Can the Right Make Good Satire Without Collapsing Due to Fake News?
On June 3rd, a conservative news satire website called The Babylon Bee demanded a retraction from the New York Times, threatening a defamation lawsuit over a March article which claimed the site trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire. On June 10th, the Times corrected the story, and was right to do so. The story at the heart of this conflict was headlined, For Political Cartoonists, the Irony Was That Facebook Didnt Recognize Irony, but the true irony of the piece is that the Times itself repeated Facebooks error: The Babylon Bee, like The Onion, may be fake news, but it is not misinformation. Advertisement  For decades, the Left has dominated political satire. So ironclad was this hold that some even wondered whether the Right could be funny at all. The most notable conservative response to The Daily Show and its countless imitators was Fox Newss The 1/2 Hour News Hour, which was critically panned and remains to this day the worst-rated television show on Metacritic. But recently, The Babylon Bee has seemingly lifted the curse on conservative satire, at least in terms of popularity, now garnering more interactions on Facebook than The Onion. As a researcher interested in political humor and online discourse, I was spurred by this unprecedented popularity to regard The Babylon Bee as an object of serious research rather than a mere curiosity. I have now studied the site closely for a year, but Id been observing it since soon after its inception in 2016. Advertisement  Advertisement  Advertisement  The Babylon Bees conflict with the New York Times over whether it publishes misinformation was a familiar one: The site has previously been flagged as misinformation by Twitter, Facebook, and Snopes. In one sense, The Babylon Bee does obviously write fake news. For instance, The Bees report on a survey that suggests that 100% of Americans will continue to wear masks in Walmart bathrooms is purely fictional. But there is also a clear difference between satire and misinformation, even if both are factually untrue things written in the style of news. The New York Times was wise to issue its correction, as was Snopes to create a fact-checking label for satire in 2019. But these media corporations and others should never have characterized The Bee as misinformation in the first placethis only makes them appear unable to take a joke from the Right and fuels the notion of a liberal media establishment advanced by The Bee and other conservative outlets. Advertisement  Snopes committed the original sin in the matter of presenting The Bees satire as fake news, giving a rating of False to a Bee article titled CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication, a notion so punny and outlandish that to offer a straight-faced fact-check was absurd. Conflict ensued. A quick peek at The Babylon Bees website offers more clear indicators that its content is farcical: reports that Disney is giving a villain origin story film to Kamala Harris, multiple articles about orcs, and the headline God Puts Rainbow In Sky Promising Never To Punish The Earth With Friends Reunion Again. On the About Us page, The Bee explicitly labels itself as satire, with a winking 100% verified by Snopes.com.  Advertisement  Advertisement  Even so, the phenomenon of audiences and even news sources mistaking news satire for reality is well-documented. What is more, a study from the Ohio State University suggested that conservatives are more likely to believe Babylon Bee stories are real than liberals are to believe in stories from The Onion, when the indicators of satire are removed. But this has less to do with The Babylon Bee itself and more to do with the penchant for conspiratorialism and questionable reporting in the conservative media ecosystem. Because satire rests on irony, the rhetorical technique of implying a meaning other than what is explicitly communicated, satiric messages are often ambiguous. As Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young argues in her book Irony and Outrage, decades of social science research have suggested that when faced with this ironic ambiguity, audiences resort to interpretations most in line with their existing beliefs and experiences: Conservative viewers of All in the Family frequently identified Archie Bunker as a sympathetic character rather than the butt of the joke, and sometimes incorrectly interpreted The Colbert Report as anti-liberal satire. Advertisement  And where The Onion riffs on the news, The Babylon Bee often riffs on riffs, building referential jokes atop the already referential right-wing commentary about the untrustworthiness of the news. With misinformation and conspiracy theories such as QAnon becoming increasingly commonplace on the Right and in conservative media, audiences are already conditioned to embrace the emotional resonance of a story over its plausibility or its ability to survive a fact-checkleaving them more credulous toward even The Babylon Bees satiric and exaggerative brand of fake news. Advertisement  Donald Trump provided the perfect example of this possibility last October, when, in a fit of characteristic outrage and ignorance, he retweeted a story from The Babylon Bee headlined, Twitter Shuts Down Entire Network To Slow Spread Of Negative Biden News. Fuming, Trump tweeted, Wow, this has never been done in history. He was correct: It had never been done, of course. It was pure satire. But because the story aligned with Trumps persistent victim complex with regards to media corporations, he was more likely to believe it to be real. Advertisement  While better described as satire than as misinformation, The Babylon Bee is certainly not fighting the spread of misinformation. In my research on The Bee, I have found that the site is adept at writing ironically ambiguous material that lets audiences from different sections of the Right reinforce their own beliefs. This is especially true in articles about Trump such as this one, which compares Trumps 2021 CPAC appearance to Jesus Christs biblical arrival to Jerusalem: readers in the more closed-off, conspiracy-prone bubble can read this and agree with the depiction of Trump as a divine political savior, whereas the never-Trump crowd can find humor in Trumps cult-like following and the ridiculousness of Trump as any kind of messianic figure. Even if The Babylon Bees satire itself should not be considered misinformation, its satire draws on and reinforces actual misinformation and conspiracya joke about Democrats agreeing to reverse the 2020 presidential election could be read as mocking right-wing wish-fulfillment fantasies, but it also affirms for those readers the false notion that the election was stolen. Advertisement  Beyond its drawing attention to existing misinformation, there are other reasons to be wary of The Bee. The site has a nasty tendency to punch down with humor parts of its audience finds refreshingly politically incorrect. The site is often ironically misogynistic, as when it defended the place of female soldiers in the American military by reporting how they dont throw grenades well, so the enemy will never know what to expect, and how you can pay them way less, which gives you more money for weapons and ammo. The site is also frequently antagonistic towards the LGBTQIA+ community, with quizzes lie What Gender Are You (Spoiler alert: the only possible answers are man and woman, with the outcome solely determined by the question What chromosomes do you have?) and countless identifies as jokes for example, Man Identifies As Woman Just Long Enough To Voice Valid Opinion On Abortion.  For millennia, satirists have publicly played with and challenged ideas, and invited their audiences to join them. In this way, satire does more than just entertain: It can persuade and even educate. Critics accusing The Babylon Bee of misinformation arent just missing the joke, theyre missing the problem. The Babylon Bee isnt trying to fool its audience about the content of its made-up news storiesbut it is letting them believe theyre correct.