Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and slammed the New York Times for claiming that the site is a source of far-right misinformation.
In a recent article, the New York Times claimed that the Babylon Bee “trafficks in misinformation under the guise of satire,” Carlson said. After the Babylon Bee threatened a lawsuit, however, the Times issued a correction stating: “We’ve removed the reference to the Babylon Bee from the article and appended a correction.”
Dillon joked by thanking Carlson for giving him “a platform from which to misinform your millions of viewers, harmfully and maliciously.” He then said that it’s important for the Babylon Bee to stand up to attacks because if not, they could lose their business. (RELATED: Trump Falls For Babylon Bee Article About Twitter Shutting Down Its Entire Social Network)
“You know, we can’t take this stuff laying down,” Dillon said. “We actually, as satirists, we want to joke about this stuff. We want to just poke fun at the New York Times.”
Dillon said that social media companies look to outlets like the Times to determine who is spreading misinformation on their platforms, ultimately using the media as a tool to decide who to kick off.
“The problem is, like it or not, the New York Times is considered a reliable source,” he added. “So when the social networks are looking to decide who’s satire, who’s misinformation, who’s fake news, they look to the New York Times, they look to Snopes, they look to CNN.”
“And so when they are making these mischaracterizations about us, we have to take it seriously, even though we don’t want to, we want to keep things light, we’ve got to send demand letters, we’ve got to threaten to sue,” Dillon continued. “Because otherwise we are going to get mischaracterized and we’re going to get the boot from social media.”
Dillon noted that social networks are crucial to the survival of sites like the Babylon Bee.
“We depend on the social networks for traffic to our site,” he continued. “If we lose the social networks, we lose our business. So it’s really a self-preservation thing. Absolutely, it’s about survival.”
He called the Times’ story a “deliberate strategy” that takes advantage of social media’s desire to shut down anyone they perceive to be spreading misinformation on their sites.
“On the one hand it’s extremely ironic that they are using misinformation to smear us as being a source of it, but beyond that, it’s comically ironic,” Dillon said. “But beyond that it’s malicious. Because they know better.”