Images from Fair.org, The Onion, The Washington Post, and The Onion

By Situation Theatre 6/11/2019

And 10% of the lies of anything published by News Corp.

An explosive new study by the Albury-Wodonga Giggles Institute has confirmed something many suspected to be the case for years: satire is more truthful than news.

The research randomly sampled 100 articles each from The Onion, The Betoota Advocate, The Shovel, The Daily Mash, and The Out and Abouter and compared them to the same number of articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review.

News Corp publications had to be compared separately because they skewed the data so radically.

What the survey revealed about the extent of lies in the mainstream media compared to those in fictional news stories shocked even the researchers themselves.

In one example, satirical blog The Out And Abouter reported that Experts Say Vast Deserts, Absence Of Life, May Indicate Mars Was Once Run By Conservatives. This article was found to contain 47 fewer lies than the average New York Times piece about Bernie Sanders.

As a result, the authors of the study recommend news consumers treat mainstream media as a joke.