CEO Seth Dillon talks to NR about the brazen efforts by powerful media outlets to misrepresent and silence his satirical publication.
CEO Seth Dillon talks to NR about the brazen efforts by powerful media outlets to misrepresent and silence his satirical publication.
I n its short life, the Babylon Bee, a satirical website often described as a conservative and Christian version of the Onion, has been subjected to some mainstream media fact-checks that are in and of themselves comical.
“There have been some crazy ones,” says Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon.
Dillon, who recently spoke to National Review via Zoom for a National Review Institute-hosted event open to NRPlus subscribers and NRI donors, points to the time that Snopes fact-checked the headline: “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication.”
Who, exactly, was confused whether that headline was real? “Do you throw these articles in the washing machine,” Dillon asks, “and it spins them?” Despite the obvious absurdity, the New York Times was still reporting in 2020 that “The Bee found itself walking the thin line between satire and fact in 2018, when it joked that CNN purchased an ‘industrial-sized washing machine for spinning the news.’”
For Dillon and his team, the fact-checks are more than a laughing matter. “Our stories get rated as false. And then we have penalties threatened against us from these social networks. It’s just this ongoing battle.”
The Bee has had some success in getting fact-checkers and Facebook to hand out a “satire” rather than “false” rating, but battles with the mainstream press continue to flare up. The latest happened in March, when the New York Times news pages described the Bee as “a right-leaning site” that “sometimes trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire.”
“They basically cited us as an example of someone who’s cheating the system by pretending to be a satire site to stay safe on that platform and continue to misinform people on their platform,” says Dillon. “So that’s defamation. That is absolutely false.”
He maintains it amounts to “a damaging smear” against his outlet. “If they can get that narrative to stick, then there is absolutely no way Twitter and Facebook are going to let us stay on their platforms if we are, in fact, a disinformation source that’s trying to deceive people,” says Dillon. “If the New York Times says that, then Facebook’s going to believe that. It’s not going to believe us. So we have to be very concerned about how people mischaracterize us.”
The Times deleted the offending sentence, but Dillon says “that’s an admission that they were wrong, the fact that they edited it,” and he is “still looking at our legal options.”
Dillon, who grew up a pastor’s kid with an affinity for The Simpsons, South Park, and the Onion, bought the Babylon Bee in 2018 from founder Adam Ford. At the time of the sale, Ford was running a two-man show with Kyle Mann, who is still the editor in chief. The staff of the Bee has grown to more than 20 employees.
Dillon says the Bee was, at first, solely reliant on online ad revenue. “We had a situation where we drove 90 percent of our traffic from Facebook,” says Dillon. “And then 90 percent of our revenue or more was from Google serving Google ads on the website.”
Being at the mercy of “fact-checkers” and two Big Tech companies was a somewhat dangerous situation for the Bee, but the website diversified its revenue streams. It has published books and sells merchandise, but what’s most important are subscriptions. “Our main income source is subscription revenue from our readers,” says Dillon. Subscribers can “turn off the ads and unlock exclusive features and content, get access to our headline-pitching forum where you can collaborate with our writers.”
Web traffic remains important for the website, and Dillon remains concerned that fact-checking operations and Facebook’s algorithm have hurt his publication. “As our audience has grown over the last couple of years on Facebook, our traffic and our reach from Facebook has declined,” he says. But subscriptions are the reason Google or Facebook won’t be able to cancel the Bee even if they wanted to. Dillon says that the site is profitable.
Dillon notes that some critics think the Bee has undergone a “radical change” in terms of its focus on political satire instead of the religiously themed satire it was known for initially. “I don’t think that that’s necessarily true that it’s a radical change, but there is a change,” says Dillon. “It is hard to come up with jokes about worship pastors and their skinny jeans every single day.”
The religion jokes are still part of the mix, but they “rarely go viral because they’re appealing to a much smaller portion of the audience,” says Dillon. “With the news cycle, there are stories every single day inspiring satire.”
But sometimes the religious jokes do break through. In 2018, after Hurricane Harvey, the Bee published a story with the headline: “Joel Osteen Sails Luxury Yacht through Flooded Houston to Pass Out Copies of ‘Your Best Life Now.’” It was shared nearly 300,000 times on social-media sites.
“That article went viral because people actually believed that it was true, which was crazy,” says Dillon. “But it was making a really powerful point” — the idea that “you can have your best life now is not necessarily true. You know, we expect to experience suffering and trials and hardships and persecution, and this life is not going to be easy, breezy, just because we’re believers.”
As for the larger mission of the website, Dillon says that “what satire does best, the most succinct and direct way I can put it is we ridicule bad ideas” — whether those ideas are coming from Prosperity Gospel preachers or politicians.
Though the Bee focuses most of its political content on skewering progressives, Republicans aren’t always safe from ridicule. “Op-Ed: If You Could Stop Comparing Me to Donald Trump, That’d Be Great,” read the headline of one piece written “by King David” in 2018.
Satire, Dillon says, is “an incredibly effective way of communicating truth. You’re using falsity, you’re using these made-up exaggerations of reality, to communicate about something true.” He’s fond of reciting a quote from G. K. Chesterton that “humor can get in under the door, while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.”
In addition to ridiculing bad ideas, Dillon says, it’s also important to be able to laugh at yourself. When he first bought the website, he was pleased to find out that it was run by Calvinists because “there were a bunch of Calvinist jokes on the website — jokes that poked at Calvinists, jokes that made fun of Calvinists. . . . It was actually very refreshing.”
The ethos is, as he puts it: “If you come to the Babylon Bee, you’re gonna get made fun of, it doesn’t matter who you are.”
“In the middle of dark times,” Dillon adds, “it’s nice to be able to sit back and laugh and have a little levity.”