INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Frequent readers of The Onion can be forgiven if they assumed one major news item this week was satire. The paper and the site are famed for stories that straddle the line between plausible and absurd, so the headline “The Onion buys InfoWars” seemed very much on-brand.

In this case, however, it’s completely true.

The company that owns The Onion has won a bankruptcy auction for the InfoWars assets of Alex Jones, prompted by the more than $1 billion Jones owes family members of the Sandy Hook shooting victims.

The news caught even those who live and breathe media by surprise.

“Well, it did,” Dr. Julia Fox from IU’s Media School told viewers on WISH-TV’s Daybreak. “But, you know, it’s poetic justice in a way.”

Fox described the sale in full-circle terms, harkening back to the original use of the phrase ‘fake news’.
“We used to call comedic news, like the Daily Show, fake news,” she said. “And then we got real fake news, sadly, which is serious information pretending to be factual news, but in fact isn’t.”

As for the fate of the InfoWars brand, Fox said the speed of action after the sale makes it clear that the future will look nothing like the past.

“They took that site down within an hour and a half. That’s gone, at least on that website, and there’s going to be one exclusive advertiser and it’s an anti-gun group. So they’re clearly making a point about getting rid of that kind of information.”

Executives from The Onion say they plan to relaunch the website in early 2025 with satire aimed at conspiracy theorists and right-wing personalities, as well as information about preventing gun violence through messages from the group Everytown for Gun Safety.

Fox said, “I found it interesting that the bankruptcy trustee didn’t have to give [InfoWars] to the highest bidder, but to the best bid. It was backed by the Sandy Hook families, who won a defamation award against [Jones] and then he filed bankruptcy. So that’s why this whole thing happened.”