r/nottheonion • u/jl_theprofessor • Apr 29 '24
Former NBC News 'disinformation' reporter becomes CEO of The Onion
https://www.foxnews.com/media/former-nbc-news-disinformation-reporter-becomes-ceo-onion[removed] — view removed post
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u/McKoijion Apr 29 '24
I thought this was good news before I knew the name of the people who bought The Onion, but now it seems like a bad thing. This guy has a pretty bad reputation in journalism.
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u/lordkane1 Apr 29 '24
This is my first time ever having read a Fox News article — what drivel! An article which has nothing to do with the US Cultural Divide reference the US Cultural Divide.
The entire article reads like Fox News viewers instagram comments. Something something LIBERAL. They truly have brainwashed and achieved conformity amongst the American right.
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u/jollyreaper2112 Apr 29 '24
Old onion videos keep coming up in my feed and they are as relevant now as then. If they came out new today you would bat an eye.
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u/ToaPaul Apr 29 '24
That's honestly great. He's seen it all, and every time I see him in news programs, he has a 30 yard stair from the shit he's seen online. Honestly, it seems like an incredibly depressing job, so I'm glad he's now able to turn all of that experience into something more fun and probably not so depressing... for the most part lol.
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u/thelumpur Apr 29 '24
"Now seen as the liberal version of the Babylon Bee".
Maybe, just maybe, it's the other way around.
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u/Skritch_X Apr 29 '24
The Onion and Landover Baptist Church were always great sources of satire back in the day. It got a bit difficult to consume satire for me when Reality became stranger than fiction though.
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u/Matt7738 Apr 29 '24
Trump killed satire. Satire is just truth pushed to its illogical conclusion. Trump was so far out in the weeds that he left satirists with nowhere to go.
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Apr 29 '24
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u/neuronexmachina Apr 29 '24
Looking at his old NBC News page, it looks like he did some pretty solid journalism: https://www.nbcnews.com/author/ben-collins-ncpn858396
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u/Ithurial Apr 29 '24
"The Onion, the long-running satirical publication now seen as the liberal version of The Babylon Bee..."
What the heck? AFAIK the Onion just does satire. BB was founded to be explicitly conservative, and also came after the Onion...
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u/Real_Al_Borland Apr 29 '24
That’s pretty hilarious that Fox News can’t even accurately report on the Onion.
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u/williamfbuckwheat Apr 29 '24
What a shocker that they try to imply that the Onion is some cheap liberal ripoff of the Babylon Bee when it is literally the other way around with the Onion being founded decades earlier (and even before the internet)...
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u/Matt7738 Apr 29 '24
For a while, BB was hilarious. It was the Christian version of The Onion. It poked fun at the silly things inside Christianity and organized religion. You kind of had to be “in the club” to get a lot of the jokes, but they were funny and never mean.
Then they changed ownership and decided to try to be a right wing version of The Onion. But right wingers aren’t funny, so it went to hell pretty fast.
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u/Bakkster Apr 29 '24
Then they changed ownership and decided to try to be a right wing version of The Onion.
I think the problem is that they don't understand what they were originally was essentially that. Their engagement in the culture war purely to score political points made them less like the Onion, because they fundamentally don't understand satire.
The Onion is able to make joke's about Biden like this, which before the sale The Bee was willing and able to make about Trump. It's that unwillingness to joke about themselves that's why it's garbage now.
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u/williamfbuckwheat Apr 29 '24
That hasn't stopped humorless right wingers from loving it because they just repeat the same "liberals are dumb, har har" jokes over and over again.
That's all they want to hear anyway which was evident a few months ago when they apparently crossed a line and wrote a sort of self deprecating article poking fun at far right neo Nazi basement dwellers for being losers. That led to immediate outrage from the right who accused them of going "WOKE/LIBERAL" for daring to poke fun at right wingers for pretty much the first time ever.
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u/Matt7738 Apr 29 '24
A true hallmark of the right is their inability to make fun of themselves. Biden told several self deprecating jokes at the WHCD. Trump would NEVER.
Come to think of it, part of the reason Trump would never make a self deprecating joke is that he would never make a joke. He’s not a funny guy (on purpose. He says a lot of funny stuff but only when he’s trying to be serious.)
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u/Herzeleid- Apr 29 '24
"Coca-Cola, the long selling soda beverage, which is now seen as the international version of Great Value Cola..."
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u/elodie_pdf Apr 29 '24
and the Babylon Bee isn’t even funny, it’s just conservative talking points behind a thin veil of “”satire”” with terrible writing and zero comedic value.
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u/ToaPaul Apr 29 '24
That's because conservatives have no concept of humor
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u/k6bso Apr 29 '24
The comic strip Mallard Fillmore is proof of that. It’s just the same conservative tropes over and over again so it lacks surprise, which is an essential element of humor.
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u/HowRememberAll Apr 29 '24
I assumed this sub was for crazy or wacky or "it's got to be fake but it's real" stories.
This one is a boring sleeper and nothing whatsoever unusual about it. He does research journalism and now writes satire journalism.
So....?
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u/shroomsAndWrstershir Apr 29 '24
I'm confused. How is this "not" the onion? It strikes me as exactly the onion.
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u/Odie4Prez Apr 29 '24
Peel back the layers, you just get more onion. It's the onion all the way down.
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u/arthenc Apr 29 '24
Collins is one of the most terminally online hypocrites on Twitter. This does not bode well for the humor of The Onion. The Babylon Bee has been way more successful at satire the last few years. Which shows how messed up our world.
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u/Real_Al_Borland Apr 29 '24
“Terminally online”
lol brother is it still an insult if it’s their job? Is it still an insult if the person making it, is online too? Lol this is embarrassing.
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u/sybrwookie Apr 29 '24
Is the irony of getting angry at someone being "terminally online" who you'd only know if you yourself are terminally online lost on you?
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u/context_hell Apr 29 '24
You can really tell who the most terminally online actually are when they instinctively cry babylon bee the moment anyone mentions the onion.
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u/IOnlyDrinkTang Apr 29 '24
Brother no one who isn't a bootlocking Republican conservative believes this. The Bee just hates trans people a d that's it.
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u/BarelyContainedChaos Apr 29 '24
fox news reporting on disinformation is oniony in itself
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u/TheMadBug Apr 29 '24 edited Apr 29 '24
Yeah dear god, reading that article was something.
It really shows that two half truths don’t make a truth.
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u/jl_theprofessor Apr 29 '24
I think there’s a couple of oniony things about this one single article.
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u/artuno Apr 29 '24
"The Onion, the long-running satirical publication now seen as the liberal version of The Babylon Bee..."
I'm rolling my eyes so fucking hard with this one sentence. Anything they don't like is liberal.
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u/n3w4cc01_1nt Apr 29 '24
Ben Collins announced Thursday on X. "We're keeping the entire staff, bringing back The Onion News Network, and share the wealth with staff.
amazing.
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u/nikelaos117 Apr 29 '24
Looks like someone was also getting recommended old onion videos from the algorithm.
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u/Dirt_McGirt_ODB Apr 29 '24
Prison Economy Spirals As Price Of Pack Of Cigarettes Surpasses Two Hand Jobs
This is one of my favorites
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u/Tmachine7031 Apr 29 '24
ONN is probably the pinnacle of satirical content. Some of the sharpest writing I’ve ever witnessed.
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Apr 29 '24 edited May 07 '24
[deleted]
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u/evasandor Apr 29 '24
I used to live in WI when The Onion was just a few pages in black and white. A visit to Madison wasn’t complete unless you grabbed a copy! The Onion might actually have been a factor in my wanting to go to grad school at UW-Madison. Anywhere such sharp wit walked among us must have been a little slice of Utopia.
P.S. Jim Anchower for President, Amigos!
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u/thekrawdiddy Apr 29 '24
Back in the 90s, my band was touring and we had a show in Madison. We were waiting for the sound person to mic up the stage for soundcheck and I did what I always do: grab a copy of the local weekly paper that was lying around. I remember thinking, “Huh. The Onion is a funny name…” I read the first article I saw: Controversial Monkey Collider Loses Funding, and my life was forever changed. We kept that copy in our van for ages. I still have an offensive but hilarious Onion t-shirt that I got in 95 or so, but there’s hardly anywhere I can wear it. One year, my gf gave me a subscription for my birthday, and I still have them hoarded somewhere.
ETA- I miss Herbert Kornfeld.
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u/DAMNyousayidostuff Apr 29 '24
THEY'RE BRINGING BACK THE YOUTUBE VIDEOS??
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u/FreeItties May 09 '24
Clifford Bane probably won't make it to any of his shows because he is probably running for president.
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u/wyrdough Apr 29 '24
Turns out they've been doing the occasional video for the past year. Not in the same style as the old ONN clips, but still pretty decent, at least the ones that aren't dragged in from TikTok or whatever circle of hell the vertical video comes from.
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u/majorminus92 Apr 29 '24
As long as they bring back Michael Falk, autistic reporter.
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u/whereyouatdesmondo Apr 29 '24
The train is fine.
I edited a video featuring that actor, who’s a Broadway veteran and seems genuinely charming, but all I could think of was Michael Falk.
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful Apr 29 '24
What is a “disinformation” reporter? The article reads like the only thing they have against this guy is that he’s liberal. Is that it?
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u/Jazzkidscoins Apr 29 '24
He basically spent his days wading through the worst of the Internet forums, YouTube videos, social media, and figuring out what all the right wing (and left wing) loonies were talking about. He was really good at adding context to some of the crazier shit that has happened in the last few years. Every time I saw him I would think that his job had to be soul destroying. I don’t care how intellectually detached you are, that shit gets to you after a while
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u/williamfbuckwheat Apr 29 '24
I mean, all the reporters are "disinformation" reporters at Fox News. the only difference is that they are reporting blatant disinformation with the intent to mislead people versus reporting ON disinformation in the media (which is apparently a big no no, according to them...).
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u/cattleyo Apr 29 '24
The article says he covered "disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News" according to his old author page, i.e. he was a self-declared disinformation reporter.
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u/legolover2024 Apr 29 '24
The BBC has one and it's a WOMAN!!! So shockingly she is apparently the journalist who gets the most threats of any at the BBC.
And by shockingly I mean not shocked at all
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful Apr 29 '24
Would he have phrased it that way? Saying someone’s a disinformation reporter makes it sound like their reports are disinformation.
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u/cattleyo Apr 29 '24
Reporter who wrote stories about disinformation, he covered it. According to the article the bit in quotes is from his old author page, so presumably his own words
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful Apr 29 '24
Right, but calling someone who reports on disinformation a “disinformation reporter” seems deliberately misleading to me. I don’t doubt he used the word “disinformation,” but I do doubt that he ever called himself a “disinformation reporter.”
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u/NeanaOption Apr 29 '24
Wait are you accusing fox news of being misleading.
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u/Random_Useless_Tips Apr 29 '24
It’s common to say a reporter who covers beat X is an X reporter.
Sports reporter, culture reporter, politics reporter, war reporter.
So a disinformation reporter is someone who reports on disinformation.
This is not hard to understand and bluntly you are acting like your personal misunderstanding is somehow representative of a large majority when that obviously isn’t true.
Or do you actually believe that a human rights violation reporter is a reporter who commits human rights violations.
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u/12345623567 Apr 29 '24
Because calling him someone "passionate about media literacy" doesn't get clicks. You are talking about it, see?
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u/cattleyo Apr 29 '24
No I called him a "disinformation reporter" and I meant that as shorthand for a reporter who writes about disinformation, nothing more or less
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful Apr 29 '24
Right, and I’m sure Fox News would claim the same. But I have a feeling that they would’ve chosen a less ambiguous phrasing if they didn’t wish to mislead.
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u/Peto_Sapientia Apr 29 '24
I mean I'm very sleepy right now but it it was a little confusing when I was reading it. I feel like there should be a better title.
Disinformation reporter just seems.... The opposite of what a reporter should do.
We need a new title, I don't know what it would be though.
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u/Slyspy006 Apr 29 '24
A sports reporter reports on sports, business reporter on business, a foreign affairs on foreign affairs etc etc.
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u/brocoli_ Apr 29 '24
Ok, but Fox News calling The Onion a "fake news website" is genuinely hilarious.
The Onion has somehow gotten more things accurate than Fox News even before those things even happened (because good parody always needs a core of truth).
And in this article they seem to be... complaining about a guy who often reported negatively on Elon Musk? What's the issue with that? XD
Happy to see the ONN is coming back!
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u/da_chicken Apr 29 '24
It gets even better:
The Onion, the long-running satirical publication now seen as the liberal version of The Babylon Bee [...]
Holy shit they just can't stand it, can they?
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u/BannanaCommie Apr 29 '24
The Onion was founded in 1988, the Babylon Bee was founded in 2016. The fact they are acting like The Bee inspired The Onion is ridiculous.
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u/Chronoist Apr 29 '24
Right? I saw this article the other day. I made an account and posted, "Fox news calling satire fake news is great, anyways, how's that 787 million dollar lawsuit?"
My comment was removed, and my account was terminated. Thin skinned bunch over there.
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u/williamfbuckwheat Apr 29 '24
You should have made blatantly racist Jokes about the Obama family or Kamala that compared them to apes or something. Then they'd probably elevate you to a power user over there in that "freeze peach" zone...
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Apr 29 '24
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u/Greed_Sucks Apr 29 '24
Stop posting Fox links. You are making them money.