Facebook Threatens Satire Site Babylon Bee over CNN Story That Snopes Rated 'False'
By Paula Bolyard
March 1, 2018

Christian satire site The Babylon Bee received a terse warning from Facebook this week after the "independent fact-checkers" at Snopes reported that one of the site's humor articles was "false."

Adam Ford, who runs The Babylon Bee, was warned by Facebook that a recent satire article about CNN "contains information disputed by (Snopes.com) an independent fact checker." Repeat offenders, Ford was told, "will see their distribution reduced and their ability to monetize and advertized [sic] removed."

The story in question pokes fun at CNN with the headline: "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication." Anyone with even a sliver of a funny bone tucked away behind their appendix would know that it wasn't a serious news piece, but, alas, the humorless dolts at Snopes had to spell out the obvious.



The story in question pokes fun at CNN with the headline: "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication." Anyone with even a sliver of a funny bone tucked away behind their appendix would know that it wasn't a serious news piece, but, alas, the humorless dolts at Snopes had to spell out the obvious.

Zitat

---

Claim: CNN invested in an industrial-sized washing machine to help their journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication.

Rating: False

---

"Although it should have been obvious that the Babylon Bee piece was just a spoof of the ongoing political brouhaha over alleged news media 'bias' and 'fake news,'" Snopes explained, "some readers missed that aspect of the article and interpreted it literally."

Is that so? Are we to believe there are people who really accepted at face value the claim that CNN bought a literal washing machine to literally "spin" their news? Highly doubtful. What more likely happened is that some trigger-happy activists who don't appreciate Christian and conservative satire reported The Babylon Bee to Facebook, setting off an investigation by Snopes.

Snopes conceded that "the site’s footer gives away the Babylon Bee’s nature by describing it as 'Your Trusted Source For Christian News Satire,'" and explained that the site "has been responsible for a number of other (usually religious-themed) spoofs that have been mistaken for real news articles."

.............................................................

https://pjmedia.com/faith/facebook-threa...-fact-checkers/

The Offending Article:
CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication
March 1, 2018



ATLANTA, GA—In order to aid the news station in preparing stories for consumption, popular news media organization CNN purchased an industrial-sized washing machine to help its journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication.

The custom-made device allows CNN reporters to load just the facts of a given issue, turn a dial to “spin cycle,” and within five minutes, receive a nearly unrecognizable version of the story that’s been spun to fit with the news station’s agenda.

One reporter was seen inserting the facts of a recent news story early Thursday morning.

“Okay, so we just slip in the location, the people involved, the facts of the story, and there we go,” he muttered as he fiddled with the buttons and dials on the machine. “Spin for five minutes on high, and we’ll have ourselves a news story.”

Minutes later, he removed the story and found it had turned into a perfect piece to push universal health care, common-sense gun control, and the removal of President Trump from office.

“Perfect!” he said, taking the story straight to his computer in order to upload it to CNN’s website.

At publishing time, CNN had also purchased an industrial-sized trash compactor in order to help compress and distort facts to fit into its preconceived narrative.

http://babylonbee.com/news/cnn-purchases...ws-publication/