The founder of The Babylon Bee set satire aside Tuesday, and launched the real-news site Disrn.com, whose goal is to provide “brief, smart, and faithful” news to readers.
Adam Ford, the Bee’s founder, partnered with the satire site’s current owner, Seth Dillon, to launch Disrn with a small team of writers focused mainly on hard news with some opinion, according to their launch announcement. While The Babylon Bee styles itself as an explicitly Christian satire site, Ford told the Daily Caller that Disrn will not be reporting on issues with a Christian bias.
“Our news articles will be objective, but we will report on things that Christians and conservatives care about,” Ford told theDC. “The opinion pieces, newsletters, and coming podcasts will be, of course, from a Christian and conservative perspective.” (RELATED: How The Fake News Panic Threatens To Kill Conservative Satire)
As of launch, Disrn promotes two daily newsletters, one under its own name and another from Ford. Their goal is to bring honest reporting to readers in as concise a manner as possible, a decision which shows on the site; none of the news articles are longer than 300 words.
“We deliver the news to you in a short, concise format,” Ford said. “Including just the details you need to know about while letting the rest blow away in the breeze. You can check in, quickly learn what you need to know, and then get on with your day.”
Ford sold The Babylon Bee to Dillon in 2018. The so-called fact checking site Snopes has “fact checked” dozens of the Bee’s satire articles, sometimes leading Facebook to mistakenly restrict the Bee’s audience reach in an effort to combat fake news.
The Snopes-Bee feud came to a head in August when Snopes was forced to come out with a new classification for fact checking satirical content. The new fact-check designation is “labeled satire,” which Snopes describes as indicating “a claim is derived from content described by its creator and/or the wider audience as satire.” But the description later asserted that content, even if explicitly labeled “satire,” may not be such and the designation is necessary to prevent the spread of false claims.
“There is an ongoing pattern of mistakes in tech and the media. They call them mistakes, but they always seem to cut in one direction–against conservatives–to a point that is way beyond coincidence,” Dillon told TheDC during the spat with Snopes. “These are huge companies and nearly 100 percent of their employees are liberal. They are bound to say or do something inappropriate, and they wont even notice because they all agree.”
