The Onion just won an award from a very unlikely source: the normally quite serious Washington Monthly.
Each month, this excellent left-of-center political magazine honors a reporter or news outlet for coverage that goes above and beyond the territory normally covered in the mainstream press.
This month (Novermber 2001), the award went to the staff of The Onion, for Holy Fucking Shit: Attack on America.
The Monthly goes on to say: “Since September 11, the media have risen to the occasion by producing so much top-notch journalism that choosing the finalists for our Monthly Journalism Award has been nearly impossible. But we finally settled on The Onion, a satirical newsweekly and website, which on the week of September 24, released a special issue devoted to the terrorist attack. To a country still shell-shocked and grieving, it provided sorely needed relief from the endless stream of bad news. While others were declaring comedic irony dead, The Onion’s “Attack on America” series managed - respectfully - to prove otherwise.”
It goes on to list some of the individual articles in the “Attack on America” issue, and mentions that the website got the most hits in its history that week.
Cool beans. 
