, is so clearly fictional that it is simply not credible that, as Snopes claimed, some readers “interpreted it literally.” (Perhaps some readers claimed to have been taken in, in order to spur Snopes to write the story?)

So, again, why Snopes is doing this, whether one of their writers/editors has it in for the Bee, and is intentionally abusing their fact-checker status, or whether they simply don’t recognize the impact of what they do, I can’t say. At any rate, it makes it clear that the convenience of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and the ability they provide for writers and creators to promote and monetize their work, come at a cost.

And, come to think of it, I suppose I should finally set up that Bee subscription to give them more money than what they earn off ad revenue.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brownsville_Herald_Newspaper.jpg; By Dontbesogullible (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Yes, I’m lazy. I need an image and also need to click “publish” before picking my son up from band, so am less than keen on finding a Snopes, Bee, or fake-news themed image.

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