Image via Babylon Bee
In a piece entitled “Facebook admits mistake in flagging satire about CNN spinning the news with a washing machine” uber liberal The Washington Post reports that Facebook flagged popular Christian satire site The Babylon Bee after the “independent fact-checkers” at Snopes reported that one of the site’s satirical articles was false. Eric Wemple has the story:
No, CNN doesn’t actually use a household appliance to prepare its daily output of scoops and analysis. That was the point that fact-checking site Snopes made in a March 2 story under the headline: “Did CNN Purchase an Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News?”
Huh?
As it turns out, Snopes felt the need to set the record straight after the Babylon Bee published a story with precisely that implication. “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication,” reads its headline. If you thought that headline was a satirical stretch, your suspicions were confirmed by the text of the “story,” which includes this: “The custom-made device allows CNN reporters to load just the facts of a given issue, turn a dial to ‘spin cycle,’ and within five minutes, receive a nearly unrecognizable version of the story that’s been spun to fit with the news station’s agenda,” it reads.
Snopes busies itself with investigations into plausible falsehoods — stuff about Harvey Weinstein, about the Parkland school shooting, about public health and so on. So why was it checking into the notion that the 24/7 network was spraying OxiClean on its interviews and then putting them on “Prewash”?
Here’s the site’s explanation:
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. But the site’s footer gives away the Babylon Bee’s nature by describing it as “Your Trusted Source For Christian News Satire.” The site has been responsible for a number of other (usually religiously themed) spoofs that have been mistaken for real news articles.