We’re big fans of The Babylon Bee, a hilarious conservative satire website that oftentimes runs afoul of humorless media hall monitors and supposed “fact-checkers” for scoring direct hits in appropriately characterizing the biased “reporting” of national news outlets like the NY Times, the Washington Post, and other news outlets.

The Bee has become so popular over the years that the Times, in particular, became borderline obsessed with trying to get them falsely labeled by other media outlets and the “fact-checkers” they and Big Tech rely on as a site that publishes “misinformation under the guise of satire.”

Tensions reached a boiling point when, back in March, Bee CEO Seth Dillon hinted that the site would take legal action (“I’m pretty sure there’s a legal term for what’s happening here”) if the paper did not alter an article they published about Facebook’s “trouble in dealing with satire” to remove all references to the Babylon Bee as a “misinformation” website because it was, in the Bee’s view, defamatory.

Here we are three months later, and we are learning that the Bee’s persistence finally paid off. Dillon took to the Twitter machine this morning to update readers with the good news:

Big update here. The @nytimes has responded to our demand letter by removing defamatory statements about us from their article. Here’s their email to our counsel notifying us of the correction. https://t.co/lv0eYo6NzK pic.twitter.com/OLi5KzMzej

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) June 14, 2021

Originally, the article said we were a far-right misinformation site. It pointed to us—and only us—as an example of a site that misuses the satire label to protect our presence on social media sites that would otherwise ban us for spreading fake stories.

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) June 14, 2021

We objected to this pretty strongly, so @MikeIsaac removed the sentence that said we trafficked in misinformation. In its place, he put an update that said we’d feuded with @snopes and @Facebook about whether we’re misinformation or satire. But that wasn’t true, either.

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) June 14, 2021

This latest correction, however, no longer mentions the Bee as an example of a far-right misinformation site that pretends to be doing satire. And it notes that neither Snopes nor Facebook maintain that we’re misinformation. pic.twitter.com/MSsxgrWrnH

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) June 14, 2021

Dillon insinuated it was the implied threat of legal action that ultimately did the trick:

This is huge. The NY Times was using misinformation to smear us as being a source of it. That’s not merely ironic; it’s malicious. We pushed back hard and won. Thanks to everyone who voiced and offered their support. We don’t have to take this nonsense lying down. Remember that.

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) June 14, 2021

Indeed. As I’ve said before, the moral of the story here is twofold. First, when attacked by a supposedly credible and respected news organization (or public figure) with claims that are demonstrably untrue, it’s wise and to your credit to not back down. And two, if you’re a media outlet and you’re going to come for The Babylon Bee, maybe think twice before doing so. Because in the war of words, you will have your patootie kicked and then some.

And, as Dillon noted, you will also lose.

Flashback: Babylon Bee Relentlessly Hammers CNN After Journalist Frets Over Their Higher Social Media Share Counts