“Following her controversial testimony last week at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, TheOnion asked Americans to explain why Harvard University’s president should resign, and this is what they said.” This is the article published by The Onion on the recent calls for removal of Harvard university’s president Claudine Gay over antisemitism testimony, humour for those who know the nature of publication and a potential fake news for its non-audience.
With 11.6 million followers on Twitter, over 800k subscribers on YouTube, 40k followers on LinkedIn and about 4 million and 6 million followers on Instagram and Facebook respectively, the satirical publication has a niche loyalty of those who get its humour who knows about the facts about the events from the conventional media publications.
The publication articles on international, national, and local news as part of its digital media company and newspaper organization since 1988. In 1996, it started publishing online. However, it is a parody of a traditional news website layouts and an editorial voice supposed to be modelled majorly on the Associated Press.
The humour of the publication often relies on sensationalizing mundane, everyday events as if they were newsworthy, surreal, or frightening. However, interestingly, it explicitly states what is “read between the lines” in a conventional news publication.
How is the news presented?
The webpage of The Onion is like any other conventional news publication with news segregated into different beats like breaking news, politics, world, entertainment, opinion…Some of the tabs on the page lead you to articles which are written just in a paragraph. It has the presence of conventional parts of a news article, a headline, lede, body and conclusion. However, it does not strictly follow the rules of inverted pyramid, may and may not have the parts and is not differentiated into paragraphs.
Some of them leads you to a slideshow supported by the headline which works as a description. The slideshows generally contain voices, which are quotes in a conventional news article. The slide usually contains the photo of the speaker, the source, usually a known personality related to the news, using whom the satire is being drawn, or that of different unknown people representing the voice of the common speaking on the issue which might (or might not…remember, it is a satire) affect them.
How does news on The Opinion appear at first glance or to those who are not its audience?
At first, given its layout, the news appears to be a serious one. Even its headline, font, picture, all deliver the seriousness of a news, unless one is aware what the publication is exactly about. If one does, humour is delivered.
Further, the news on The Onion does not give you facts. It can easily pass as fake news unless one knows the nature of the publication. Knowledge of the context, facts from the original news, happening is important to absorb the content of the publication.
The publication yet delivers more accurate news than the conventional one. Confused? If one goes through what it publishes, it contains what’s supposed to be “read between the lines”. It also does one more interesting thing is that it writes what goes on in the mind of the readers, thus is the real voice of the people.