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The Onion Reports Obama Pulls Out the Boxing Mittens

11 Comments

This report by The Onion is a wonderful news satire of how careful Obama was to respect McCain during the debates, while McCain avoided all eye contact with him. This is one of the few Onion video clips that gets better as it progresses. If anyone knows someone at The Onion, please let ’em know I’d do a cameo for free. Heck I’d even pay for the crew’s lunch on the day of my shoot. Even if it involves feedbags.

I’ve often wondered how The Onion decides whether a topic warrants a news article, video, or satire on the popular radio show. For instance, I thought “Wealthy Teen Nearly Experiences Consequence” would make an excellent video.

11 thoughts on “The Onion Reports Obama Pulls Out the Boxing Mittens”

  1. They’ve got some really creative people working at The Onion. I love how they skewer the media. With all of the financials issues going on I’m waiting for them to go after CNBC with a schizophrenic business reporter. I’m not sure how you can get a cameo, but a year ago, NPR did a piece on their team and talked about their writing process. They have a podcast online that’s worth listening to if you are interested in how they choose their stories.

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15559260

  3. I know what you mean about it rarely gets better the further along you go; I’ve read the print version of The Onion since the early 90s, when they still published in Madison, Wisconsin. Often you could get your day’s humor just by reading the headlines (I still do that).

    Yes this piece was very funny, but I think on point: I’ve noticed McCain’s ads paste together images, music and accusations and Obama’s are sincere, well spoken, logical appeals to thought processes. In any other year, McCain’s might win the day, but people are so scared by the economy I think they are actually paying attention.

  4. The Onion videos are generally the only ones I send to people via mass emails. The last one about the Vacation Yankee Stadium in the Hamptons was actually received very well among the Yankee fans I know.

    BTW, Nalts… Have you had problems with your blog and RSS feed? I read your blog via Livejournal and it just updated like a month of posts all at once, heh.

  6. I read that those who write for the Onion end up in places like Colbert Report and the Daily Show. I have one reprint of an Onion article on my blog from last year and that thing still gets tons of hits.

    They should hire you Kevin as man in the street, or old man in the street, or depressed old man in the street or cranky depressed old man in the street correspondent.

    Wait, Mr Safety make $20k a month?
    Get out of here!

  9. @8

    I’m not real. I’m actually a collab project between Nalts, spricket24, and renetto. The three of them needed someplace they could dump their worst material, the stuff that impedes their watchability. (Okay, that’s only half-true: Renetto is sending his best stuff my way, but it falls in at about the quality level as the other two.)

    Heck, I’m not even a real person. The three of them convinced a crack team at Pixar to donate time to create “me” and my surroundings, and the voice is generated by a supercomputer at Stanford U. For posting messages like this, interns at Nalts’ fortune 100 company are required to play me as part of their program.

    So really, it’s all an elaborate hoax. As Tim Allen once said, I’m not really here.

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