Why Is "The Onion" So Effective?

"The Onion" is an American news source that creates satirical news that are meant to make people laugh. They also are known to call out the hypocrisy of popular culture. I remember the first time I was fooled by "The Onion". I was 16 years old and had just recently created a Facebook. I was scrolling through my Facebook feed when I saw "Vatican Reverses Stance On Gay Marriage After Meeting Tony And Craig". The title of the article immediately caught my interest because it was around the time the current pope had been ordained. I clicked on the article excitedly thinking about how important this news is to the world and how it would be a huge revolution of the ideology in the Catholic church. It made me excited to think that soon members of the LGBT community could finally be married through the Catholic church. As I read the article, I immediately caught the sarcasm and face palmed to myself real hard for falling for the satirical news article. Below is an example of the satire from the article.

                                                  

I closed the window and read the comments on the link that was shared and saw hundreds of people commenting happily and angrily over "the Vatican reversing their stance on gay marriage" and was surprised at how many people actually fell for the article like I had. It appeared that people had not caught onto the satire and took it very seriously. It made me wonder how "The Onion" was able to tell a false narrative that many people believe. 

                                    

In class, we learned about how stories are incredibly valuable because they simplify complex situations, can be shared and remembered easily, and are compatible with the way people think. "The Onion" uses all of the valuable qualities. Their articles use language  that is easily understood, meaning that there aren't any big, difficult words that only Ph.D students can understand and their platform is on a website where each article can be easily shared when clicking any of the social media links at the bottom of the page (Facebook, Twitter, Etc). "The Onion" is also very successful at sharing information. They follow the guidelines for sharing information that we learned in class. For example, "The Onion" bases their articles on current events that are receiving a lot of attention in the media (such as the pope being ordained). In other words, they are building on their reader's prior knowledge of current events while also creating content that is relevant to what people are caring about at the current time. "The Onion" provides visuals (usually photoshopped) to help the reader visualize what their narrative is about.

                           

As you can see above, "The Onion" limits distractions on the site by not posting any ads and keeping the formatting pretty neutral. The site posts the titles, giving an easy to find overview of the information in the article. Typical articles from "The Onion" include a somewhat small paragraph of the satirical news (unlike sites such as The New York Times that have many pages of information), which makes the article a quick read. All of these qualities make "The Onion's" content highly shareable. Thinking about all of the qualities that "The Onion" has in terms of shareability and storytelling, it's easy to believe that so many people read the satirical news site thinking that it is real. Whether their narrative is real or fake, their site's content and visual aesthetic does a great job of creating a good story that is shared by a click of a button all over the world.