A sample of recent headlines from that website, The Babylon Bee:
- "Dems shocked, disappointed to learn the new Israeli prime minister will still be a Jew"
- "Dr. Fauci gets in heated debate with previous versions of himself"
- "Biden announces Putin meeting was a success, Hunter now has a job with Russian pipeline"
This is the kind of "breaking news" that apparently fooled The New York Times – which last year unironically told its readers The Bee was peddling fake news and misinformation.
Conservative radio talk-show host Richard Randall says if the politics were reversed, those accusing The New York Times of reporting fake news would be laughed out of the room.
"It would be like trying to say that some of the late-night comedians or [those on] Saturday Night Live, that somehow they're trafficking in fake news because they do a parody or a comedy on a president or what's going on in the nation," he explains.
After being threatened with a lawsuit, the NYT issued a correction, which states:
"An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the Babylon Bee. While both Facebook and Snopes previously have classified some Babylon Bee articles as misinformation – they have dropped those claims."
Randall wonders: "The New York Times and Snopes and the rest of these people didn't get the difference between satire and parody – and fake news? I find that hard to believe."
The radio host argues it's practically impossible to actually mistake anything The Bee publishes as trying to represent the truth. "[But] apparently, they can be that stupid at the New York Times – or they can have such an agenda that they would intentionally misrepresent something," he concludes.
