There is a bit of good news in Ben Collins’ purchase of The Onion and his decision to run the website: he will no longer be claiming to be a “journalist.”
His work has always been a form of unintentional satire, although it was never funny. And, unfortunately, The Onion hasn’t been funny for years, so he is a perfect fit for the job of CEO.
NEWS: My friends and I now own and run The Onion. I’ll be the CEO.
We’re keeping the entire staff, bringing back The Onion News Network, and share the wealth with staff.
Basically, we’re going to let them do whatever they want. Get excited.https://t.co/CQtWzFHn4A
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) April 25, 2024
I used to love The Onion, but as with so many things that lean Left, it lost its sense of humor and basic connection to reality in the past decade or so. It used to poke fun at both the Left and the Right, and it could make you guffaw about politics and the absurdities of the world.
In the old days it published some real zingers, poking fun at everybody.
In Focus: Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years http://t.co/AZxoYxHW0t
— The Onion (@TheOnion) June 30, 2013
Alas, those days are long gone, and the Ben Collins era promises to drive a stake through the heart of The Onion.
One great irony is that Collins is one of the big promoters of the “disinformation” narrative. He never saw a story that the Left found inconvenient that he didn’t want to pretend to “debunk,” censor, or slander. He called his beat at NBC “News” the “Dystopia Beat,” implying that living in a world with Orange Man and his supporters was a living hell.
He certainly worked hard to slander us.
Collins was, of course, one of the biggest spreaders of misinformation on planet Earth, lying about everything. He did revel in being a punching bag for the right, largely because he could slander us with impunity from his well-paid perch at NBC.
Think of him as a better-looking but less charming Joe Scarborough. He has Karine Jean-Pierre’s wit, Nina Jankowicz’s temperament, and Sam Bankman-Fried’s integrity and ethics.
Expect The Onion to become even less funny and even more biased. I don’t mind bias in my humor as long as it is, well, funny. Everybody needs to have his ego prodded, and by God the Right deserves as much ridicule as the Left. If you can’t laugh at Donald Trump selling Bibles in the same way he sold only OK steaks and crappy wine, then you need to get out more.
But The Onion is now focused on calling Republicans Nazis and similar names, and that isn’t funny. It’s stupid. You can make fun of people for being stupid, but being stupid is not funny. It is sad.
The Onion’s humor is closer to a Robert DeNiro rant about Trump than a Babylon Bee headline. It has gotten so unfunny that Elon Musk probably would not have noticed if Twitter had deplatformed them. He famously bought the platform in order to return The Babylon Bee to it.
Perhaps running a formerly satirical website will give Collins a hobby other than blasting conservatives, but I doubt it. He will likely just use it as another platform to go after us, which is fine.
At least when he does it at The Onion he will be admitting up front that everything he says is fake news. It always has been anyway.