The "fact-checkers" at Snopes have rightly taken a lot of ridicule for their repeated insistence on "fact-checking" the satirical news site The Babylon Bee, including once rating a 2018 story "false" about how CNN was using an industrial-sized washing machine to "spin" the news. This actually resulted in Facebook citing this fact-check in a warning message to the Babylon Bee, where they threatened to limit their content distribution and monetization. A humiliated Facebook quickly apologized after learning that Snopes was fact checking satire.
But it hasn't been just Snopes who are upset with the Babylon Bee. Other, once supposedly credible news outlets appear to have a problem with their satire (a strong indication that it is hitting its mark).
A couple of days ago the New York Times was forced to issue a retraction after declaring in March that the satirical website was a "far-right misinformation site" that "trafficked in misinformation." The retraction was the typical mealy-mouthed one we've come to expect
“An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the Babylon Bee, a right-leaning satirical website, and a controversy regarding the handling of its content by Facebook and the fact-checking site Snopes. While both Facebook and Snopes previously have classified some Babylon Bee articles as misinformation, rather than satire, they have dropped those claims, and the Babylon Bee denies that it has trafficked in misinformation.”
Of course they leave out the shamefaced apology Facebook made after discovering that the folks at Snopes were humorous morons who never heard of satire before, had led them astray. Apologies are more than just dropping the claims.
For it's part The Babylon Bee goes well out of its way to be clear they are a satirical site repeatedly describing itself as "your trusted source for Christian news satire" and "the world’s best satire site." And yet leftwing gloomy goobers can still manage to take a joke about CNN using a washing machine to "spin" the news seriously.
Perhaps it is because they themselves have published so many spectacularly ridiculous claims as fact over the past four to five years that they assume that is what the Bee must be doing.
In any case, as the CEO of the Bee, Seth Dillon, pointed out "The NY Times was using misinformation to smear us as being a source of it. That’s not merely ironic; it’s malicious. We pushed back hard and won."
Comment