Many years ago, the local rag in my old home town published a shocking exposé: people were selling pirated software at the local computer swap meet. Imagine my shock.
I mean, it’s not as if that’s specifically just about the only reason most people actually went to the swap meet. It’s also not as if the swap meet in question had been operating for a couple of years. In a building right next door to the newspaper office.
You couldn’t say our local mainstream media weren’t hotshot investigative journalists.
They certainly weren’t a patch on the hardnosed news-hounds of the big city papers-of-record, like the New York Times.
The Times has a proud history of breaking the big stories: no famine in the Soviet Ukraine, for instance. Or Saturday Night Fever: believe it or not, John Travolta’s breakthrough movie was based on a “real” story published by the Times – except that the journalist admitted that he made the whole thing up.
But if the Times has a singularly egregious record on making things up, they’re quick to pounce on anyone else who makes things up. Even if they admit that they’re making it up, because it’s a joke.
The New York Times corrected a story referring to the satirical Babylon Bee website as “misinformation” after the site’s operators threatened legal action, calling the description “imprecise.”
No, “imprecise” is claiming that Michael Brown said “Hands up, don’t shoot” (a complete fabrication by the Times).
This is pure, unadulterated fuckwittery.
“An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the Babylon Bee, a right-leaning satirical website, and a controversy regarding the handling of its content by Facebook and the fact-checking site Snopes,” the paper noted in a correction appended to the story. “While both Facebook and Snopes previously have classified some Babylon Bee articles as misinformation, rather than satire, they have dropped those claims, and the Babylon Bee denies that it has trafficked in misinformation.”
The correction, dated June 10, arrived nearly three months after the March 19 story’s publication. Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon highlighted a message on Twitter on Monday that Times attorney Dana Green sent the publication regarding the removal in which Green said the paper had “carefully reviewed” a letter from the website demanding the correction. In addition to adding the correction, Green said, the paper had removed a reference to it.
The story, authored by the Times’ Mike Isaac, centered on political cartoons and originally said called the Babylon Bee “a right-leaning site” that “frequently trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire.”
As opposed to the mainstream media, who constantly traffick in misinformation under the guise of “news”.
As of Monday, top headlines on the site — which began in 2016 as a conservative alternative to The Onion — included “Surefire Ways to Win an Argument With Your Wife,” along with “Dems Shocked, Disappointed to Learn the New Israeli Prime Minister Will Still be a Jew.”
Mediaite
Wait — that second one isn’t even satire. Just ask Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar.
Just don’t tell the New Zealand Greens that Bibi has been replaced by another Jew. They’ll never get over the disappointment.
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