The Journal. - The Onion Is Buying Infowars. No Joke.

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

The Onion, the satirical news outlet, wants to buy Infowars, the platform conspiracy theorist Alex Jones used to defame families of the Sandy Hook massacre. Onion CEO Ben Collins shares why and John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, explains what it means to Sandy Hook families and the fight against disinformation. Further Reading: -The Onion Is Buying Alex Jones’s Infowars Site  -Alex Jones Files for Bankruptcy Following Sandy Hook Trial Losses  Further Listening: -How Much Will Alex Jones Pay for his Sandy Hook Lie?  -What One School District Is Doing About Rising Gun Violence  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yesterday, the company that owns the satirical news organization The Onion shared some news that almost seemed like a parody. The Onion was going to buy Infowars. Infowars was owned by the far-right media personality, Alex Jones, and was up for sale as part of a bankruptcy proceeding. To a lot of people, the news came as a big, hilarious surprise. Yeah, I mean, that's what we wanted it to be.

We wanted people to wake up and be like, wait, I can get a push alert, that's not the worst thing in the world. Like, I can get a push alert. That's not the worst thing in the world. I can get a push alert that's like, oh my God, a nice thing happened on the planet. So we just want, we wanted people to feel that way. This is Ben Collins, the CEO of The Onion. Alex Jones is, this is a guy who has spent his whole life

trying to legitimize some pretty awful ideas through the veneer of the news. He's gonna keep doing this, like that's just the way it is. But we can interrupt him and also we can get one over on him. I think like when most people read this news yesterday, they looked at their phone for the first time in a while potentially and was like, huh, something good happened, something funny happened.

That's what we wanted to do. And at the end of the day, that's the reaction we want to have from people. And also, we also get to build this world. The Onion is the very best place at going at the heart of the absurdities of American life. And there's nothing more absurd than this. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Friday, November 15th. Coming up on the show, why the onion bought Infowars and what it plans to do with it. is helping small businesses get more done and save. Get the latest technology for your business at exclusive Black Friday prices. Shop these limited-time offers today at telus.com slash business Black Friday. Conditions apply. Telus, proud supporter of Canadian business.

How Infowars ended up in the hands of the Onion started with a conspiracy theory. In 2012, a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at a Newtown, Connecticut elementary school, the Sandy Hook Massacre. Soon after the tragedy, Alex Jones started to spread lies about it through his platform on Infowars, saying that the shooting and others like it were hoaxes, that the victims and their families were just actors, and that it was all a pretext for the government to take away guns. In response, families of the Sandy Hook victims sued Jones for defamation. And they won. A judge ordered Jones to pay the families $1.4 billion in damages.

Following the trial, Jones filed for bankruptcy, saying he didn't have the money to pay them, which kicked off a lengthy bankruptcy court case and an auction to sell some of his assets to pay the families. One of those assets was Infowars. And that gave Ben Collins an idea. You know, in June, we saw it was for sale and we thought like, man, wouldn't it be funny if the onion bought Infowars?

And it was like, just like a bit in our head. Trust me, we say, wouldn't it be funny all the time? But then I was like, but I think we can do this. Like I knew, I knew the family's lawyers. I used to be a disinformation reporter. So I knew some of the family's lawyers and I gave them a ring. I was like, what's the deal? Like what's going on here? What's exactly the process here? And then I started to realize like, maybe we can actually do this. And I started to call around internally and in the office and people in the

larger Onion alumni group, which is like every great comedy writer in America. And we started NDAing people and being like, what would we do if we got this thing? And their ideas were insane. They were incredible and like beautiful ideas. So... It's like funny jokes. People were like, yeah, this would be hilarious if we owned it more. even beyond the first initial joke, which I think everybody thinks, you know, this would be the funniest thing that ever happened How do we sustain that, you know? Ben saw the potential to take over info wars and transform it into something new but he needed a partner So he approached John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control and violence prevention advocacy group.

John, what was your reaction when you heard about this offer? And can you say anything about how the parents of Sandy Hook reacted when they got this offer? Well, I think three things were really going through our mind when we started talking to Ben and to the Onion team. One was, you know, there is nothing we can do to heal the pain of the Sandy Hook families, but our feeling was like if we could contribute one ounce of restitution or one ounce of something that brings them some sort of satisfaction, it would be completely worth it to us.

And then the second thing obviously that came to our mind was just the battle against extremism and misinformation. We know that from all the polling we do that most Americans believe in gun safety. However, misinformation and hate and fear has so distorted reality that we knew we had to get into the fight of battling it. The third thing that caught John's eye was the Onion's record on the issue of gun safety. One of the Onion's most viral posts is from 2014. It's about mass shootings. And the headline is, No way to prevent this, says OnlyNation where this regularly happens.

The Onion keeps republishing this article after mass shootings. They've run it now 37 times. And it's something every town noticed and appreciated. So they were on board with Ben's idea, and they signed a deal to be the exclusive advertiser for the relaunch of Infowars. We thought that an advertising relationship could actually help us really break through. I mean, we've got at our fingertips the facts, the data, the research, the stories, but what they've got is the creativity and the ability actually to use humor to cut through misinformation.

And sometimes you need that kind of medium of humor to really set the record straight. Well, say more about, you said that there's an element of satisfaction. I think I've heard you say elsewhere that there's like an element of justice. What is satisfying about the onion owning Infowars to you? I think it's karmic justice, truthfully. You know, what did Alex Jones do after the Sandy Hook massacre? He called it a hoax. And for the onion to couple itself with a gun safety organization, I think is karmic justice. Ben, you said a moment ago that you think that this is like the funniest idea ever, but where do you see the humor in it?

Yeah, I mean, it's obvious. It's trying to put on the affect of a real news organization. He has tried to take these ideas that mass shootings are writ large, false flags done by the government to take away your guns, that these victims of shootings aren't real, sometimes that they never existed, that they're actors or whatever, which is this double whammy of grief that these people in America, and really only America have to go through right now. They are, you know, the families of the victims of shootings, first have to deal with the most horrific thing that's ever happened to them, and then have to have that had to be

visited by this wave of, of awfulness. And he managed to for several years legitimize himself. And what we can do is the onion is bring it back to where it should be, which is farce and like lunacy. And also more importantly than anything else, we can build something on top of it. What they plan to build, that's after the break. the break. This episode is brought to you by TELUS Business.

This Black Friday, TELUS Business is helping small businesses get more done and save. Get the latest technology for your business at exclusive Black Friday prices. Shop these limited time offers today at T telus.com slash business Black Friday. Conditions apply. TELUS, proud supporter of Canadian business. Ben Collins used to spend his days looking at sites like Infowars. For years, he was a reporter who covered disinformation online. And then, in April, Collins, alongside a group of friends and a tech billionaire, took over

The Onion. Since then, he's been trying to breathe new life into the publication, restarting its print edition and The Onion News Network, its cable news parody. Ben sees InfoWars as the next great idea. Ben, is this just funny or is it also a good business decision for the Onion? It's a great business decision for it. That's why we did it.

Like it's, it's, this has a lot of different reasons for doing it. You know, we took over this company seven, eight months ago now. And since then- The Onion you took over, yeah. And what we've been able to do is bring back the newspaper and we've been shocked by the response by it.

We send you a physical newspaper in the mail once a month and people love getting it. It's really nice. We've been like really like blown away by the support. How many subscribers does the Onion have? We have, I would say now, two arenas full of people. Like we have a lot of people. Two arenas. So not 4.3 trillion, which it says in the about us section of the Onion. I don't want to contradict you, but I thought it was 4.4 trillion. Oh yeah. Well,

yesterday we had a big day, John. So what can you say about your plans for Infowars, if this deal does go through as expected and once you get control of it? Yeah, we're really excited. We have this moment where media is so balkanized and everybody has their own little cult armies. We're going to go after that. We're going to find a way, in the onion's own way, to tackle this really weird and incredibly siloed media environment

that we have. Now, are you planning to turn Infowars just into like a joke, an obvious joke, or do you want to like only tweak it enough so that like, do you want to keep its existing audience but try to change the existing audience's mind by not making it so obvious that you're just turning it into a satire. I think you'll see. They are building a universe right now where I think there's a world in which... They being the comedians that you're working with.

If you were in a coma yesterday and you were an Infowars fan and you woke up in January, you would be like, oh, it's a little bit different, but I could see it. I think that's what it is. And look, man, we have... I do want to say like ever since this news came out, every great comedy mind in the country has reached out to us asking how they can help and asking if they can write synonymously for us. And there is a wide open blank canvas here that a lot of comedy writers have wanted to play in this space.

And, but only at the quality bar that The Onion can provide. So, that's what we're going to do. will every towns role be in this look we're gonna be the major advertiser and that premier I advertiser certainly at the launch and that could mean anything from you know banner ads to video to doing joint creative content to doing links and it is a chance a chance to bring the issue of gun safety to a whole new, bigger, broader audience and do it with humor. And look, I mean, if there's one thing

that is completely on our mind, and I think everybody else's mind who sort of observes what's going on in this country, it's the role of misinformation. And the fact that we have to stop just talking to ourselves, we have to talk to broader audiences. And I think that this is a way of accomplishing both of those things for us at Everytown. Ben and the Onion haven't said how much they paid for Infowars. One piece about the deal

that we do know is that the Sandy Hook parents wanted to sell to the Onions so badly that they agreed to forego a portion of what they're owed by Alex Jones in order to support the Onions bid. John, can you say anything about why the families were willing to accept less money for this deal? Look, they realize that the currency of Alex Jones is fear. And fear has distorted people's perceptions of really reality in many ways. And I think that in some ways, the Alex Jones is sort of a standing

for the whole gun industry. And the gun industry makes money off of death. There is really no two ways to put it. And I think this was an opportunity to really shine a spotlight on it and in a different way. I mean, we're living in an age of misinformation and sometimes facts don't do the trick. And sometimes you've got to use different mediums. And I think humor is one way to cast a really harsh spotlight, not just on Alex Jones, but on the whole sort of industry of fear of misinformation and hate

that's so permeating the discussion of the issue of gun safety. It's what drives the industry. They make money off of tragedy. And this was an opportunity to really cast a pretty harsh spotlight and using humor and reaching audiences that we don't always reach. Conservatives, youth, young men. There was at least one other offer to buy Infowars by a company called First United

American Companies. First United is associated with Alex Jones's new online store. The company alleges that the sale process was flawed, citing a lack of transparency. First United didn't respond to our request for comment. On Thursday, Alex Jones took to X and made a similar claim. The words were exactly, this was a private secret sale, basically illegals, the word is used. claim. A bankruptcy judge said he would schedule a hearing for next week to review the sale process and the bids.

The sale can't close until the court approves it. How do you think it solves the problem though, you know, a satire website? Because there are Reddit threads and there's a section of the onions Wikipedia page about times when people thought that the onion was real and that the headlines were real. Well, I think the most important thing here is the onion is the diametric opposite of NFWars. NFWars is trying as hard as possible to convince you that a fake thing is real. And we're trying as hard as possible to convince you a real thing is fake.

That's basically the difference here. And I can tell you, you know, I used to be a disinformation reporter. I was for the last decade of my life before I took this job. And there's only so many facts you can show people before that are inconvenient and might not help their life before they might slink off into news that feels better to them. News in quotes that feels better to them but isn't actually true. You know, the 6,000 word features I used to write about, like cults that had websites, they were beautifully constructed and really good and well edited.

And, you know, who knows what impact they made, but a joke that lands, that's like a joke that's 10 words long that lands, that might have more outsized impact than anything else. So you're sort of saying that like that rather than fight misinformation with facts, you want to fight it with humor in satire. Yeah, we want to fight fear. And we want to show what's happening. And the only real way to get to them that way is to be funny.

Like, you can scold them all you want. You can do the hardest-hitting feature of all time. But I'm here to tell you, the best way to get to people is to be like, isn't that kind of silly that you used to believe this? And what I think humor and satire can do is sort of point out the manipulation and sort of saying, you're being sort of strung along with fear and we're manipulating you into

Behavior that makes us richer makes an industry richer and makes a country more violent No, I understand that you'll also gain control of this supplements business that info wars has made so much of its money off of What are your plans? What supplements are you gonna get and what are you gonna do with them? I believe, I mean, I wanna defer to global tetrahedron CEO, Bryce Tetraider, who said we would boil it down to one omnivitamin that the CEO will be able to eat to gain immortality. I think that's probably the best way of handling it.

We don't really have a second idea yet, to be real with you. I don't know what to do with a warehouse full of supplements, but we're going to figure it out. Like we, it is a very silly thing and I obviously never anticipated having to deal with this, but look, if you know a supplement guy, give me a call. Can you, I know that you're being, you don't want to share much about what you plan to do with the site when it relaunches in January of 2025, but can you give me like, what would

be like, what do you think the lead story will be on Infowars? Oh, I'm not, I'm not funny enough for that. But like, look, the way the world's, I mean, we're going to have a world by January 2025, so let's just, let's pray we get there. See how it goes. And then if we get there, we'll have a very pretty and very nice website to show you with some of the most unhinged sentences you'll ever read. Great. Any any final thoughts from either of you before we let you go? I think that just to underscore the bottom line here is if I've ever seen a case of poetic justice, this is it for Alex Jones.

The supplement offer is real. If you know a guy, just give me a ring. Okay. That's all for today. Friday, November 15th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Alexander Gladstone, Joseph de Avila, and Akiko Matsuda. The show is made by Katherine Brewer, Jonathan Davis, Pia Gadkari, Rachel Humphries, Matt Kwong, Kate Limbaugh, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Laura

Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alessandra Rizzo, Alan Rodriguez-Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Piers Singie, Jeevika Verma, Lisa Wang, Katherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamis, and me, Ryan Knudsen, with help from Trina Menino. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Katherine Anderson, Billy Libby, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singapok, Griffin Tanner, So Wiley, and Bluedot Sessions. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis and Kate Gallagher.

Thanks for listening. See you Monday.