When fake news is dead serious

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When fake news is dead serious
Satirical news sites like The Onion are doing the work that legitimate publications won't by taking an actual stand

By Andi Zeisler
Published June 25, 2025 1:30PM (EDT)


(Salon) Satire has had a difficult time competing with legitimate news for a while now. Last weekend, as Donald Trump prepared, with all the finesse of a damp sock filled with pennies, to escalate U.S. aggression against Iran, the Opinion section of The New York Times saw the challenge and rose to it: Sunday brought forth a column with the boot-lickingest headline of 2025 so far: “Trump’s Courageous and Correct Decision.”

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But last Sunday’s Times also contained something surprising: A full-page ad for the satirical newspaper The Onion, whose front page blared, “Congress, now more than ever, our nation needs your cowardice.” The open letter to Congress featured in the ad read, in part:

“Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost, Our Founding Fathers, in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero action as this precious inheritance was stripped away — and that is where we have finally arrived.”

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The last war the United States entered under flimsy premises, after all, was made possible by tireless platforming from the New York Times, in particular, of dubious intelligence and uncritical allegiance to White House narratives. “Trump’s Courageous and Correct Decision” shows that the paper of record is willing to once again give its all to the manufacture of consent. And the fictitious news, as in 2003, is among the dwindling number of sites that we can count on to enthusiastically push back.

It is admittedly very difficult for the sober, formal legacy media to capture in mere words national politics that features the president shilling Teslas on the White House lawn, a former Fox News host leaking classified information in a group chat, astonishingly consequential decisions made on a whim by an unelected, ketamine-addled billionaire and millions of dollars poured into a military parade whose most indelible legacy might be the hapless squeaking of a restored Sherman tank. But those outlets also don’t have to report on these things and more, as though they are business as usual, rather than the deranged acts of a president whose only platform is punishing his enemies and cartoonish grifting. The destabilizing of news media is just one of the terrifying things unfolding in Trump’s second term, but it’s one that becomes more terrifying as it becomes less remarkable. ...........................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/06/25/when-fake-news-is-dead-serious/