When fake news is dead serious

Satire has had a difficult time competing with legitimate news for a while now. Last weekend, as Donald Trump prepared, with all the finesse of a damp sock filled with pennies, to escalate U.S. aggression against Iran, the Opinion section of The New York Times saw the challenge and rose to it: Sunday brought forth a column with the boot-lickingest headline of 2025 so far: “Trump’s Courageous and Correct Decision.”

The NYT hinted to readers where it was headed back in 2017, the year it hired the aforementioned column’s author to bring “ideological diversity” to the organization; the news organization also retired its public editor position that year, reasoning that Twitter could work just as effectively as an ombudsman. These days, its ideologically diverse opinions seem to have reached their final form: In political coverage, an ongoing obsession with Democrats in disarray; in political op-eds, high-minded sh*tposting desperate to own the libs at any cost.

But last Sunday’s Times also contained something surprising: A full-page ad for the satirical newspaper The Onion, whose front page blared, “Congress, now more than ever, our nation needs your cowardice.” The open letter to Congress featured in the ad read, in part:

“Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost, Our Founding Fathers, in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero action as this precious inheritance was stripped away — and that is where we have finally arrived.”

The full letter — only a portion of it printed as part of the ad — has been sent to the Capitol building mailbox of every member of Congress. It appears in an upcoming issue of The Onion’s recently revived print issue in its full, zinger-packed glory. Speaking to independent news site The Handbasket, Onion CEO Ben Collins acknowledged the news outlet’s “oracular ability to predict the next great American horror,” but the ad’s impeccable timing was prescient in another way.

The last war the United States entered under flimsy premises, after all, was made possible by tireless platforming from the New York Times, in particular, of dubious intelligence and uncritical allegiance to White House narratives. “Trump’s Courageous and Correct Decision” shows that the paper of record is willing to once again give its all to the manufacture of consent. And the fictitious news, as in 2003, is among the dwindling number of sites that we can count on to enthusiastically push back.

It is admittedly very difficult for the sober, formal legacy media to capture in mere words national politics that features the president shilling Teslas on the White House lawn, a former Fox News host leaking classified information in a group chat, astonishingly consequential decisions made on a whim by an unelected, ketamine-addled billionaire and millions of dollars poured into a military parade whose most indelible legacy might be the hapless squeaking of a restored Sherman tank. But those outlets also don’t have to report on these things and more, as though they are business as usual, rather than the deranged acts of a president whose only platform is punishing his enemies and cartoonish grifting. The destabilizing of news media is just one of the terrifying things unfolding in Trump’s second term, but it’s one that becomes more terrifying as it becomes less remarkable.

In recent years of flourishing disinformation ecosystems and broken social contracts, satirical journalism has taken up more than a bit of the work abdicated by legitimate outlets. After the 2016 election, taking an overtly apolitical stance in their craft was no longer good for business, both ethically and materially. The president was leading a culture war more than he was a country, and consumers wanted to know where the entertainers they loved stood and what they would stand up for.

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The most mainstream of comedians, those who host late-night TV, were among those who took that responsibility seriously. Speaking to Northwestern magazine in 2018, “Late Show” host (and Northwestern grad) Stephen Colbert emphasized the importance of connecting with his audience by acknowledging their confusion and fear: “If half of the country votes for somebody you feel is the absolute nadir of what it means to be an American, and that person gets the highest job in the land, it can be a lonely feeling — that maybe you do not have a community to belong to.”

Meanwhile, the sheer number of options created by prestige cable channels, streaming, podcasts and more meant there was room for more than one explicitly political comic at a time to break through. It also offered the chance to try out formats beyond the deadpan anchorman behind a desk riffing on news of the day. John Oliver, host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” used this opportunity to make a show about the news as a product, devoting each episode to one topic —like cash-bail systems and abortion bans — and the systems of social forces, institutional bias and profit that impact how they’re presented to news audiences.

Revealing how the sausage is made puts Oliver on level footing with his audience. Sure, he’s funnier than we’ll ever be, but he’s also looking at the same world as we do and asking the same questions: How is this sh*t happening? Why is it not front-page news? Can we do anything to change it? (The answer to this last question, by the way, is yes — turns out that gleefully antic public shaming can occasionally make a difference.) Both Oliver and The Onion, meanwhile, choose to partner with independent media creators like The Handbasket and 404 Media, giving their work a megaphone and reminding audiences of what they can choose to support.

Plenty of comedians are funny at a distance, engaging but not caring. But it’s clear that there’s a hunger for earnestness amid the irreverence. Ramy Youssef told NPR in 2024 that the rawness of being Egyptian-American in post-Oct. 7 America inspired him to think of his comedy special “More Feelings” as “a bit of an offering to have some of that openness that I don’t think anyone needs to be afraid of.” Jon Stewart explained his 2024 return to “The Daily Show” by noting that it wasn’t until after it stopped airing that he understood that his role was to provide “air support” for activists and advocates doing work on the ground. Absurd levels of hypocrisy and injustice are leading the country for the foreseeable future. And as prominent news outlets continue to normalize and launder that simple fact, comedy that’s both humane and hilarious is a way through, if not a way out.