Last Saturday Straight Up had an item, THE FUNNY PAGES, noting that an obit correction
in The New York Times “read like a satire from The Onion,” as did a David Brooks
column. We also pointed out that “a tidbit from Reuters” about Italy’s multibillionaire prime
minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was “too funny for The Onion.”
Two days later, on Monday, Elizabeth Spiers was wondering in her New York magazine
blog, The Kicker, about an oddball news
story on Madonna and whether she could believe it. “I keep checking the dateline on
this to make sure it still says ‘Reuters’ and not ‘The Onion,'” she wrote. “Hold on a
second…yep, still Reuters.” Is it something in the air? Has something happened at Reuters that we
don’t know about? Does anyone care to start a Not the Onion blog?
