Periodically on my Facebook, I get news updates from both the Onion and President Obama. One day, about a month or so ago, I was scrolling through my feed and I saw a news item, “President Obama Attends White House Maintenance Workers’ Dinner” (or something like that.) I didn’t click the link; just read the headline.
I thought to myself, “Well, that was nice of him.”
Then I looked a little closer and saw that it was from the Onion’s feed, and not Obama’s. So I felt like an idiot.
Anything like that happen to anyone else here? If not from the Onion, did you ever get whooshed by some other piece of satire that you took seriously.
The Onion has never gotten me. I’ve read it since 1980 so knew what it was when it hit the internet.
Some stuff has got me because it was an April 1st article read months later with a page that always has today’s date instead of the day published. I eventually figured out it was a bullshit article. Considering the freaks on the site I was on the actions in the article were plausible.
This is the best I could do, but it’s not the link to the blog I recall originally being linked to from a thread here. IIRC the blog posting had a bunch of comments along the lines of “uh, you know that’s a satirical website, right?”
One of my friends read The Onion for quite a while before she found out it wasn’t real. She never was the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I do love her so.
I often read headlines out loud to the other members of the house. I will switch between several news sources, and try to see if I can fool them into mistaking Onion headlines for actual news and vice versa. Hubby is learning, but sometimes he still falls for them. Sometimes news aggregators I use will have Onion headlines and I do recall it adding occasional surreality to my day.
Yes, before I knew what Onion was, I came across a vid that was supposedly a congress session discussing an alien invasion. I even posted it on here asking for confirmation, the bastards!
I have a friend of a friend who worked for the Onion in Madison. She was the one who read the mail and she said most of it was from readers who got it, but the two that really caused a stir were the Harry Potter creating young satanists and the Chinese couple who had to decide which of their triplets to keep.
She also said that there were some people who got it that they were joke articles, but still got sucked in by the articles mentioned above.
As for me, I always knew the Onion was a joke, but I got sucked in by a Chicago radio station’s April Fools joke a few years back.
On Saturdays, WXRT does Saturday Morning Flashback where they take a year and play the music, bits talking about what was popular, what movies played, and who died in that particular year.
April Fools was on Saturday, they first announced that this was the last Flashback and they would be playing bits from what they’re going to replace it with. One of them was 24 – The Radio Series and they had dialog of Jack talking to CTU waiting for a file to download. The other was a “things to do on the weekend” bit with two girls talking to each other trying to decide what to do that evening. They were essentially going back and forth saying “What do you want to do?” “I dunno, let’s go out.” “OK, like where should we go?” “I dunno.”
One time I started reading an article on-line about Marilyn Manson driving around to different houses and attempting to gross out the owners and blow their minds only to have them unfazed and feeling kind of sorry for him. I almost started getting into it until I had an a-ha moment, checked who wrote the article, and saw that it was the Onion. :smack:
Maybe he is thinking of that other old Madison humor paper, The Daily Cardinal. It was not quite as funny as The Onion. I mean it was funny, but more of a sad funny.
ETA: Thought the Cardinal died in 1995, but a quick Google search tells me they could not kill it.
I was taken in by one where the new CEO of Radio Shack couldnt figure out how they made money. At the time the Onion wasnt really on my radar. Like all good pull your leg stories it had just enough grains of “truth” to be believable.
I did a thread here asking what cartoons the Onion cartoons were satirising. Someone in the thread hadn’t realised the Onion cartoons were not meant to be taken at face value.
