"Snopes, however, was not content with performing its vital public service of debunking crazy rumors and easing childhood fears."

"It had pretensions to be something more. It took the cultural goodwill built up over years of truth-telling and decided to make a real difference. It kept fact-checking urban legends... but it also began fact-checking politicians and news sites, and conducting its own investigative reports... And that brings me to one of my favorite websites, the Babylon Bee. It’s distinctly conservative, it’s distinctly Christian, it’s very, very funny (especially if you’ve grown up as an Evangelical Christian), and it’s obviously, clearly satire.... Snopes has fact-checked whether Democrats demanded that 'Brett Kavanaugh submit to a DNA test to prove he’s not actually Hitler.' It’s fact-checked whether Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez repeatedly 'guessed "free" on TV show "The Price is Right,"' and whether Ilhan Omar actually asked, 'If Israel is so innocent, then why do they insist on being Jews?'...  [L]ast week Snopes... fact-checked an article called 'Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-Fil-A Employee Told Her To Go Back To Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said "My Pleasure."'... [I]t questioned whether the article was satire, accusing the Bee of 'fanning the flames of a controversy' and 'muddying the details of a news story.'... [If Snopes] wants to serve its purpose, it must not use its remaining cultural power and its remaining commercial influence to target the satire that stings its allies. Hands off the Babylon Bee."

Writes David French in "Hands Off the Babylon Bee" (National Review).

First, let me disclose my bias. I loathe The Babylon Bee. I don't try to read it. I encounter it because Instapundit puts up the attention-getting headlines so I'm forced to read them and do the half-second-long mental work of seeing that it's just a joke and I never find the joke funny. It's always, oh, no... it's The Babylon Bee. It's like Instapundit is Rickrolling me. But David French says "it’s very, very funny." Not to me, it isn't. Admittedly, I did not grow up as an Evangelical Christian, but I don't know why that would make me more open to attaching nasty fake quotes like "If Israel is so innocent, then why do they insist on being Jews?" to a real name like Ilhan Omar.

It doesn't sound as though Snopes is confused about The Babylon Bee and thinks it's purporting to be a real news site. But even when you completely understand the format is satire, like The Onion, you believe that the satire relates to something real. You have to wonder what is the real thing that happened that this is a satire of. So, for example, in the case of "If Israel is so innocent, then why do they insist on being Jews?," you'd have to assume, if that's supposed to be funny, Ilhan Omar must have said some anti-Semitic things. The presentation of the quote as satire implies that there is something out there that is being satirized. You extrapolate.

So, in the case of the insist-on-being-Jews quote, Snopes tried to find the factual basis for the satire:

In this case, the website’s intent was to ridicule Omar’s reaction to escalating violence on the Gaza Strip (“The status quo of occupation and humanitarian crisis in Gaza is unsustainable,” she tweeted, emphasizing the plight of Palestinians) by attributing barely coherent anti-Semitic quotes to her. Earlier in the year, Omar was accused by members of both parties of using “anti-Semitic tropes” in criticizing Israel’s influence over U.S. politics. She has made no public statements resembling those in the Babylon Bee article, however.

That is an unusual form of fact-checking, but it is real fact-checking. Snopes also fact-checks The Onion in the same way. For example, there's: "Did ICE Hurl a Pregnant Woman Over a Border Wall?/In June 2018, a piece of satire from 'The Onion' became more confusing to social media users":

The Onion is, of course, a satirical web site that was founded in newspaper form in 1988.

Readers’ mistaking The Onion's humorous material for real news is not uncommon on social media, as demonstrated by questions we’ve received from readers about warring cruise ships and a photograph of Cuban people clinging to the wings of Air Force One.

It's not that people believed the photograph that showed a crowd of people on the wings of Air Force One as it flew, but some readers imagined that something happened, that at least some Cubans clung to the wings of the plane while it was still on the ground.

It's not just this inference that something underlies satire, but that headlines get decontextualized in social media. This is what's I've found so irritating encountering The Babylon Bee at Instapundit. And, yes, I know that lately Instapundit includes some note that the quoted headline is satire — sometimes with a reference to Snopes but also with a nudge that it's awfully close to what's true. For example: "Note to Snopes: It’s the Babylon Bee, so this is satire — or is it?"

So, yeah, I'm defending Snopes. I don't see the problem with what it's doing. I'm sure it leans left, but those who are attacking it lean right. Websites have political leanings. Big deal. So what? That's not worth getting excited about. Who's doing anything wrong here? I don't see much of a problem anywhere. The Babylon Bee isn't very good, in my opinion, and I can't avoid it because it's constantly linked on Instapundit, and I'm not going to quit Instapundit, but I completely own that as my problem.