No Joke: The Onion Wins One of Journalism’s Biggest Awards
by Peter Kafka
Posted on April 1, 2009 at 3:38 PM PT
It’s not layoff news, and it’s not an April Fools prank: The Onion has won a Peabody, one of journalism’s most highfalutin awards.
The Peabodys, administered out of the University of Georgia, date back to 1941, and honor “the most outstanding achievements in electronic media, including radio, television and cable.” They tend to go to earnest television documentaries and the like, but they also allow for some very smart, quirky stuff.
Hence the award for the weekly’s “Onion News Network” video site, which debuted two years ago but has really been hitting its stride lately (disclosure: I’m pals with some Onion people). Per the judges: “The satirical tabloid’s online send-up of 24-hour cable-TV news was hilarious, trenchant and not infrequently hard to distinguish from the real thing.”
Other winners include the New York Times’s (NYT) excellent Web site, CBS’s (CBS) “60 Minutes” and… “Lost,” from Disney’s (DIS) ABC. But none of those are as fun to embed as Onion clips.
Here’s the Onion’s most recent effort:
Morning Show Host Starts Charity to Rid World of Flying Debris
And here’s a beauty that, like some other Onion stories, got digested as bonafide news in some places:
Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport
And while this one isn’t technically an Onion clip, I’ve always enjoyed its many meta qualities:
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Comments
man did you see the ninja parade? that made me lmao. also their radio is GREAT!
Posted by Simone Parma at April 2nd, 2009 at 1:59 amThe Onion is my absolute FAVORITE way to get my news!! I can’t stand to watch actual news… I find I can’t sleep at night if I do– well, when I do that and drink several bottles of Coke. Now, speaking of sleep, I’ve had a far easier time getting my shut-eye thanks the reasonably-priced memory foam mattress I managed to find. Ya-da, ya-da. I’m just glad that somebody out there finally recognized what a tremendously brilliant resource The Onion is, joking or not.
Posted by Abigail Slemp at October 25th, 2009 at 8:16 pm