![]() The Family Guy creator and pop culture shock jock played down to the worst expectations of him, peddling in off-color (and even worse, stale) jokes about everything from Mel Gibson to pedophilia, eating disorders and domestic violence. “But at least there’ll be an artifact of how many chances we let slip away.If there’s one thing I’m disappointed by at this year’s Oscars, it’s that no one’s going to be talking about what a spectacularly bad outing Seth MacFarlane had as his first time as host. It probably won’t change anything, “because we Americans are addicted to the way guns make us feel,” Roeder adds. I hate to say it, but I fear that headline will last as long as the Onion itself does.” “I can’t believe this country has gotten to the point where the Onion could insert a variation of the headline in every single article slot. Roeder is no longer on staff at the Onion, but he found the layout “really powerful, horrifyingly breathtaking”, he says. “Still, sometimes I wonder if it could take on some force, build some sort of gravity at a certain scale. “I am generally down on the real-world power of art,” he says. It’s also gutting.”Ĭould that poignancy contribute to the real-world push for change? Roeder isn’t sure. Responding to the Onion’s series of tweets featuring the piece, the writer Jared Petty posted: “It’s necessary and poignant. ![]() “The Onion just stopped being satire,” wrote one user after Senator Lindsey Graham suggested no law could have stopped the shooting. The article was popular, he said, because “we look for the people who tell us the truth … who see through the stuff, and don’t just print the same old stuff, or do the same old stuff, or do the safe stuff – the people who call us on our shit.” resonates because they totally got it,” Dave Cullen, a journalist who has long covered mass shootings, told NPR in 2015. So the ‘No way to prevent this’ felt like a very unique take that really hit the zeitgeist of everything that’s going on.”Īnd it has resonated. “We’ve just done countless takes on mass shootings. In meetings, the Onion’s editorial staff looks to make “what we feel like is a unique point,” Nackers says. Rather, it’s “kind of putting all the pieces together and exposing the truth”. The Onion piece is “not a belly-laugh type joke”, Nackers says. The story serves as a potent example of humor’s ability to cut through political and media-driven noise – an increasingly challenging task in a post-truth era when, as the creators of South Park said in 2017, “satire has become reality”. ![]() “I was just exhausted by this country’s special station in the mass murder hierarchy and wanted to express that.” “I didn’t recognize the headline for what it would become,” says Jason Roeder, who wrote the original piece. The article first appeared in 2014, after the misogynistic Isla Vista killings in California, which left six people dead. That prompted the layout decision: editors sought to “emphasize this and show it in sort of a meta way”.Ĭhad Nackers, editor-in-chief of the Onion. The fact that the elementary school violence occurred within days of a mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket, allegedly by a white supremacist, “hammered home the repetition of it for us”, he said. “This was a gut punch,” said Chad Nackers, the Onion’s editor-in-chief. But after the shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 21, the Onion filled every slot on its homepage with different iterations of the story, making its point all the more grim. Normally, the piece appears as the site’s lead story after an attack. This week, however, the site went for the jugular. ![]() The brief article reports: “Citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place,” with a bleak quote attributed to a different person each time: “This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them.”
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