It’s obvious now that Trump’s election broke the legacy media. From the moment Rachel Maddow began sniffling live on air, the legacy media’s fig leaf of impartiality was ripped away like a waxing strip. But many of the new media have fared little better, especially on the left. And especially wannabe amateurs who strut the internet pretending to be the acme of journalistic integrity.
Website Snopes has long enjoyed a reputation greatly disproportionate to its merit. It started out as a hoax-busting site founded by two non-journalists whose background consisted solely of trolling the early internet world of BBS and Usenet groups. Of course, qualifications do not a journalist make; some of the greatest journalists in history had no “qualifications” as such. Anyone can be a journalist, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is. But, so long as they stuck to debunking email hoaxes, Snopes was able to obscure their basic lack of journalistic nous.
Once they started sticking their noses into politics and trying to pass themselves off as some kind of arbiters of journalistic truth, Snopes quickly fell apart.
It really seems like Snopes is not okay. In 2019, Snopes fact-checked satirical site The Onion once. Already this year, Snopes fact-checked The Babylon Bee a total of six times. These fact checks of The Babylon Bee read like satire themselves. Why the hell is a media watchdog organization doing fact checks of satire in the first place? Are they going to set the record straight on A Modest Proposal next?
We reported on Snopes’ bizarre obsession with “fact-checking” satire sites, back in April. As I wrote back then, Snopes is beyond satire. In fact, they’re something more sinister.
Is Snopes a fact check site or a site that judges satire?…why does Snopes so consistently harangue The Babylon Bee?
The Babylon Bee doesn’t purport to be anything other than it is. It’s like The Onion, but…they veer more toward political rather than cultural humour.
It seems that the increasingly shrilly left-wing Snopes doesn’t approve of Political humour.
Beyond the fact that it’s downright preposterous for a media watchdog to fact-check a satire site, there is a more sinister implication to all of this. It appears that Snopes and others are trying to take advantage of the stricter “fake news” policy of Facebook to punish The Babylon Bee for being outwardly Christian.
And there’s the rub: this isn’t about “fact-checking” at all. It’s purely about policing the left-wing narrative.
As I wrote back in April, po-faced authoritarians…know that the jester is one of the biggest threats to their power. “Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution”, as Orwell said.
Thankfully, the Babylon Bee is fighting back.
After releasing a letter to readers on Twitter where the editors wrote: “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.” In fact, they have retained legal counsel…
The Babylon Bee offered a counter-attack, in the form of a satire about Snopes’ new opinion check feature: “Alongside the site’s helpful fact checks of satirical articles and debunking of urban legends, there will now be a section of the site dedicated to checking out opinions and letting you know which ones are acceptable to hold.”
Comedy, humour, and satire are hard enough to do well these days–it’s not easy to compete with the absurdity of reality in 2019. But The Babylon Bee does it well, and consistently. The only problem? They are Christian and conservative. So they must be punished.
thepostmillennial.com/is-snopes-okay/
If there’s one thing the grim authoritarians of the modern left can’t abide, it’s being laughed at. This is why they targeted Milo so mercilessly and why the Great Meme War of 2016 was such a devastating culture-war victory for conservatives. Having been so mercilessly mocked and derided by dangerous faggots and cartoon frogs, the left is desperately trying to stamp out humour, like the born inquisitors they are.