Osler's Razor

The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history. In addition to maintaining a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires, The Onion supports more than 350,000 full- and part-time journalism jobs in its numerous news bureaus and manual labor camps stationed around the world, and members of its editorial board have served with distinction in an advisory capacity for such nations as China, Syria, Somalia, and the former Soviet Union. On top of its journalistic pursuits, The Onion also owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes, stands on the nation’s leading edge on matters of deforestation and strip mining, and proudly conducts tests on millions of animals daily. 

Parodists can take apart an authoritarian’s cult of personality, point out the rhetorical tricks that politicians use to mislead their constituents, and even undercut a government institution’s real-world attempts at propaganda. Farah, 736 F.3d at 536 (noting that the point of parody is to “censure the vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings of an individual or society”) (cleaned up). 

 Time and again, that’s what has occurred with The Onion’s news stories. In 2012, for example, The Onion proclaimed that Kim Jong-un was the sexiest man alive. China’s state-run news agency republished The Onion’s story as true alongside a slideshow of the dictator himself in all his glory. The Fars Iranian News Agency uncritically picked up and ran with The Onion’s headline “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama.” Domestically, the number of elected leaders who are still incapable of parsing The Onion’s coverage as satire is daunting, but one particular example stands out: Republican Congressman John Fleming, who believed that he needed to warn his constituents of a dangerous escalation of the pro-choice movement after reading The Onion’s headline “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex.”