Snopes Fact Checks Satire Website Babylon Bee Yet Again Over Article On Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
How many times will “fact checker” Snopes fact check the satirical Christian website Babylon Bee? Either Snopes employees keep falling for Babylon Bee satire, like other outlets and politicians have fallen for The Onion articles, or they think people actually believe obvious memes.
On Monday, Snopes tweeted out an article by asking, “Did U.S. Rep. [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] repeatedly guess ‘free’ on the TV show ‘The Price is Right?’” The tweet included a link to an article that continues to fact check the “claim” even as it repeatedly notes the Babylon Bee is a satirical website.
Snopes went so far as to play forensic analyst on the obviously fake photo (“free” is not even in the same font as the typical number display on “The Price Is Right”) by creating an entire video showing the differences between the “altered” and “original” photo.
Don’t worry, everyone, Snopes figured out where the doctored photo came from, and provided an image of the doctored “Price Is Right” meme, the original screenshot from that episode, and an image from “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” where the picture of Ocasio-Cortez came from. Glad we got the bottom of that!
After days of mocking, Snopes sent out another tweet that seemed like it was trying to explain why it was necessary to fact check an obvious satire.
“What started as a story about @AOC on a satirical website also spread on social media as a standalone altered image. Without context, it is inevitable in today's misinformation age that some people will see, believe, and keep scrolling,” Snopes tweeted.
What started as a story about @AOC on a satirical website also spread on social media as a standalone altered image. Without context, it is inevitable in today's misinformation age that some people will see, believe, and keep scrolling: bit.ly/2XdidMz
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As examples of people sharing the image of Ocasio-Coretz “out of context,” Snopes included a tweet from pundit Jack Posobiec, who tweeted out the image with several laughing emojis. Posobiec was obviously laughing at the image and not trying to claim it was authentic. Another Twitter user posted the image with the caption “Breaking News… AOC appeared on PRICE IS RIGHT but didn’t win anything because she kept guessing that all the items were FREE.”
Again, this was a clear joke.
But thankfully we have Snopes to inform us that “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not appear on the game show” and do a deep dive into how the picture was made.
This is not even the first time Snopes has fact checked the Babylon Bee. As the Daily Wire’s Paul Bois reported in February, the “fact checker” had given the Babylon Bee a false rating for an obviously satirical post that CNN had hired Jussie Smollett as a commentator after he was charged with lying about a hate crime (the charges have since been dropped for questionable reasons). Snopes also fact checked the Babylon Bee last year for an article claiming CNN literally bought a washing machine to “spin the news.”
As Bois noted at the time, Snopes has also fact-checked the Onion on multiple occasions.
