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In May 2019, we received multiple emails from readers who were unsure about the authenticity of comments attributed to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The would-be 2020 Democrat presidential nominee was quoted as criticizing businessman Robert F. Smith as an evil billionaire, after Smith pledged to pay off the student loan debt of the entire 2019 Morehouse College graduating class, at whose commencement he delivered a keynote address. On 20 May, the satirical web site Babylon Bee published an article with the headline Bernie Sanders Criticizes Billionaire for Giving Money to Students Instead of the Needy Federal Government, which read (in part): Like everything published by the Babylon Bee, the article was intended to be satirical. Sanders never described Smith as an evil billionaire, nor did he vow to reverse the pledged gift. Although the Babylon Bee's web site contains a disclaimer that describes it as Christian news satire, the article and quotations attributed to Sanders were republished elsewhere online without such a disclaimer. This is a common occurrence, which often causes readers to have reasonable and understandable questions about the authenticity of quotations or claims that, in their original, clearly labelled context, might not have prompted doubt or confusion. For example, the headline and other sections of the article appeared in the online SoonerPolitics.org, the forum TigerDroppings.com and the website Right-Mind.us — all without any clear disclaimers as to the satirical intent behind the article. Furthermore, while the use of terms such as evil billionaire and needy federal government may have been far-fetched, Sanders did make comments about Smith's Morehouse gift that were far from unequivocally supportive, telling a rally in Montgomery, Ala., that private charity alone was not an acceptable solution to the broader problem of student loan debt: More generally, Sanders has long advocated a policy of increasing taxes on financial institutions in order to defray the cost of lowering student debt obligations, and in 2017 he proposed legislation to eliminate tuition fees altogether at public colleges and universities. So the notion that Sanders would call on a billionaire businessman to contribute more money to the federal government (by way of increased taxation) to be used for the greater good, in the context of student loan debt — a position the Babylon Bee article attributed to him — is a somewhat crude but not entirely misleading representation of Sanders' actual policies in this area. However, Sanders did not make the comments that the Babylon Bee attributed to him in its May 2019 article, and he certainly never described Smith as an evil billionaire.
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