Satirical News

While doing some research for a class, I came across a video captioned “White House Reveals Obama Is Bipolar, Has Entered Depressive Phase”. Intrigued, I clicked on it, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. What appeared in the video certainly did not seem plausible, yet I didn’t catch on that it was a satire until I read the rolling headlines at the bottom of the screen that said “Yankees hire Pakistani cricketer just to be assholes.” This is how I came to know The Onion.

The Onion makes extremely exaggerated and humorous articles appear plausible – by giving it the rhetoric and feel of the “professional media.” In the Obama video for instance, they started off with the serious-sounding music, showed comments from a “White House representative”, called upon “expert witnesses”, had a live teleconference and during the entire time they maintained a serious demeanor that we associate with “the News”.

The Onion also satirizes current events and turns serious stories into funny ones. The Obama story is clearly based on some truth – the declining public euphoria over Obama’s election and the fact that Obama is not succeeding in alleviating the problems of reality. It achieves this by over-exaggerating. The tone of the stories are lightened and turned humorous by intentionally losing credibility with the viewer.