The mainstream media has once again called out a leading satirical publication, accusing it of proliferating fake news.
The Babylon Bee, a faith-based satire website that publishes witty takes on the day’s headlines, has come under fire from various fact-checkers and media organizations in recent years. This time, it was CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan who took a swipe at the site, arguing that many who have shared the outlet’s recent article on slain Iranian military general, Qasem Soleimani, are unaware that the piece is satire.
The headline of the article in question reads:
“Democrats Call For Flags To Be Flown At Half-Mast To Grieve Death Of Soleimani”
It has since received over 500,000 shares on Facebook.
“To put this in perspective, this is the same number of engagements the top NY Times and CNN stories on Facebook had over the past week,” O’Sullivan tweeted. “A lot of people sharing this “satirical” story on Facebook don’t know it is satire.”
Donie went on to suggest that the Bee is only classing itself “satire” in order to “get around a lot of the changes Facebook has made to reduce the spread of clickbait and misinformation.”
In response to the accusation, the Bee’s Editor-in-Chief thought it appropriate to highlight CNN’s penchant for rampant editorializing and its tendency to push out a partisan narrative.
“The glory of CNN suddenly being concerned about clickbait and misinformation is worth basking in for a moment,” Mann tweeted. “I truly believe these people just don’t understand humor pointed at them and assume it must have some ulterior motive.”
This is not the first time the Babylon Bee has come under fire from so-called fact-checkers.
As Faithwire previously reported, in December last year, the self-described fact-checking website “Snopes” issued a complaint to the White House after President Trump retweeted a Bee article.
“President Trump recently retweeted a post from @JennaEllisEsq containing a fake quote from an entertainment article,” wrote Snopes’ Dan Evon in the memo. Evon then queried whether the President was “aware that this quote was fake when he sent it” and asked why the tweet wasn’t “accompanied by a message labeling the quote as fiction.”