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Not just sexy Kim Jong-un: 5 times the Onion has fooled foreign media

... and US domestic media have been duped, too.

It would be unfair to single out foreign media as the only victims of The Onion's straight-faced wit, since the US media have fallen for its stories as well.

In 2010, Fox News' Fox Nation subsite treated an Onion story entitled "Frustrated Obama Sends Nation Rambling 75,000-Word E-Mail" as fact – as did numerous commenters on the story, according to Mediaite.

In 2004, MSNBC's Deborah Norville cited a new study as saying "58 percent of all the exercise done in America is broadcast on television.  For instance, of the 3.5 billion sit-ups done during 2003, two million, 30,000 of them were on exercise shows on Lifetime or one of the ESPN channels." That study was, naturally, an Onion invention.

And The Onion continues to fool readers every day, as the Literally Unbelievable website reveals.

The Monitor is not presently aware of having treated a story from The Onion as factual. But The Onion's writers are quite clever, so the possibility can't be ruled out.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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