A ‘Fact Checker’ Declares War on Satire
A
‘Fact Checker’ Declares War On Satire
When we make fun of
liberals, Snopes pretends to take us seriously and labels our jokes ‘false.’
By Kyle Mann Aug. 21, 2019 6:57 pm ET
If your job is to make people laugh, what do you do when your
brand of humor is classified as dangerous?
I run the Babylon Bee, a satirical website, and we’ve had to
face that question a lot lately. The “fact checkers” at Snopes.com—once a
reliable source for distinguishing reality from urban legends—have been
smearing the Bee as “fake news.” They don’t seem to have a problem when we make
fun of Trump-worship, conservatives, fundamentalism and megachurches. But when
we target Democrats and the left, suddenly we’re branded liars.
The most recent controversy began when Snopes published a
thorough “debunking” of our satirical take on Georgia state Rep. Erica Thomas
’s false claim that a white man in a supermarket told her to “go back to where
you came from.” Our humorous headline: “Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-fil-A
Employee Told Her to Go Back to Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said
‘My Pleasure.’ ”
Snopes knew this was a joke but questioned our “brand” of
satire. The website called us “junk news” and a “ruse.” It accused us of
intentionally “muddying the details” of a current event to “fool” people.
In response our CEO, Seth Dillon, instructed our lawyers to
demand an edit of the article and appealed to the public on social media. The
scolds at Snopes seemed to comply and removed the worst bits from their piece.
But they then rolled out a new rating, “Labeled Satire,” which is meant to
suggest that we are somehow making jokes in bad faith. Here’s the explanation
of the new rating: “Not all content described by its creator or audience as
‘satire’ necessarily constitutes satire, and this rating does not make a
distinction between ‘real’ satire and content that may not be effectively
recognized or understood as satire despite being labeled as such.”
Snopes proceeded to publish a long-winded piece explaining why
it “fact checks” humor in the first place and reposted a summary of an
unpublished Ohio State University study on satire in which the authors claim
the Bee’s material is “among the most shared factually inaccurate content”
they’d found.
If I told you the Ohio State study looks like a setup, with
researchers providing grossly inaccurate summaries of the Bee’s stories and
asking participants if they’re true or false, you might think I was satirizing
these people. Nope—it’s true. Our headline “Nation Awaits Apology From Media
That Pushed Fake News Story for Two Years,” for example, was summarized as
“Most Americans believe that major media companies should apologize for pushing
the now-debunked news story of collusion between President Trump and Russia.”
Our article never made that assertion, and their hacked-up version misses the
joke—which assumes the nation isn’t holding its breath for an apology for the
collusion hoax.
In short, they drained the humor from our jokes, then feigned
shock when research subjects failed to see it.
This ugly dispute has demonstrated
the danger of assigning authority to supposedly unbiased fact-checkers. They
have the power to slap a joke they don’t like with a “false” rating and defame
the authors as purveyors of lies and fakery. Last year Facebook
threatened to forbid us to collect money from ads, and even to boot us
entirely, after Snopes “fact checked” a piece of ours headlined “CNN Purchases
Industrial Washing Machine to Spin the News.”
Life isn’t always “true” or “false,” and mockery, like art, is
especially averse to easy labels. Scams and hoaxes are fairly called lies.
Opinion and satire involve layers of context and interpretation—and, yes, bias.
It’s dishonest for “fact checkers” like Snopes to treat satirical sites like
ours as if we claimed to be objective news sources simply in order to saddle us
with the “fake news” sobriquet.
Lies claiming to be objective truth are a problem, and sometimes
people mistake satire for fact. But let’s not give up our sense of humor just
because some “fact checker” pretends not to have one.
Mr.
Mann is editor in chief of the Babylon Bee.
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