Rare #TWITTERFAIL for The Onion
Let me preface this by saying I feel a little bit like a kid with a set of water colors telling Da Vinci how to paint. Still...
Gotta put this one down as an epic fail for the brilliant satirists at The Onion.
I am one of the 3.1 million Tweeters following The Onion. So I was more than a bit flummoxed when I saw this tweet a few hours ago.
Now, I'll admit... this caught me a bit flatfooted. Sure, I know that The Onion is a satire site. But where's the context in the tweet, the satirical hook one can hang his hat on?
Yes, the 140-character limit of Twitter makes it difficult. But it's not impossible. Witness these other tweets.
OF COURSE it's satire, and a brilliant take on news writing in the 21st century. Then there's this one.
HILARIOUS. So when I and hundreds of others saw the bare-boned opening tweet in what has turned out to be a day long (so far) running satire, I had to wonder just for a second... has the Onion been hacked? Or are they actually reporting hard news... for real?
I went to the usual sources and saw no mention of gunfire at the Capitol. But some of these news websites are notoriously slow. For instance, sometimes even LOWLY YOURS TRULY has a story on the web before these jackanapes in the Mainstream Media can find time to post it.
So, knowing the Onion to be a satire site — one still had to wonder. So did the hundreds of others who saw it about the same time I did, and they weren't so kind about it.
Eventually as the Onion posted further tweets including the link to the story on their site (with a simply HILARIOUS photo of John Boehner with a gun to a kid's head as he peeks out a door at the Capitol) the true nature of the event became apparent.
Continued on the next page
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