The situation I have chosen to look at is a common one: times people have been fooled by the Onion, a satirical news site. One situation in particular that I will focus on is when the Beijing Evening News ran a story on Congress threatening to leave D.C. after reading an article titled “Congress Threatens to Leave D.C. Unless New Capital Is Built,” which can be found here. The Washington Post reports, “While the Beijing Evening News originally refused to run a retraction, even challenging Western reporters to prove that their article was wrong, it later offered a printed apology to readers.” According to the Post, part of the apology read, “Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money…That is what the Onion does.”
There are several things that went wrong in this instance of digital communication. First, there was a misunderstanding due to the genre the Onion was writing in. While the Onion appears to be writing in the genre of most news sources, it is only using those genre conventions for a humorous purpose. This is where context comes in; the Onion is meant to be read with an understanding that most of the information in the articles is false, and the audience is not meant to take anything the Onion writes as fact. However, somebody who is not from the United States or even a person from the United States who is not familiar with the Onion or satire may not have the background necessary to understand the Onion’s context or genre. Audience is especially important in this case, because the audience for the Onion is not people trying to discover what the actual news it. The audience is people who are looking for a humorous and likely not factual take on the news. The Chinese newspaper that published the article was not the target audience for the Onion piece, as they were looking for actual news. The situation from So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed that most reminds me of this situation is from Chapter 4, when Justine Sacco tweeted something that she assumed would be funny but that was not perceived as humorous by others. The main similarity is the idea that humor does not always come across well on the internet, and something that is meant to be funny by one person can be taken completely seriously by another. When it comes to satire and sarcasm, especially, it is difficult to comprehend tone. Justine Sacco’s comments were offensive, while the Onion’s story was simply inaccurate, but both situations showcase the difficulty of identifying tone in online writing. I think that the best way to deal with this issue is to think twice before writing or publishing something, and to always check your sources. These are very basic pieces of advice, but I’ve found that people are often willing to post or share things that they have not bothered to do the slightest amount of research on. In the case of the Chinese newspaper publishing an article based on the Onion article, research into the Onion and their reputation as a fake news site might have saved them to trouble of printing a false story.
2 Comments
Aubrey Keller
11/12/2018 10:09:02 am
Your post is unique in that it points out that communication breakdowns do not always reflect badly on the original author, but sometimes cause backlash for the misunderstanding audience. I like that you acknowledge that while the author has a burden to communicate clearly, the reader also has a burden to understand the author's reliability. That is especially important when the reader is using the source for research.
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Allyssa
11/14/2018 01:20:54 pm
I had never heard this story before! As a longtime fan of satirical news sites, I am not at all surprised whenever a person believes the articles are real, but I am shocked that an actual news station ran a story using the Onion as their source. Unfortunately there is a TON of false news out there but you did a great job offering advice on how to prevent it such as double checking sources.
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AuthorDigital Literacies student Archives
October 2018
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