I find it more than a little bit amusing that so many people get so bent out of shape by the Babylon Bee. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a satirical news site like The Onion, but with a conservative Christian bent, not-unlike the way Reductress has a feminist bent. A lot of the Bee‘s articles have too pronounced a Christian bias to be funny IMHO, and some of them are flat-out offensive (especially the ones springing from anti-abortion or pro-cop propaganda), but a lot of the time they’re quite funny; furthermore, similar caveats apply to The Onion, Clickhole, Reductress, National Lampoon, and even MAD. Satire isn’t easy, which is why there aren’t half a dozen “Weird Al” Yankovics out there; one has to be able to gauge which topics deserve to be lampooned and then do so in a manner that is both smart and funny while not alienating one’s core readership. Sometimes a parody works and sometimes it doesn’t, and if there were a sure-fire formula for predicting a hit every creator in every creative genre would be a smashing success. But while there are a lot of legitimate criticisms of satirical news sites (including some I’ve made myself) in general, and no site can possibly amuse all of the people all of the time, there seems to be a very peculiar animus against the Babylon Bee in particular despite the fact that it’s not unfunny, offensive or just plain dumb any more often than any of the others. Once-reliable fact-checking site Snopes has repeatedly “fact checked” obviously-absurd Bee stories, despite admitting that they are clearly labeled as satire, justifying the practice with inane statements like “Some readers didn’t see much humor in the post” (a claim that could be made about every joke in every satirical poem, book, magazine, TV show, or website ever created since at least the time of Petronius). And The New York Times actually “reported the site publishes false information ‘under the guise of satire’ when the site openly admits that it’s satire.” I mean, here’s the top thing on their “about” page:
There’s nothing wrong with just saying a humorous website, show, magazine, or whatever doesn’t appeal to you; I haven’t watched Saturday Night Live since the original cast left, and there were some Kids in the Hall sketches that I found revolting. And sooner or later the Bee will probably print some dumb anti-whore thing that’ll piss me off enough that I’ll be done with them, too. But even then I won’t repeatedly expend effort criticizing them as though they were Michael Moore presenting propaganda as fact, and doing so makes the Times, Snopes, et all look like clueless puritans with a stick so far up their arses it’s coming out from between their teeth. Which, come to think of it, they basically are.
A Bee in Their Bonnets
April 22, 2021 by Maggie McNeill
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I admit that the Babylon Bee is funnier than most of the satirists on Newgrounds. Speaking of satirical outlets, I think this may pique your interest: http://carnegietimes.com/2017/03/12/nobody-is-impressed-that-you-get-your-news-from-political-satirists/
Saturday Night Live fell after 1996, though their children’s clothes parody from 2019 was the first funny skit in who knows how long. Mad TV’s first five seasons still hold up to this very day, but like The Simpsons and South Park, it went downhill around 2001-2002.
I recently read one of the few journalist still worth following describe how “he has watched in horror” as The Babylon Bee has become the go to for what’s funny. He’s a classic liberal and as he accurately pointed out, “that used to be our thing!”
Once a cop like Kamala Harris started describing herself as a liberal it was clear the label had come to mean tee-totaling type progressive puritan from the early 1900’s than someone too cool for school. It was cringe listening to her talk about smoking “marijuana cigarette’s” in college, that crazy hipster.
Liberals from her age group want to both lecture us on how dangerous it is that our lawn is too long and still be the cool Mom. It’s been more than a little amusing to watch some of them wake up to the horror that they have become the Dean from Animal House.
Less of an issue for liberals say 35 and under. They never viewed themselves as counter culture so there’s no cognitive dissonance with the past. Tougher for those old enough to remember when effective satire was their thing.
As a great natural philosopher remarked to me at our mutual friend Trimalchio’s dinner party last week, “Duae sunt infinitae, hominis stultitiam, et universum.”
The “moderation” of the likes of Twitter and the outrageous slanting of what we used to call mainstream news media have produced a predictable result: a whole new industry of “alt-media” or “new media”, especially podcasts, which cover news the legacy media won’t. As a dissident myself, I’ve been getting my news from these sources for most of a decade now. The Bee isn’t the only funny source on the list but they’re one of the best.
I won’t go into any rants here uninvited; this isn’t my forum.
But I thought I would toss out one representative piece of alt-news that you won’t be hearing about on legacy media: The US Postal Inspection Service is now spying on what we all do on alt-media, and for all I know that may include this site, too. The story is on Dan Bongino’s site.