The Babylon Bee
The Babylon Bee is an American conservative Christian news satire website that publishes satirical articles on topics including religion, politics, current events, and public figures.
History
The Babylon Bee was founded by Adam Ford and was launched on March 1, 2016. It is headquartered in Jupiter, Florida, and employs around 24 people across the United States.In 2017, Hurricane Harvey battered Houston, Texas, causing widespread flooding. In that context, The Babylon Bee satirically criticized televangelist Joel Osteen with a headline that read: "Joel Osteen Sails Luxury Yacht Through Flooded Houston to Pass Out Copies Of Your Best Life Now". The article went viral, prompting a fact check from Snopes.
In late 2018, Ford sold the website to Seth Dillon. In an interview with The Christian Post, Ford cited several reasons for the sale, including his discomfort with the power wielded by social media companies like Facebook over creators and what he perceived as an anti-conservative and anti-Christian bias.
At the time of the website's sale, Kyle Mann, who had been head writer since September 2016, became editor-in-chief. Ford maintained a financial stake in the site and its sister site Not the Bee until November 2023. Citing the "inevitable consequences of burnout" that came from keeping up with current events, he handed over full control to brothers Seth and Dan Dillon. Seth remained the majority owner of The Babylon Bee while Dan Dillon, who had helped cofound Not the Bee, became its majority owner.
At the time of its sale to Dillon, The Babylon Bee was receiving 3million page views per month. In October 2020, the website said that it was receiving about 8million visitors a month. which would have been more than The Onion traffic in the same period. By January 2021, The Washington Times said that The Babylon Bee was receiving more than 20million page views per month, had more than 20,000 paid subscribers, and had a Twitter account with more than 856,000 followers. In January 2022, The Economist said that The Babylon Bee was "claiming as many as 25m readers a month at its peak", and that Dillon had turned The Babylon Bee "into one of the most popular conservative sites after Fox News".
Content
The Babylon Bee began by lampooning a wide range of topics including progressives, Democrats, Republicans, Christians, and Donald Trump. The purpose of the site, according to its founder Adam Ford in 2016, was not just to evoke laughter, but to prompt self-reflection. "It's important to look at what we're doing, to 'examine ourselves.' Satire acts like an overhead projector, taking something that people usually ignore and projecting it up on the wall for everyone to see. It forces us to look at things we wouldn't normally look at and makes us ask if we're okay with them." In an April 2016 Washington Post profile of the site and its founder, Bob Smietana observed that "The Bee excels at poking fun at the small idiosyncrasies of believers, especially evangelical Protestants." Susan E. Isaacs publishing in Christianity Today wrote in May 2018 that the site "lampoon the faithful across denominations, political affiliations, and age groups". Emma Green in The Atlantic noted of The Babylon Bees content in October 2021, "Although political humor drives much of The Bees web traffic, the publication's signature hits focus on what the writers see as shallowness in the evangelical world."In the years leading up to 2020, the site grew less critical of Trump and more critical of the left and liberalism, though it continued to satirize topics across both parties. Emma Goldberg of The New York Times said in 2020 that although Trump was still not off limits as a target for The Babylon Bee, "their "early coverage of Trump, back in 2016, was much more vitriolic than today's. They called him a psychopath, or a megalomaniac. Now they're more bemused by him and the ghoulish ways he's described on the left." In another 2020 New York Times article, Emma Goldberg wrote that the unifying goal of the site was "poking fun at the left", and that "their most popular articles are often those making jokes at the expense of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden". She wrote that its success was due to finding ways to punch up by "ridiculing every source of authority outside the White House." In the same article, The Babylon Bees editor-in-chief Kyle Mann summarized how he believed readers of The Babylon Bee considered the site: "this comedy makes fun of everybody, but it's a little harder on the left, and when it makes fun of the right it's not hateful." Parker J. Bach wrote in Slate in June 2021 that the site frequently makes jokes that target marginalized groups, with articles that are "often 'ironically' misogynistic" and "frequently antagonistic toward the LGBTQIA+ community". In an October 2021 interview with The Atlantic, Mann described the site's view of satire and its mission as "mock people who hold cultural power and... communicat truth to a culture that many times does not believe in an objective, universal truth any longer."
The Babylon Bees hosted Elon Musk for an interview on the site's podcast in December 2021. The episode featured regular hosts Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicolle, who were joined by Seth Dillon. The podcast covered a wide range of topics, ranging from a response to Senator Elizabeth Warren's criticism of how little Musk paid in taxes to scandals at CNN to his thoughts on Christianity.
Jennifer Graham of Deseret News attributed the success of The Babylon Bee in 2021 to "the increasing polarization in America, with Republicans and Democrats clustering in information silos that reflect and affirm their beliefs." Nick Gillespie of Reason praised The Babylon Bee in 2022, saying that "The fact that the Bee is very funny, day in and day out, is almost enough to get me, a lapsed Catholic, to believe in divine intervention, if not a covenant of grace not works." The New Yorker and The New York Times have described The Babylon Bee as a Christian or conservative version of The Onion.
Mistaken for factual reporting
As the readership of The Babylon Bee increased from 2016 to 2020, there were independent, ongoing discussions within journalistic circles on how to handle the rise of fake news and its influence on the public. The Babylon Bee was brought into this wider conversation when several of their articles were shared on social media or reported upon, ostensibly as factual.In 2019, The Babylon Bee satirically criticized Donald Trump with an article saying that Trump claimed he had "done more for Christianity than Jesus". The article went viral, prompting a fact check from Snopes after some thought the article was a real story.
The Conversation published research by academics at the Ohio State University in August 2019 that found that people regularly mistook satirical reports from The Babylon Bee, The Colbert Report, The Onion, and others for genuine news. They found that "stories published by the Bee were among the most shared factually inaccurate content in almost every survey we conducted." They also found that both Republicans and Democrats mistook articles from The Babylon Bee as news, but Republicans were considerably more likely to do so. The Babylon Bee
Media outlets' responses to incidents in which The Babylon Bees content was mistaken for factual reporting have varied. Some have described The Babylon Bee and its content as obviously satirical, whereas others have suggested the site misleads its readers, either intentionally or inadvertently. The frequency with which Babylon Bee stories are confused with real news has resulted in numerous reactions from fact-checkers.
In September 2020, British newspaper The Guardian reprinted as factual a Bee-doctored image of LeBron James wearing a lace collar supposedly in tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In October 2020, a satirical news story by The Babylon Bee claiming that Twitter had been shut down to protect Joe Biden from negative coverage was retweeted by then-U.S. President Donald Trump, who, according to some journalists, seemed to not realize the article was parody and condemned the fabricated incident described in the story as a case of leftist censorship. This event prompted Kevin Roose, writing in The New York Times, to question whether The Babylon Bee "traffic in misinformation under the guise of comedy", concluding that "The Babylon Bee is not a covert disinformation operation disguised as a right-wing satire site, and is in fact trying to do comedy, but may inadvertently be spreading bad information when people take their stories too seriously".
Parker J. Bach wrote in Slate in 2021 that The Babylon Bee "is adept at writing ironically ambiguous material that lets audiences from different sections of the right reinforce their own beliefs... even if The Babylon Bee