‘The Onion' CEO on That Brutal ‘New York Times' Op-Ed: ‘Expect Us in Weird Places'

Yahoo

6 hours ago

Readers of Sunday's New York Times were treated to an unusual full-page ad from a rival newspaper — the venerated satire periodical The Onion. Most of the available space was taken up by a mocking editorial piece with a headline that blared: 'Congress, Now More Than Ever, Our Nation Needs Your Cowardice.' In a note at the bottom of the page, the company revealed that print copies of the op-ed were being delivered to the very lawmakers it ripped apart as complacent do-nothings under an increasingly authoritarian Donald Trump.
And, just by wild coincidence, the stunt came right as the administration barreled ahead with the bombing of Iran, a destabilizing and politically unpopular action that for many Americans recalled the preludes to other catastrophic wars the U.S. has initiated in the Middle East. Whether Congress can successfully challenge Trump's unilateral show of military force — something it is technically obliged to do under the Constitution — remains to be seen. But the smart money is almost always on The Onion's prescient cynicism.
More from Rolling Stone
'The Onion' Mocks Congress' 'Cowardice' in 'New York Times' Full Page Editorial
Judge Blocks The Onion's Bid to Take Over Alex Jones' Infowars
He Wrote The Onion's Famous Mass-Shooting Headline. It Still Haunts Him
Here, Ben Collins, who has served as CEO of the 37-year-old publication since it changed owners in April 2024, talks about why the staff decided to make a bold statement in the Gray Lady, the success of their relaunched print model, an ongoing legal battle with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and how The Onion's writers stay one step ahead of a surreal new normal.
So, this op-ed. Can you tell me how that came together, and why this was the moment for it?[The writing staff] have been sitting around looking at the failure of the legislative branch, which I thought was a co-equal branch of our government, but I guess it isn't. We're learning a lot of new stuff all the time. And they really wanted to go for it. The only note that I give them is just, if you are ready to go for it, let's go for it as hard as we can. So we reached out to the New York Times for editorial space. We didn't even know what we were going to put in there yet, necessarily, months ago. I just wanted them to have the ability to do something in that space. And they came up with that headline, and they were like, it's time. They also came up with the idea to mail that headline to Congress. I don't know who was in the room, but somebody on editorial staff was like, why don't we just make this all one thing, let's mail it to Congress, publish it as a full page of the New York Times, and make it a big hairy deal. We're hitting the gas pedal here, and think it's working. Hopefully they should be showing up in the mailboxes of every single congressperson.
What kind of a reaction are you expecting?I have no idea! The thing that The Onion does best is it creates, in my opinion, some catharsis. It [allows] people without the full vocabulary for the moment to create a complete sentence for themselves. It allows them to put up a protest sign. We wanted people to understand that they are not alone in feeling particularly helpless in this moment. And we want Congress to understand that maybe they could fucking do something at some point in any capacity about the litany of horrors that we have been subjected to in the last six months.
It's also fun to do it in the in the , since their editorial section has advocated for some questionable things over the decades.Yeah, I mean, we're right back in 2003. The timing is crazy in terms of the the the Iran bombing — I almost called it Iraq, because the language and the op-eds are the same as when I was growing up. I read a David Shields book called War Is Beautiful, it's a collection of New York Times photos of Iraq and Afghanistan where they made war look like this beautiful Disneyfied fireworks display, and that's not what it is. War is fucking brutal and horrible and evil. And it does feel like we're back in this mode where completely disconnected elites are killing people for sadomasochistic enjoyment. I grew up with this, and so did The Onion. This is where The Onion is at its at its best, when they are fully lined up against what is very clearly 'The Man,' and the machine is in full swing, from cable news to the Times op-ed page to the government itself, with every Republican in Congress and some Democrats [embracing] the idea that if we just annihilate some of these people, there will be no consequences. We've been through this before. During the Iraq War, The Onion was one of the only places to stand up against it. It was just, like, The Onion and the fucking Dixie Chicks, and now we're right back in that moment. Thankfully, I think more people can smell that this reeks and are not buying the party line of lobbyists that appear in the mainstream news saying that this will end all of our problems in the Middle East. We're just doing what we did 20 years ago.
It's been a little over a year since the leadership shakeup at . What have you learned in that time, and are you feeling a sense of accomplishment a year later?Things have dramatically changed in the media landscape, and the fact that we're important and viewed as truth-tellers is an incredible indictment of the rest of the press. It's insane. I will say I am so deeply proud of the independent journalists out there that have stepped up and have a lot to lose in the face of harassment campaigns and lawfare and the immense power against them — they've done some of the best work ever. That's why we gave the scoop to Marisa Kabas at The Handbasket, she is just one of many people in independent media right now who are doing some of the best and most unafraid journalism I've seen in my lifetime. What we've seen is people who have told the truth and not kowtowed and not just bent over for this administration, or tried to meet halfway on fascism. Those are the places that have done really well. We've gone all in on speaking the truth, despite how dangerous it is now — the truth is incredibly absurd, so it just happens to line up very nicely with our business model. But yeah, it's been both horrible and horrific and and heartening to see that our work is more important than ever. And, you know, I would guess that by the end of the year, we're going to be one of the biggest newspapers in the country by distribution. We ship this paper to all 50 states and over 50 countries. I'm proud of the people who work here because they stood up a newspaper in a three months and have only made it bigger and better and sharper and more incisive.
A lot of people would look around at the state of the world and say it's beyond parody or satire. How do your writers think about that and face that challenge?That's a question that we get a lot, and I think that it just shows how hard this is and that you need professionals. What we do is incredibly inefficient, and it's art, and it's hard, and that's what makes us great. We throw away like 150 headlines a day. That's not an exaggeration. Every day, they go in there, they write usually over 150 headlines, and they whittle them down to two or three. Sometimes it's zero. Sometimes nothing comes out of that. And then they they decide, like, is this a video? Is something we grab as a NIB, which stands for 'news in brief.' Where does this live in the Onion universe, basically. And then from there, they build out the joke. It's surgery every single time on each verb and and article and everything. It's just a tremendous amount of work. If Sam Altman or whoever came in here and took over this company, it would be fucking obliterated instantly. Because it's an old-fashioned machine that we have that works really well. We have 40 years of institutional knowledge here. The thing that I've come to realize is there's a math and a science and art to this. I think most people feel that satire is like, turn everything up to 2x speed or just do the inverse or something. I think what The Onion does is like 1.25x speed. It allows you to see into some funhouse future. And it just allows [the writers] to cook a lot easier. They don't overdo it. And by doing that, it kind of like keeps it within the bounds of reality, but in a way that is both funny and biting.
There's a strong tradition there, but in this last year, we've seen some big swings that we wouldn't have seen from the old . I realize it didn't quite work, but are we going to see more stuff like the out of bankruptcy?We're still working on that, brother. As I've said, Alex Jones is the Michael Jordan of evading justice. He's gummed up the work so substantially in every way, and scared every judge and every person that he can intimidate. So we're still trying to get through it, and we are confident we'll end up with it by the end of the day, but I don't know when the end of that day is, so we're still fighting. But yes, expect us in weird places. We constantly want to show up, saying the sentence that everybody's thinking but can't say in public right now. We have this incredible market advantage of not being beholden to anybody right now. And it's great for our bottom line. What I'm trying to say is, we're going to be rich. It's a gold mine for us, baby! Expect us to do both the right and the funny thing in incredibly surprising and weird ways in the next few months and hopefully years. We have a bunch of stuff lined up that will hopefully get people off their couch a little bit. We want to be able to say stuff that other people, for institutional reasons, can't say, or they're too afraid to say.
You may be the only CEO in America making that promise.We're in a unique position, certainly. And other places have to learn from this — being afraid all the time and just constantly making transactional moves. How long can you survive like this? What is even the point of being alive if you're just gonna continue managing rot? And it seems like that's what 98 percent of people are doing in these media companies right now. I don't know, take a chance. Nobody likes what's happening. Especially if you're a journalism company or a media company, you're [meant to be] actually reflecting what people want or what people believe. So get some guts and do something interesting. It's not that hard.
So that's your advice to ?Him, no, he shouldn't. He should not do anything ever again. He should just stop whatever he's doing. [Those] people who have gotten us to a very bad spot should go take their boats into the ocean and do sea-steading or whatever they keep saying they're going to do. Go light fireworks in the ocean and look at them for the rest of your lives, just be happy. Go away from us, please.
I have an ethics question. Your partner, Kat Abughazaleh, is . I was just wondering if you'll abuse your power to endorse her through the through the paper of record.I've been threatening all of everyone in Illinois with personal punishment if they don't say that she's the coolest person who's ever lived. I'm extremely rich. What I do is I drive my Lamborghini to everyone's house and I just berate them at their doorstep. So that's my plan. If you haven't been berated yet by me at your doorstep, or had me shouting at you from the Lamborghini, then, frankly, I haven't done my job. She's fucking great. I'm proud of her. She's doing so good. And yeah, the second that we get into internecine local politics at The Onion is the second that we've lost the plot.
Though it is a Chicago paper, after all.It is a Chicago paper. That's correct. I'm assuming we've done some Chicago stuff, right? I'm actually gonna look it up. I don't really know, but let me see if we did, like, a Rod Blagojevich story. Oh, these are fucking ancient. Let's see. 'Rod Blagojevich Trying To Sell Presidential Commutation to Cellmate For $2.8 Million.' Pretty good. So, yeah, there is Illinois politics in general. But no, that whole thing is very strange, because I've never been around actual politics, so to hear it in the other room when I wake up every day — she spends every day just like, pounding on doors and shaking hands. And it's very different lifestyle, certainly.
It seems in the nature of that it's going to take rotten people down a notch rather than elevate good politics. But then you had this idea to put up information about gun violence on the Infowars site. Is there room for earnestness at , where it's not just sarcasm? I don't actually think so. I think there are words and there are actions. You can do good deeds with your actions, but in terms of the words that we put out on a day-to-day basis, we are going to remain stupid as fuck and silly, and we're going to try as hard as we can to get to the to the meat of stuff by not telling the truth. That is what The Onion is, writ large. We will obviously do stuff too, we will do whatever we can to make the world better. Hopefully, you'll see that in the next few months, as we kind of grow and build on top of this weird little newspaper empire established in a year. But we don't let anybody get in the way of the actual writing or the editorial or the videos they make, or anything like that. That stuff is sacrosanct, and if we can do some good on the side as a means of getting that writing in front of more people, even better. Good stories are kind of against the law right now. We want to show up in places and make people believe that good things are possible and that you're not going nuts, that things are actually quite exactly as bad as you think they are. And here's, like, a very short sentence that will allow you to think about the world through that construct. That's the whole goal here, man.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Best of Rolling Stone
Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best
The United States of Weed
Gaming Levels Up