Fake News Media Consolidation

After more than a year of legal back-and-forth, it finally has happened. In the biggest fake news consolidation deal probably ever, The Onion has finalized its purchase of Alex Jones' InfoWars. I have been reporting on the story since news of the sale first broke, but now it appears to be for real.

Families of the children killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting won a billion dollar judgement against Jones. He had repeated insisted on his show that the shooting was staged and their children were not really dead - which is a level of awfulness that as a parent I find hard to imagine. The Onion purchased InfoWars during Jones' bankruptcy auction.

The Onion confirmed the news in a separate statement along with a link encouraging people to buy satirical tote bags featuring a mashup of both companies’ logos.

"Finally. It took 17 months and hundreds of hours in courtrooms, but America’s Finest News Source has entered into an agreement to operate America’s Source Of Disinformation For Sovereign Citizens Who Reject The Idea Of Child Support,” The Onion said. “Big things are coming."

The fictional CEO of Tetrahedron, Bryce P. Tetraeder, elaborated on what “big things” might be in store in a story on The Onion itself. “The InfoWars of tomorrow will converge into a swirling vortex of content about content, talent acquiring talent, rings of concentric media mergers processing all human artistry into one endlessly digestible slurry,” Tetraeder wrote.

“This will be a dank, sunless place, one where panic and capital feed on each other like twins in the womb of a hulking, unknowable monster—a monster known by many names, but which I like to call modern-day America.”

So exactly the same, I guess? Except, of course, instead of pretending fake news stories are real news, the new InfoWars seems slated to instead embrace its fakeness. This raises the possibility of media consolidation in the sphere of fake news, so we'll have to watch carefully how this goes.

We may find that when fewer companies that control fake news, the variety of fakeness out there will suffer. Only time will tell.