Former NBC journalist Ben Collins, who recently became CEO of satirical news site The Onion, believes disinformation has won and is unconcerned about headlines being taken seriously.
Collins said The Onion has had the most correct and steady moral compass of any news outlet in his lifetime, often being the first to call out issues like the Iraq War and trans rights.
“My first instinct is to say, ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,’” Collins said.
“I will say, The Onion, ironically, has been, even unironically, the most correct paper of my lifetime. When it was deeply unpopular in 2003, they were some of the first people to call out the Iraq war… they’ve been up on the moral panic on trans rights,” he added.
As an NBC reporter, Collins openly displayed left-wing views on social media and was temporarily banned from covering Elon Musk due to critical posts about his Twitter takeover.
Collins remains upset about the “Twitter Files” revealing internal decisions to block the Hunter Biden story.
He says disinformation has won on platforms like Twitter-turned-X and the best way to fight is adopting that language to tell the truth.
“Disinformation won, there is no other way to put it,” Collins said.
“Musk sort of won the pipeline war with Twitter and then he turned it into a weird, spammy bot website where lies and conspiracy theories won out. Disinformation won,” Collins said.
“The best way to fight, in this moment, is to take that language, take that verbiage, of disinformation but kind of tell the truth with it,” Collins added. “That’s why we got into this.”
Despite criticizing X, Collins has used it to promote The Onion.
In September he threatened to leave journalism unless things changed but recently took the Onion CEO role after publishing just one story in over 200 days since then.
