Of all the news sources, The Onion (@theonion) makes us smile the most and the vast majority of the time, readers take it for what it is: an always-creative satire on contemporary news and chaotic randomness, both of which are welcome changes to the dreary and pessimistic routine news cycle.
But it seems that someone doesn’t quite get the joke.
First, some background on the Syrian Electronic Army from the Committee to Protect Journalists:
…In its campaign to silence media coverage, the government disabled mobile phones, landlines, electricity, and the Internet. Authorities have routinely extracted passwords of social media sites from journalists through beatings and torture. The pro-government online group the Syrian Electronic Army has frequently hacked websites to post pro-regime material, and the government has been implicated in malware attacks targeted at those reporting on the crisis.
Which brings us to the unfortunate affair at The Onion’s Twitter and Facebook accounts today. From Huffington Post:
Messages from the Onion’s Twitter and Facebook feeds prompted questions about whether the accounts had been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army on Monday. The hacker group claimed responsibility for the posts.
“The Syrian Electronic Army Was Here” appeared on the Onion’s Facebook page on Monday morning. Similar messages appeared on the Facebook and Twitter feeds for Onion Sports, and were removed.
CHICAGO—Following today’s incident in which the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into The Onion’s Twitter
account, sources at America’s Finest News Source confirmed that its Twitter password has been changed to OnionMan77 in order to prevent any future cyber-attacks.
Of course, the hackers were not without their own perceived reason, valiantly summed up as such:
“We hope people take it in good humor and understand our people’s suffering,” the email added. “The Onion can do a much better job reporting the truth through its satire. Unfortunately even they seem to be biased.”
We must agree that The Onion, while supplying us with crucial headlines like “Meal Not Sitting Well with Area Man”, “White House Denies Existence of Karl Rove”, and “Chocolate Pudding Up $2 a Barrel”, can always do better, and we expect nothing less.
However, to call them “biased” is a bit of a stretch, especially when their coverage of Syria has included stories that fall in favor of the government and Bashar al-Assad’s willful preservation of the al-Assad dynasty, such as “Standing By The Assad Regime: An Onion Special Report On Remaining Loyal To Old Friends” and al-Assad’s own Op-Ed from March 25, 2013: “Hi, In The Past 2 Years, You Have Allowed Me To Kill 70,000 People”.
The Onion has also covered the topics of economic fallout from the Syria conflict with reports like “Target Pulls All Sponsorship From Publicly Ignored Syria Conflict.”
In all seriousness, The Onion handled the affair with its trademark aplomb, publishing an Op-Ed from the Syrian Electronic Army titled: “We Were Going To Take Over The ‘Onion’ Website, But It’s A Real Mess With All Those Ads“, trashing The Onion’s website:
We were looking for a media company with dignity and gravitas that puts the value of its content well above cheap, desperate grabs for advertising dollars. But what we found instead was a nauseatingly commercial-heavy site that does not, apparently, value its users in the slightest. And the bottom line is we won’t stoop to such a pitifully low level to publish our pro-Assad message next to that garbage.
The whole affair is steeped in irony, as the Syrian Electronic Army tried to hack and then beat The Onion at its own game of satire, on behalf of Bashar al-Assad. Would Herman T. Zweibel ever have thought that The Onion would play such a major role in the minds of those at war?
Or, was the whole thing a publicity stunt for The Onion? Hmmm, there could be much more to this Onion story once you start… peeling away the layers.
Apologies for that.
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