The Onion and Ben Collins: A Perfect Fake News Marriage

It’s hard to remember a time when The Onion was synonymous with “funny.”

The humor site once had the field all to itself, creating Fake News stories that made us laugh and think. The Onion came out in printed form, and its attacks on the political class could be withering.

That was then.

Today’s online-only Onion is comedic in name only. The outlet’s hard-Left politics have all but stripped away its comic potential, from the woke handcuffs placed on liberal satire to how it protects Democrats…

…much like today’s late-night TV landscape.

So if you want to read something funny about President Joe Biden, for example, you’d never type “the onion” into a search engine. You go to The Babylon Bee.

To Save Time, The Babylon Bee Will Now Just Republish Everything Biden Says Verbatim https://t.co/KDHEZAjgU7 pic.twitter.com/O4ZfgGrc8P

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 18, 2024

That site leans to the Right, but it’s unrelenting in its humor and ability to smite both sides. It’s everything The Onion isn’t – topical, fast, bold and hilarious.

And, sadly, The Onion might soon be even worse.

The site just got picked up by new owners, and former NBC journalist Ben Collins is the platform’s CEO moving forward. Ostensibly charged by the Peacock network with overseeing so-called “disinformation,” Collins proved inept at the gig.

We’re still waiting for him to weigh in on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, the “Very Fine People” hoax and more.

Here’s how Collins described Libs of TikTok, the social media journalist who exposes the far-Left’s extremes.

“Fox News’ favorite aggregator of LGBTQ teachers they don’t like the look of.”

The latter part of the sentence feels slanderous, no? What’s his proof that Libs of TikTok is bigoted. Does he share any?

Collins, formerly with the far-Left Daily Beast, also got exposed by The Federalist for carrying water for the hard-Left. Consider:

NBC’s leftist reporter Ben Collins, meanwhile, arguably offered the most laughable response to Soros backing Bragg. Quoting a CNBC story, Collins says Soros can’t back Bragg because the two never met.

Journalist Steve Krakauer slammed Collins for his social media-heavy methods that often occur without actual journalism.

Collins seems to spend his days endlessly opining on social media about the state of journalism – like his frequent attacks on the New York Times. But one thing Collins does not appear to be doing very much anymore is journalism. Collins hasn’t written an article for NBC News in more than 100 days. His last one, published in early October, was on one of his favorite targets, X owner Elon Musk. Before that, you have to go back to May 22 to find his previous byline, a short piece about a “fake picture of an explosion” at the Pentagon that had gone semi-viral.

He’s also wary of transparency.

I asked Collins and NBC News if he was still a full-time employee of the media outlet, and neither responded to multiple requests for comment. 

Does this sound like the person to shake The Onion from its hard-left shackles?

It gets worse.

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Collins was one of many mainstream news reporters who got the infamous Gaza hospital story wrong.

Collins is treated as an expert in the burgeoning field of countering the spread of misinformation. Yet his error rate is noteworthy….

Did Collins soberly wait for these facts to come in? Nope. The award-winning disinformation expert helped circulate the inaccurate claims of the Palestinian authorities. When other voices on social media recommended caution, Collins chimed in to assert that any delay in reporting the horrific casualty numbers represented a profound moral failing.

It’s Disinformation 101, and he fell for it. That he recently won a Walter Cronkite Award for journalism speaks volumes about today’s Fourth Estate.

Collins’ rage against free speech advocate Elon Musk found him making more mistakes, according to Reason.

Collins’ reporting often contains basic errors that suggest he doesn’t particularly understand the right-wing forces he’s denouncing. His most recent article alleges that Musk’s plans for Twitter were shaped by a far-right former Trump administration staffer, even though it’s fairly clear the staffer wasn’t actually telling Musk what to do, but rather warning about what would happen to Musk if he offended “the regime.”

Collins even raged against the release of The Twitter Files, which exposed the platform’s extensive censorship regime against right-leaning voices. He did so without calling out any errors in Matt Taibbi’s reportage.

He just used ad hominem attacks on the left-leaning Taibbi.

So The Onion’s return to its funny, bipartisan roots is even more unlikely today.

Still, the two parties may be perfect for one another.