Really?
Or do you mean that the Onion is Daily Mash like. As I'm in the UK.
As if satire and real life can be distinguished at all now-a-days??
At least the sites such as The Daily Mash and The Onion write articles that are
meant to be humorous distortions of real life. They are meant to be read as sly satire and they are not intentionally trying to mislead their readers; however having readers take these things seriously is inevitable as an article is picked up and propagated by others. Plus real life is so distorted in the Trump era that it is very difficult to come up with a fictional scenario that outdistances the actual events, making even the most outrageous satire more plausible.
Unfortunately on top of this is a proliferation of web sites that
purposefully create outright lies that are
intended to mislead and manipulate their readers for outright political goals. Their overt purpose is not only that people reading their site will absorb the lies as truth, but even more so that the lies will then be propagated as facts through social media to a much wider audience. And it can be amazingly successful; once established in someone's brain it is virtually impossible to argue them out of these lies, no matter how absurd, using logic. I have a nephew on Facebook... well never mind...
These latter sites often try to legally protect themselves by noting in 5 point type in some obscure corner of their webpages that their stories are for only satirical purposes, but the design, feel, and political partisanship of the sites makes this virtually impossible to believe. Just as an example, a significant number of stories and pictures that personally attacked Dr. Ford credibility by presenting completely made-up photos, historical facts, quotes, etc. originated on these types of sites. Snopes lists and clarifies a few (e.g.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brett-kavanaugh-foreclosure-accuser-parents/).
