Onion Nation

In that meeting, issues under discussion were whether it would be funnier for Detroit Red Wings goalie Chris Osgood to be caught making love to the Stanley Cup or merely getting to "second base" with it; whether 1937 Triple Crown Winner War Admiral should have been spotted leaving the 2008 Belmont Stakes in a Rolls Royce with a cigar in his teeth; and the comic value of a TPGA Tour, which would give transsexual golfers a chance to compete. The meeting finally petered out around 6:30. Leaving the office, the writers radiated a jittery, joke-addled adrenaline. One could see their eyes roving over the cubicles and the receptionist's desk with a suspicious alertness that somewhere close by lurked an unexploited joke, a kind of comedian's version of the neurosis that causes war veterans to hit the deck when a car backfires. On the elevator ride down back to Broadway, a woman left the elevator at the fourth floor. "Fourth floor, fourth floor," one of the contributors murmured, as if he were trying to spin a headline from it. "That's pretty funny."

"Yeah," said Reiss. "It'd be funnier if she'd gotten off at the third."

If a mattress were substituted for the meeting table, the chamber where the Onion's writers spend the balance of their professional lives could pass as the bedroom of an excessively bright, not terribly well-adjusted teenage boy. In one corner, beside a rack of comic books, a bookshelf holds a small bounty of items brought in by staffers to furnish the room: an action figure of Lee Majors as the Six Million Dollar Man; an enema syringe; a videotape titled "The United States Capitol: A Place of Resounding Deeds"; copies of books such as "Everything You Need to Know About Abortion" and "Darwinian Dynamics"; as well as a half-dozen trophies, including one for the Onion's retrospective news compendium "Our Dumb Century," which topped the New York Times Best Seller List in May 1999, and a "The Best of the Web" award from the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences for the Onion's Web site, which, according to Onion management, receives more than 5 million unique visitors per month.

As its strait-laced cousins in the traditional print media suffer withering cutbacks, the Onion is in comparatively robust shape. In the past three years, the Onion's New York staff doubled in size, to 50 full-time employees, as the print edition of the paper, which is free, added markets in Austin, Los Angeles and Washington (The Washington Post prints the paper's D.C. edition and sells local ads for it), and holds strong at a circulation of 630,000 nationwide, management says. Meanwhile, according to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, free papers that subsist on ad sales, as the Onion does, have been faring poorly. Creative Loafing, which owns free newsweeklies throughout the South, mid-Atlantic and the Midwest (among them Washington's City Paper) filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September because of debt and declining ad sales. The Onion's ad sales have seen no appreciable decline.

The Onion's success in a down market reflects Americans' surging appetite for satiric news as a regular part of their media diet. A March 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center placed Jon Stewart fourth among the nation's "most admired news figures," ahead of Ted Koppel, Peter Jennings and Diane Sawyer. In early October, "The Daily Show's" election campaign coverage broke its own ratings records at that time with an audience of 2.4 million, outstripping "Hardball With Chris Matthews" by nearly 1 million viewers. Or, compare the 6 million or so who watched Katie Couric's momentous CBS interview with Sarah Palin to the audience of 14 million who tuned in to watch the Alaska governor's appearance on "Saturday Night Live" and its fake news segment.

According to Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, the success of the Onion and its ilk lies in part in the ability of satirists to penetrate the hypocrisies of the news cycle that the straight press is compelled to dance around. For instance, just weeks after 9/11, when the likes of Dan Rather were pledging their support for President Bush on network TV ("Wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where," he told David Letterman), the Onion was already presaging, from the safe bunker of satire, the leaps of credulity America would soon be asked to make in obeisance to the War on Terror. "If I Don't Get My Medium-Rare Shell Steak With Roasted Vegetables In The Next 10 Minutes, The Terrorists Have Already Won," read an Onion op-ed published in November 2001.

"The public's frankly gotten frustrated with the convention of objectivity, the idea that you have to present both sides of the story, even if one side is completely bogus," said Niles, citing as an example news reports on global warming in which the views of politicians and lay-skeptics get consideration equal to studies by climate science PhDs. Niles went on to argue that satirists gained additional traction in the post-9/11 news climate, when mainstream media outlets didn't push back as hard as they might have against perceived intimidation of the press by the Bush administration.

"Take for example, [Ari Fleischer's] chilling quote that all Americans 'need to watch what they say,'" an admonition Bush's former press secretary made about TV talk show host Bill Maher at a White House news briefing shortly after 9/11. "That should have been the moment that all the journalists woke up and said, 'Screw that!' But it was generally the satirists who felt emboldened enough to say the things that the mainstream news wouldn't for fear of seeming too partisan."

But culture war considerations aside, Niles attributes the boom of the faux news corps to a plainer cause. "Quite simply, people like the Onion are creating more engaging content than the daily papers are."

The rise of the parodic industry poses new riddles for media observers: In years to come, will America's faux news prove a more enduring enterprise than the news itself? What might it mean for our nation that joke news could outlast the institutions it ridicules? "Speaking as a citizen of America, it's a little terrifying that real news is crashing while fake news is growing," said Chet Clem, the Onion's editorial manager. "It's scary. You wonder where people are going to get their facts."

But on the bright side, Clem continued, at least the shrinkage of the newspaper industry had yielded some usable copy for the paper, inspiring such stories as, Coverage Of "Dying Newspaper Trend Buys Nation's Newspapers Three More Weeks."

By Tuesday, after another lengthy meeting, the 140-some first-cut headlines were winnowed to a final assortment. "Steven Tyler Laid Off From Aerosmith As Band Jobless Rate Hits 20%" endured, as did, " 'Time' Publishes Definitive Obama Puff Piece"; "5-Year-Old Wants To Be A Tractor When She Grows Up;" and "Bill Clinton Sadly Folds First Lady Dress Into Box."