The Onion

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The Onion is a satirical American weekly news magazine, and its associated web site.[1] Over the years, The Onion has expanded from a simple magazine to a massive company, running a website that beats most professional news organizations and running television skits where the production values rival those of CNN. Because of the high quality of The Onion's appearance, it's little wonder that it sometimes gets mistaken for the real thing.

The Onion also has an entertainment/pop culture newspaper and website called The A.V. Club, which features pop culture news, reviews of almost every form of media (TV, albums, books, etc.) and interviews presented in a humorous but factual tone. The site's head writer was Nathan Rabin until 2013. The A.V. Club maintains a separate identity and has very little (if anything) in common with The Onion, mostly to avoid people mistakenly thinking that The A.V. Club presents fake news like The Onion.

The Onion has in the past extended into a movie (critically panned, even by its own A.V. Club), and most recently two TV series — Onion SportsDome on Comedy Central and the Onion News Network on IFC. In 2013, a pilot for Onion News Empire, a behind-the-scenes look at the ONN newsroom, was made for Amazon.com. (It wasn't picked up.) There have also been three original Onion books - Our Dumb Century, a history of the 20th century told through fake Onion front pages, Our Dumb World, a Hollywood Atlas filled with stereotypes and Black Comedy, and The Onion Book of Known Knowledge, a mock encyclopedia of all existing knowledge.

In June, 2014, The Onion launched Clickhole, an ancillary website that seems to be The Onion's take on Huffington Post-styled reporting.

Many upon scores of many times, The Onion has beaten RationalWiki to the punch with their humor and payroll.[2] We work for free :)

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[edit] Poe comes full circle

In 2002, the Beijing Evening News ran a story in which the United States Congress threatened to leave Washington DC unless a new capitol building, complete with a retractable roof, was built. Their source was an Onion article written to parody the practice of some sports teams of leaving their home cities for ones with better facilities. The Beijing Evening News soon retracted the piece, but not before the author, who had picked up the piece wholesale off the internet without citing the source, vehemently defended the truth of the article in an interview with the LA Times, saying “How can you prove it’s not correct? Is it incorrect just because you say it is?”

The temptation to publish an article where the Speaker of the House for the decadent, immoral American government calls the Capitol a "drafty old building ... no longer suitable for a world-class legislative branch,” must have been overwhelming. We expect that one day soon, the Beijing Evening News will achieve the same level of fact-checking, accuracy, and attention to detail that are the hallmarks of the American media.[3]

Unless Fox News is reporting.[4]

In 2012, China was at it again! In December, they congratulated Kim Jong Un on being named sexiest man alive by—guess who—The Onion.[5]

[edit] Bizarre Editorial Cartoons

The Onion hosts a single editorial cartoon allegedly penned by a man named "Kelly." Kelly is a bitter curmudgeon who views the world in a black-and-white dichotomy of innocent, heroic Republican American fundamentalist Christians versus filthy liberal hippie Democrat foreigner feminist atheist commies. His comics accentuate their point with cameo appearances of Lady Liberty, usually weeping or overjoyed, and with author self-portraits quipping snippy, pun-laced one-liners.

The cartoons are actually drawn by Ward Sutton, a liberal political cartoonist who is much more talented than his persona. The Kelly cartoons satirize a particular demographic: the middle-aged, white Fox News crowd, with a simplistic right-wing worldview and a love of mindless entertainment.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

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