From the New York Times to the National Enquirer, there are thousands of different places to get your news. However, if what you're looking for is hard-hitting, investigative reporting, tell-it-like-it-is opinion columns, stunningly sharp social commentary, and overall journalistic excellence, there is only one place to go: The Onion.
The Onion
The Onion Newspaper is a satirical weekly featuring "fake" news on everything from sports to celebrity gossip. Many of the articles are based on fact and simply look at actual events through a bizarre lens (such as the article about Tiger Woods' 2008 U.S. Open triumph: "Man Who Used Stick To Roll Ball Into Hole In Ground Praised For His Courage"), while others are simply the product of creative (but hilarious) whimsy: "5-Year-Od Wants To Be A Tractor When She Grows Up."
In addition to news articles, the Onion also features horoscopes, opinion articles, the news in brief, obituaries, infographics, statshot, and social news, all of which are satirical. The Onion has also had several themed issues, such as The Onion's Green Issue - a clear jab at Time Magazine's Earth Day Special Edition Issue.
The only non-satirical part of the Onion is the A.V. Club, which usually fills the back half of the newspaper. The A.V. Club features movie, video game, and music reviews as well as interviews with various celebrities or writers. The A.V. Club has its own website and is considered to be independent of the Onion.
The Onion is distributed free in Madison, Milwaukee, New York City, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Denver/Boulder, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Washington, D.C and has a readership of more that half a million.
History (both fictional and actual)
In reality, the newspaper was founded in 1988 by two students at University of Madison-Wisconsin. They sold the rights to coworkers within the first year. Under the new editor, Scott Dikkors, the Onion expanded from limited readership among college students in major college towns (Madison, Milwaukee, Boulder, Chicago), to national fame. The Onion website was founded in 1996, and in 2007, the Onion News Network, an online news station running 24-hours-a-day, was launched.
Officially, the paper purports to be over 250 years old, having originally published in the mid 18th century. It was named the "Mercantile Onion" because those were the only two English words the paper's immigrant founder, Herman Ulysses Zweibel, knew at the time. (Zwiebel is German for onion - note the difference in spelling.) The newspaper's motto was Tu Stultus Es, or 'You are stupid' in Latin.
In 1896 Zweibel's 20-year-old son, T. Herman Zweibel became editor, a position he supposedly holds to this day despite being over a century old and largely senile. For much of the 20th century the paper was highly reactionary and violently opposed every social reform the century brought forward, from women's suffrage to married characters sleeping together in the same bed on television.
Fictional chronology
- 1756: Friedrich Siegfried Zweibel founded the Mercantile-Onion
- 1850: F. Siegfreid's son, Herman U., took over the company.
- 1888: T. Herman Zweibel, assumes editorial directorship
- 1892: Onion 24-Hour Television News Network (ONN) founded. It can now be seen in 811 countries around the world.
- 1896: T. Herman Zweibel, F. Siegfried's grandson, took over the company, upon death of Herman U. Zweibel.
- 1958: Zweibel was court-ordered to retire.
- c. 1960: Onion Radio founded
- 2000: Zweibel left Earth itself (The Final Frontier, T. Herman Zweibel).
Source: Wikipedia
Onion Controversies
The Onion is a satirical newspaper, and so, obviously, is sometimes taken seriously by certain thick-headed segments of the world population. One of the most interesting cases is when the Chinese government actually believed the report that the U.S. Congress was threatening to move the capital to another city if Washington D.C. did not build a retractable dome on the capital building. The Chinese government posted the news on the state-run Beijing News Network and refused to retract the statement until the U.S. government demanded that they do so.
Often times, many of the controversies with the Onion come from well-meaning readers who complain that the newspaper has gone too far. Says executive editor Chet Clem, "Almost every piece of hate mail starts with the line, 'Usually I love The Onion, but this time you’ve gone too far…' We responded to that with, 'Normally I love your pornographic website, but this time you’ve gone too far…' Someone will always be offended by something."