Last Updated on: 14th November 2024, 11:37 am
The Onion, the satirical news company that repeatedly spoofed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, has won the bankruptcy auction for control over his media empire — most notably InfoWars, the far-right, conspiracy-minded website that served as Jones’ primary online platform.
The Onion plans to shutter Jones’ InfoWars and rebuild the website featuring well-known internet humor writers and content creators,according to a person with knowledge of the sale.
Jones, one of the most-high profile and financially successful alternative media personalities, built a small empire off a radio show-turned-internet video operation centered around the Infowars brand that focused on false and often bizarre claims about grand conspiracies and government wrongdoing.
Conspiracies such as the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting that killed 26 people being a hoax, which is why this highly successful media empire went bankrupt and now finds itself in much better hands. Families of the victims of that shooting sued and were awarded somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1.5 billion, which Jones and his companies weren’t successful enough to pay, as it happens.
Terms of the sale haven’t been disclosed, but whatever they paid, I’m sure they’re going to make it worth every cent.
Not sure I’ve ever described myself as gleeful, but that seems fitting today.
I’ve got bad news. It’s actually up for review because another company that Alex Jones happens to be part of wanted that infowars. Apparently this is somewhat normal in bankruptcy cases, but we will see what happens here. It doesn’t look good.
Damn. That’s too bad. Hopefully we wind up with a happy ending here. Being from Canada I don’t have a great understanding of American bankruptcy laws, so I didn’t know that was a thing.
I don’t know whether or not it doesn’t look good, but Alex Jones has definitely sued claiming that there were problems with the bid that the Onion made. Some of his arguments sound silly to me like the one about how they’re going to misuse the name and the IP and ruin what he had spent years building (poor muffin maybe should have kept his stupid mouth shut and not gotten spanked by the people he defamed), but if there are actually transparency and procedural issues like he claims, that could be more trouble.