Fighting conspiracy theories with comedy? That's what the Onion hopes after its purchase of Infowars
It seemed like bad satire, or yet another conspiracy theory
Headlines from the satirical website the Onion on Thursday: “New Dating Site Suggests People You Already Know But Thought You Were Too Good For.” “Trump Boys Have Slap Fight Over Who Gets to Run Foreign Policy Meetings.” “Here's Why I Decided to Buy Infowars.”
Only one has the ring of truth. Sort of.
The bylined author of the Infowars article, Bryce P. Tetraeder, doesn't actually exist. And the Onion doesn't plan to invest in business school scholarships for promising cult leaders.
But the Onion's purchase of Alex Jones' conspiracy-theory-saturated media empire at a bankruptcy auction tied to lawsuits by the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims is very real — an effort to fight falsehoods with funny and a who'd-have-thunk-it development in an already somewhat unbelievable year. An element of doubt was added late Thursday when the judge in Jones' bankruptcy case ordered a hearing for next week on how the auction was conducted.
On Thursday, The Onion immediately shut down Infowars and said it plans to relaunch it in January as a parody of conspiracy theorists.
“Our goal in a couple of years is for people to think of Infowars as the funniest and dumbest website that exists,” said Ben Collins, the Onion's CEO. “It was previously the dumbest website that exists.”
The purchase, for an undisclosed sum, was backed by Sandy Hook families, who were awarded nearly $1.5 billion in lawsuits against Jones for his false claims that the 2012 shootings at a Connecticut elementary school werex a hoax.
The new Infowars will be a satire of theories Jones advanced, which themselves were so absurd that they could have seemed satirical if they hadn't caused real-life harm. The
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