InfoWars audience is loyal only to Jones himself and will never visit InfoWars again. Jones will go elsewhere, 100% of his audience will follow, and the Onion is in for a big letdown. If you are dreaming about reprogramming Jone's followers by taking over InfoWars, it just shows that you know nothing about the typical InfoWars consumer.
This my view, in fact the whole thing completely puzzles me, Jones is free to publish his vile views elsewhere and his followers will find him. Infowars "onion-style" would have to be pretty dammed subtle to "trick" Jonesites into consuming it sincerely.
How the parents of the Sandy Hook victims use their compensation is their business but I feel supporting advocacy for better mental health facilities in the USA would be a better use of the money.
I will never cease to by amused by the idea that Jones' fans value the InfoWars brand and website above Jones himself. He is a celebrity among his fans. Exactly 0 of them will pay any attention to InfoWars the minute Jones is no longer associated with the brand.
I don’t think they expected anything different. I think they saw the brand for sale at firesale prices, and decided they could use it. In fact, they’re one of the only ’mainstream’ outlets that can use the InfoWars brand, since it’s funny. Perhaps they will set up a ‘competing’ ‘right-wing’ satire site ala Colbert Report vs Daily Show.
The difficulty with this is that anything that isn’t a hard 180 involves continuing to publish approximately the same type of content for a while, which is probably unpalatable to The Onion. Anything that is a small enough course correction to retain its audience is too small a shift to get away from that hateful nonsense. It’s a nice idea to try to steer people away, but you have to start off by driving in the same direction, which nobody wants to do.
> The trick is to lie to them to get them away from their hateful and conspiracy theories
I can't articulate what you're admitting to exactly, but it's an interesting admission.
On a more serious note, most of the readers of these kinds of outlets aren't stupid in this specific sense. They go looking for confirmation, rather than new information. This is why they're hard to untangle.
> They go looking for confirmation, rather than new information. This is why they're hard to untangle.
This applies to most readers of most things, not just fringe content on the Left or the Right.
Most people are stuck in their confirmation biases, and few make an intellectual effort to look at topics from multiple angles and via multiple media outlets on various sides of the political spectrum.
It would be a massive undertaking but wouldn't it be funny if the savior of modern media turned out to be a student newspaper from Madison, Wisconsin?