Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Rsearch Center loves to help right-wing satire site the Babylon Bee play victim for purportedly being "censored," when all that's actually happening is that it's getting fact-checked because its fellow right-winger have a bad habit of treating its satire as reality. Christine Salgao did her part to push the misleading narrative in an Oct. 7 post:
Big Tech just can’t seem to get off the censorship train — especially when it comes to content that runs counter to the left’s accepted narrative. “You know, tyrants don’t like [satire]. It’s the thing that they hate more than anything else,” said satire site Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon.
Dillonbappeared on Tucker Carlson’s show “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Wednesday to discuss how Big Tech censorship is harming humor. Tucker called Babylon Bee “one of the few remaining amusing sites on the internet.” He added, “[O]f course Big Tech hates it and is trying to censor it.” Dillon told Tucker, “We’ve been fact-checked to death,” specifically citing a 2018 piece which jokingly described an “industrial-sized washing machine” CNN bought “to help its journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication.”
Dillon said social networks use “fact-checkers” under a pretense of controlling “misinformation.” “It’s politically motivated, has been the whole time,” Dillon stated. Big Tech censorship, starting with the 2020 election, created “a drastic drop in [Babylon Bee] traffic,” explained Dillon. “We used to derive most of our traffic through Facebook,” Dillon said, but no longer. Babylon Bee articles, formerly “crazy viral,” are now barely shared. The satire outlet CEO said one recent piece reached only 11 people. “We could have reached more people if we’d printed it out and nailed it to like, a telephone pole in a small town,” Dillon expressed his frustration.
Dillon is deliberately misleading about the 2018 CNN piece. Snopes pointed out in its fact-check that "Although it should have been obvious that the Babylon Bee piece was just a spoof of the ongoing political brouhaha over alleged news media “bias” and “fake news,” some readers missed that aspect of the article and interpreted it literally. Again: Babylon Bee isn't being fact-checked because it's right-wing, it's being fact-checked because its readers believe its satire to be real life. Salgado added to the dishonesty by noting only that "Snopes admitted it 'should have been obvious' The Babylon Bee piece 'was just a spoof'" and censoring the part about Bee readers treating the spoof as real.
Kristine Marsh did her part to advance thte Bee's victimhood in an Oct. 15 item:
Lefty magazine The Atlantic published an interview with massively popular Christian satire site The Babylon Bee on Thursday, which turned out to be hilarious for all the wrong reasons. Religion writer Emma Green tried to guilt-trip Bee editor-in-chief Kyle Mann for mocking leftists (though she seemingly had no problem with the satire site’s self-deprecating jokes about the evangelical church.)
Green was so uptight about jokes aimed at the left, that Mann was actually forced to explain what self-evident jokes about Trump-deranged Democrats meant.
[...]
Green tried to railroad him for the Bee's scathing joke about Democrats being so crazed by Donald Trump, that they went into mourning when his orders took out a terrorist:
Like Salgado, Marsh censors the context that the piece was fact-checked because "some social media users mistook this piece of fiction as if it were a genuine news item."
But Marsh wasn't done complaining about tyhe interview:
After repeatedly trying and failing to shame the Bee, Green ended the interview lecturing the Christian website for being...un-Christian. (Funny how the media doesn’t ever lecture progressive Christians for not following the Bible on social issues.)
“Do you feel like your work at The Babylon Bee helps you live out what you see as the image of Jesus in the Bible?” she asked, following up with, “Jesus certainly calls out those who are powerful and strong, like in the Sermon on the Mount, but that doesn’t feel the same as taking a swipe at people who are weak and vulnerable.”
To The Atlantic, the Bee mocking the woke media, progressive Democrats and literally every major institution in the country that leans left is attacking the “weak and vulnerable.”
Only at the MRC is it a bad for a right-wing Christian site to be asked how what it does fulfill the Christian prinicples it professes to follow.
