Cries of laughter could be heard miles away from the Mabel Brown Room as two writers from the publication The Onion- America's Finest News Source presented the audience with their best satirical articles. These writers further proved the belief that you should never believe everything you hear or read. The Onion makes its fame by providing its followers with outrageous and false stories on political figures and life- changing events that have happened or are currently occurring. The Onion is an example of a publication that tries to find the humor in every situation.
From this presentation we all learned the secrets of the writing process behind The Onion. The biggest revelation to me was the fact that the first step in writing an article for The Onion is first creating the headline. Usually in the journalism world the heading is the last part of the article that is created, and the heading is most likely formed by the editor. In my opinion, this would be a hard task to accomplish because you never know what you are writing until you apply the pencil to the paper.
Even though I was laughing throughout this presentation, I was constantly questioning the ethics of their publication. I thought it would be nearly impossibly for them to get away with the facts and words they had written, but this is not the case. Since their publication is considered to be satire parody, they never run into any trouble from the law. Since the public knows that all of the information they are writing is in fact false, they are writing ethically. The writers are also careful about who they target. By choosing targets that are often in the spotlight, it is equivalent to writing a gossip magazine such as Star about these people.
From this presentation I definitely became more knowledgeable about the code of ethics and how it can be applied according to a publication’s tendencies. The lesson to learn here is you can’t believe everything you read kiddos.
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