Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

The Onion, if you're not familiar, is a "news" outlet that puts out a printed newspaper, a TV show and a website absolutely chock full of fake news. Typical headlines are things like, "Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What's Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions" and "Syracuse Leaves Big East For Woman Named 'Misti'." The Onion, in my humble opinion, varies between mildly amusing and downright hilarious, and occasionally it hits the nail on the head with its headlines in ways that make you say, "What's sad is, that's almost true."

From time to time, the Onion gets in trouble because someone doesn't realize they're kidding. There is, in fact, an entire blog devoted to people taking the Onion literally on Facebook, often with hilarious results. Many years ago, when the Onion published a story saying that Congress was threatening to leave Washington unless they got a new Capitol building with sky boxes, it got picked up by the official media in China and reported as factual evidence of the failures of capitalism.

Today there was another such Onion incident. The Onion ran an article on its website with the headline, "Congress Takes Group of Schoolchildren Hostage." The tagline was, "'We need $12 trillion or all these kids die.'" This was accompanied by a doctored photo of John Boehner with a gun to the head of a little girl.

The Onion then began sending tweets, the first of which read, "BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building." This got retweeted enough times and alarmed enough people that the phones at the Capitol Police Department started ringing off the hook. They actually began an investigation, because by this point, although they knew the story was false, they couldn't figure out where it had started.

So the question is, is this just another case of people not getting an Onion joke, or did the Onion actually do something wrong here? I think it's the latter, but apparently for a different reason than most commentators out there.

My take is this: the Onion is funny because they manage to run stories that relate to reality in some way but are just off the wall enough that if you're paying attention you know they can't be true. In this instance, the notion that Congress is "holding the country hostage" is not a new one, but no one really thinking about it would believe that John Boehner actually was threatening little children with a firearm. You may or may not like the politics of this story, and you may or may not think it was funny, but it was clearly intended as a joke. Most of the comments out there about this mess suggest that such a story by itself, or with the picture, crosses the line of decency. I actually think that is not the problem

The problem is that, when the Onion started tweeting, they did something crucially different than what they did in the original story. That first tweet had absolutely nothing in it that would even hint that it was supposed to be a joke. There wasn't anything about how Congress, as a whole, was taking hostages. That's the part we knew was false. All it said was that there was gunfire and screams at the Capitol. That was purely believable, and because of that it wasn't funny.


You might argue that anyone who knows anything about the Onion should have known it wasn't true anyway, and you would have a point. However, not everyone knows the Onion, and once people started retweeting and the original author was lost in the stream, people seeing this tweet had no way to know that it wasn't real. The Onion lost control of the joke. In hindsight, at least, that seems pretty predictable.


The Onion's sin here wasn't making fun of violence at the Capitol. It was joking in a way that did not insure that everyone would at least have a chance to be in on the joke. I hope the folks over at the Onion learned a lesson, because I'd hate to feel like I can't read it anymore. It's pretty funny.

This post was updated on September 30 at 11:09 PM.

Actress Brittany Murphy, whom you may have seen in "8 Mile" or "Clueless" or heard as the voice of Gloria in "Happy Feet," died today at the age of 32.  She went into cardiac arrest at her home and was pronounced dead at the hospital.  The Los Angeles County Coroner's Office has said that foul play is not suspected, her death appears to be natural, and they are looking into her medical history and "some other issues."  The blogosphere and the entertainment media are buzzing with speculation, ranging from complications from diabetes, to anorexia, to drug use.  Various references to Murphy have been in the top 10 trending topics on Twitter all day.

What makes us so fascinated with the lives and deaths of celebrities? Certainly we can all agree that healthy 32 year olds don't often drop dead of cardiac arrest, but why are we more interested in Brittany Murphy than we would be in the death of some random resident of Los Angeles whom we've never heard of?

Part of the issue is that we are, in some sense, told by the media that we're supposed to care.  If you are a media outlet that covers celebrities, you're obviously going to cover this in a big way.  You're going to talk about Brittany Murphy as though you know everything there is to know, or at least are talking to people who do, and as though nothing is more important than finding out what happened to her.  We, the viewers and readers of this, think, "This must be important because they are covering it so much."

There is more to it, however.  If you go purely by name recognition, most celebrities have more people who "know of them" than the average citizen.  When someone whose name you know dies, it piques your interest, and so we pay attention to the death of celebrities.  When someone we think of as someone we "know" dies, we want to know what happened both because we are upset and also because we want to make sure it isn't something that might happen to us.  Celebrities offer us the opportunity to explore traumatic death with a minimum of grief, from a safe distance.

The danger, however, is that there is a fine line between taking interest in the circumstances of someone's death and feeling entitled to know everything about those circumstances.  Brittany Murphy may have died of anorexia, or drug use or diabetes, or she may have had a heart defect, or something else we don't even know about. The thing that is difficult for fans and celebrity reporters and bloggers to reckon with is, the answer is actually none of our business. 

The family and the coroner's office would be well within their rights not to release the information publicly.  Brittany Murphy may have made the choice to make her life public, but her family absolutely does not have to make her death public.  Lots of people probably don't want to hear that. Murphy was somebody's wife, somebody's daughter, and somebody's friend.  They have the right to deal with this horrible situation as they need to.  Taking care of us is really not their concern, and if that leaves us with unanswered questions, we're just going to have to live with that.

Bryson Ross, a 2 year-old Florida boy, drowned in his family's swimming pool on Monday.  His mother, Shellie Ross, is better known in the blogosphere as @Military_Mom, a mommy blogger with more than 5,400 Twitter followers who writes about her experiences parenting four children and being married to a military husband.  Ross was tweeting just 1 minute before her 11 year-old called 911, and Ross performed CPR on Bryson.  Thirty-four minutes after Bryson was taken to the hospital, she tweeted asking for prayers for him.  Five hours later she announced his death on Twitter. 

There has been a firestorm of controversy surrounding these tweets.  Some are saying that Ross was too busy tweeting to watch her child, and was callous to tweet about the accident.  Some are dismayed to have messages such as these delivered to their timeline when they are used to having much lighter-hearted fair from Ross.  Many are asking the question, "What kind of mother tweets when her child is dying?"

I don't know Shellie Ross.  I'm not a follower of hers on Twitter and I had not heard of her before this happened.  But I do have an answer to that question.  What kind of mother tweets when her child is dying?  A blogging mother.  More precisely, a blogging mother going through every parent's worst nightmare.

When trauma strikes, it is literally too big for our brains to process.  We cannot assimilate the situation fully into the normal structures with which we understand the world.  We have no place for this new information, and it gets stuck.  Because we don't know what to do with what has happened, it is not at all uncommon for people to "revert to type" following a tragedy.  That is, they suddenly and even compulsively do the things that are most comfortable for them.

I have heard stories of military wives who see a chaplain and an officer approaching their door and go take a bath before they let them in to deliver the news that their husband has died in action.  I have seen people go to the kitchen and start cooking.  Children in particular often shock adults by greeting horrible news with something like, "OK, can I go play now?"

When something awful happens, it can seem like the world has come to an end.  Doing what is most familiar to us gives us a sense of normalcy that we desperately need in order to even begin to understand what has happened.  Shellie Ross exhibited two basic, instinctive behaviors -- she did what was familiar and she asked the first people she could think of for help.  Her behavior wasn't abnormal -- the situation was abnormal.  So maybe we could all show a little compassion instead of rushing to judge.