Editorial: Satire v. Fake News, and why we don't publish our April Fool's articles online
As many of our avid readers may have noticed, the stories from our last issue, though available in print, were not placed online.
Like any organization, we appreciate all the shares on Facebook and hits on our website, but last week we kept our arguably most popular issue – our April Fool’s Edition – to print-only. Though this seems like a slighting of our digital readers, we do so for good reason.
The April Fool’s Edition has been a tradition of The Weekly’s for as long as our records stretch back, and the decision to keep it offline is not something new to our current staff. For as long as we’ve had the website, we’ve kept this issue offline, but our decision this year carries particular weight.
The staff has always had a blast filling our paper cover-to- cover with Onion-style satire. Satire, however, only works so long as the audience is in on the joke. Perhaps none of our readers would actively believe that the College was stuffing Harambe for display in New Sci, or that President Williams’ evil twin is the one really to blame for some of his less popular decisions, but a story that the Courts might be razed for a new parking lot or the soccer field converted to dorms house a certain amount of believability out of context.
The context being, of course, our masthead changed to The Brucknerberg Weekly, date stamped the last week of March. The purpose here is obvious – happy April Fool’s Day, everyone!
Though a couple months down the road, and separated from some of the more ridiculous stories, puts the articles in a different context; one where the audience doesn’t expect satire, and which lacks the original framework meant to clue the reader in. In this context, the articles pose a real danger of becoming fake news.
Fake news, of course, is more than just misinterpreted satire. Fake news has the intent to mislead, to cause panic or evoke emotions; an example might be celebrity death hoaxes.
What was published in our April Fool’s Edition had no intent to be taken seriously – and, quite frankly, that was the joke.
We speculated uses for the tuition raise, poked fun at the lack of space on campus, mocked meme culture and made fun of our own staff. We had no intention of trying to disguise any of what was so clearly fake as real, and that, in short, is the difference between satire and fake news.
That being said, anyone with a smartphone or laptop is welcome to check out the digital PDF version of our April Fool’s edition... so long as you know not to believe a single word.