Comedy news outlet The Onion — reinvigorated by new ownership over this year — is bringing back its once-popular video parodies of cable news. But this time, there’s someone with real news anchor experience in the chair.
When the first episodes appear online Monday, former WAMU and MSNBC host Joshua Johnson will be the face of the resurrected “Onion News Network.” Playing an ONN anchor character named Dwight Richmond, Johnson says he’s bringing a real anchor’s sense of clarity — and self-importance — to the job.
“If ONN is anything, it’s a news organization that is so unaware of its own ridiculousness that it has the confidence of a serial killer,” says Johnson, 44.
As the host of WAMU’s NPR-syndicated “1A,” and then shows on MSNBC and NBC’s streaming site, Johnson covered hot-button issues of the Trump and covid eras. For ONN, his content veers into the absurd.
New ONN segments starring Johnson focus on fake news reports that seem designed to tickle viewers afflicted by news fatigue: Pope Francis’s dire condition after being left in a “hot popemobile” by irresponsible Swiss Guards, and an eclipse-style watch party for the appearance of a divine body part too crude to describe.
But Johnson said he isn’t just there for the laughs. Instead, he’s hoping his ONN segments prod real journalists to reconsider why some media outlets – pompous and disconnected from their audiences – are so easily parodied.
“I hope by seeing this lampooned again, and by seeing it dissected again, it’ll advance the conversation about what we do about it, about how we break this old style and evolve it for the future so that this profession will survive,” Johnson says.
In November 2022, NBC canceled his streaming show, NOW Tonight, and Johnson moved from New York to Las Vegas for “a change of pace, much lower costs of living and to reset for a while.” Since then, he has been sharing his thoughts via text, audio and video on his website the Night Light, with topics such as “The Neuroscience of Electing Kamala Harris” and “the liberating moral of ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.’” He’s also been learning how to DJ. An overarching goal has been to “unclench and detox and think.”
Onion CEO Ben Collins, a former disinformation reporter for NBC News, knew Johnson from the network and asked him earlier this year if he’d like to try out for ONN’s lead anchor. Johnson, a theater and broadcasting double major in college, surprised Onion staffers with his audition. After getting ONN’s anchor job, Johnson started flying between Las Vegas and Chicago to film segments.
“We brought him in expecting it to be good, but he took it so incredibly seriously,” Collins said.
Founded in 1988 as a weekly humor newspaper in Wisconsin, the Onion grew to include a website and a series of books. Some of its headlines have become internet shorthand, like spinoff site ClickHole’s “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point.” After a mass shooting, an immortal and recurring Onion headline sums up a sense of countrywide despair: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
The news network started online in 2007 during the Onion’s boom years, when the outlet tried to surf the digital age by producing countless online clips and two seasons of a show on the cable channel IFC.
But ONN effectively ended in 2013 and – like much of the Onion franchise — lay dormant for years under the ownership of private equity holding company G/O Media. In January, Collins posted on social media that he was trying to recruit people to help him buy the Onion. What started as more or less a joke, though, eventually succeeded in April when a group that included Collins took over the Onion with funding from the former CEO of tech company Twilio.
Collins, another ex-journalist, said the outlet offers him and other staffers a chance to critique current events and politics without being beholden to outside interests, or having to wrestle with irritated sources. Plus, he says, it’s “100% more fun.”
ONN’s return marks the latest expansion of the Onion under its new management. In August, the Onion relaunched its print edition, prompting tens of thousands of new subscriptions, according to Collins. Internally, Collins says staffers are thrilled to be working on more parts of the Onion – satirical ads for the print issue, scripts for ONN – instead of just churning out funny slide shows for the website.
“A lot of media places are deeply grim environments right now,” Collins says. “This is the opposite. You go to work here and the light is back.”
All of it, Collins says, is meant to recall the internet of roughly 2010, a time Collins calls the “golden age of new media content.” But Collins says he’s hopeful the Onion can appeal to two of its key demographics: young people discovering the Onion and ONN for the first time and comedy nerd millennials whose senses of humor were shaped by the publication during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Even before the ONN relaunch, archival clips from the series have been thriving on social media. A 2011 segment about a criminal trial where a “white girl will be tried as a black adult” earned 19 million views when it was posted on the Onion’s TikTok page. Collins estimates that roughly 20 percent of viewers did not get the joke.
The new ONN will face no shortage of rivals in the world of streaming political satire, from amateurs on TikTok to cable shows hosted by John Oliver and Jon Stewart.
The Onion may be trying to recapture the jocular internet magic of 2010, but Johnson wants his satire to match the unhinged surreality of the 2020s.
“There’s a need for comedy that’s not predictable, that is truly off the rails,” Johnson says.