The Onion buys Infowars
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Really...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/business/media/alex-jones-infowars-the-onion.html
The Onion, a satirical publication that skewers newsmakers and current events, said on Thursday that it had won a bankruptcy auction to acquire Infowars, a website founded and operated by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
The Onion said that the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems.
Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit dedicated to ending gun violence that was founded in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, will advertise on a relaunched version of the site under The Onion.
The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements, Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in an interview.
Family members of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 first graders and six educators, sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut Superior Court in 2018 after he spread the baseless claim that the rampage was a fabricated pretext for confiscating Americans’ firearms.The Onion declined to disclose the price it paid for Infowars and its assets, including its production studio and diet supplement business. Mr. Jones could not immediately be reached for comment, but he said on the social media platform X this week that he planned to continue producing his online program, “The Alex Jones Show,” until he was forced to stop.
Remember when The Onion was funny?
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Auction has been invalidated.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/11/15/onion-infowars-sale-hold-alex-jones/
Judge Christopher Lopez said Thursday that he had concerns about how the bidding process played out and ordered a hearing for next week to review how the auction was conducted.
At the court hearing Thursday, the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy auction said the Onion did not have the highest bid, but that the Sandy Hook families’ agreement to forgo some of their defamation award to pay off Jones’s other creditors made the Onion’s bid the best overall deal, according to the Associated Press. The trustee, Christopher Murray, did not share the dollar amount of the Onion’s bid, but said he followed the rules laid out by the judge that allowed him to skip a round of bidding that would have let interested parties try to outbid each other.Lopez said he had concerns about the process and its transparency. “We’re all going to an evidentiary hearing, and I’m going to figure out exactly what happened,” he said, according to the AP. “No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction.”
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