NEW YORK — Newslo, the first purely democratic source for breaking news, is formally at war with dictatorial and monopolizing newsgroup, The Onion. In a statement from Roger Arkin, Press Secretary for Newslo, the site announced a preemptive strike on The Onion after Newslo’s intelligence department discovered The Onion’s plan for an attempted Internet takeover.
Arkin explained that The Onion has “slowly, over time, been developing a dangerous satirical monopoly,” and that the site’s longtime dictator, General Will Tracy, has been seeking satire technology that could threaten the western World Wide Web. In a Q-and-A with the press, Arkin admitted that Newslo began to consider action against The Onion after the latter began to systematically obliterate its competition. Arkin was likely alluding to a wave of strikes in the fall of 2011 that saw General Tracy destroy a plethora of satire news start-ups, such as the now-defunct LOLNews.org. General Tracy is said to have killed three LOLNews interns, leaked Photoshopped nude photographs of the site’s editor, falsified information that suggested the site was funded by Ann Coulter, and eventually hacked into the site itself to shut it down from within, aided by the hacker group Anonymous.
“It was brutal, what they did to those poor kids,” Newslo Secretary of Defense Alexander Marcliff said in a press conference last month. After the Secretary’s explicit expression of disapproval, many began to suspect that Newslo was preparing to strike The Onion, though no confirmation came until today. Marcliff later went on to say that The Onion had “become more powerful than Matt Drudge after the Clinton sex scandal — they need to be stopped.”
A statement released from General Tracy claims that the attacks last fall were reactionary, and that “the Zionist regime was trying to suppress” and displace him. Such claims, however, do not explain the rumors surrounding Tracy’s practices within The Onion itself. When he discovered a brown M&M in his office’s candy bowl, Tracy reportedly dangled a junior staff writer out of the window while screaming, “Only blue and yellow! Only blue and yellow!” Tracy also famously proclaimed, “There are no homosexuals in The Onion.”
The Onion moved its central operations to Chicago earlier this year, a move that surprised many — but not Marcliff. While the transition resulted in a significant loss of staff for Tracy’s regime, Marcliff explains that the Second City is the perfect place for Tracy to develop The Onion’s new satire team and nefarious new technology. Tracy hopes to expand The Onion’s weakened – but still significant – army of overweight thirty-somethings eating Hot Cheetos and laughing at their own jokes. “The kind of people who never go outside,” Marcliff explains. “What better place to find them than a city where it’s thirty below zero half the year?”
When members of the press asked Secretary Arkin how a smaller, independent site like Newslo – the very sort of newsgroup that The Onion destroyed last fall in its quest for market monopoly – could take on a 24-year-old veteran agency, Arkin just laughed.
“That’s probably the same question people asked the founding fathers when they took on Britain,” he replied. “David beat Goliath, didn’t he? Rudy made the football team, didn’t he? Barack Obama fixed the economy, didn’t he?” Pausing, Arkin looked away from the blank stares in the room, conceding, “Okay, maybe the underdog doesn’t always win. But it does sometimes, doesn’t it?”
A survey of Internet analysts has shown widespread support for Newslo’s attempt to end The Onion’s monopoly. Many agreed that the only thing worse than The Onion’s expansion of its dominance was, in the words of one analyst, “Courtney Love getting Instagram.”
Nonetheless, some in the satire news community expressed skepticism. When Newslo president Adam Gassman took the stage, members of the press pointed out that any other site could develop the same technologies as The Onion. They wondered, should Newslo defeat General Tracy, what it planned to do about the seven billion other sites that could seek the same technology down the line.
President Gassman shrugged, claiming that Newslo has pledged to handle any and all future threats as they arise. In the meantime, Gassman said, he is fully committed to stopping The Onion’s takeover of their niche of the web. “The American people deserve a choice as to where to get their breaking news,” Gassman said. “They deserve options. They deserve for their lies to be balanced and unbiased – not the greedy, corporatized fallacies The Onion’s been peddling.”
Newslo is believed to be deploying troops as soon as Monday, October 8.
