"The Onion" Satire Showing Americans Like Ahmadinejad More Than Obama Completely Fools Iranian News Outlet

This is hilarious - the spoofer of all time, "The Onion" struck again as the Iranian new agency, Fars News Agency, fell hook...line...and sinker for an Onion spoof on how Americans feel about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vs. President Obama.

Can't you just see these mooks over in the offices of Fars seeing the article and running about yelling - "look! look!  the American people outside of the urban areas hate Obama and they like our President Ahmadinejad better!  We will use this to fight the Great Satan!"    hahahaha

The story comes from The Telegraph.

Iran fooled by US satirical website The Onion


Fars News Agency, a semi-official mouth piece of the Iranian regime, earnestly published a word-for-word duplicate of an article from the Onion, a spoof news organisation based in Chicago.

The satirical article cited a fake Gallup poll which found that 77 per cent of white, rural voters would rather go to a baseball game or have a beer with Mr Ahmadinejad than with the US president.

It went on to cite a made-up West Virginian named Dale Swiderski, who said that he preferred the Iranian to Mr Obama because: "He takes national defense seriously, and he'd never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does."

Fars, which loyally prints the anti-Western and anti-Israeli tirades of senior Iranian officials, copied the entire Onion article without giving any indication of its source.

It printed the short bulletin in English but did not appear to have translated it into Farsi.



Will Tracy, the editor of the Onion, released a statement joking that Fars was a subsidiary of the Onion. "They have acted as our Middle Eastern bureau since the mid 1980s, when the Onion’s publisher, T. Herman Zweibel, founded Fars with the government approval of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. The Onion freely shares content with Fars and commends the journalists at Iran’s Finest News Source on their superb reportage."

Many news organisations have fallen victim to the Onion's mock-serious news style. In 2004, a Beijing paper reported on an Onion piece which claimed that members of Congress were threatening to move out of Washington unless their lavatories were upgraded.