The Washington Post Thinks Clickhole Is Serious, Apparently
Photo courtesy of Getty Images Comedy Features Green Day
Democracy might die in darkness, as the Washington Post goofily intones at the top of every edition, but apparently so does the ability to recognize obvious satire when you see it. How else to explain this beautiful mistake the paper made today, where it quoted a 2017 Clickhole article where Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong supposedly revealed that “American Idiot” was about George W. Bush?
this fuck-up is so pure it makes me weep pic.twitter.com/JOHHioqIAF
— Jon Hanrahan (@hanrahanrahanra) July 10, 2018
The context, of course, involves Donald Trump. The people of England are trying to get Green Day’s song to the top of their charts (yes, the charts apparently still matter in a country that still acts like a withered, inbred, medieval monarchy has any relevance in the 21st century) in time for Trump’s upcoming visit to their beautiful little island. In their write up about that this morning the Post quoted a fake essay written by Armstrong “revealing” the (not-at-all-secret) fact that “American Idiot” was written about our president at the time. Clickhole strikes again.
Hopefully all the upheaval over at Fusion Media Group, who bought up Clickhole and The Onion in 2016, several months before snapping up the remnants of the Gawker family of websites, and is now basically in the process of slowly dismantling all of them, doesn’t damage Clickhole too much. If there’s anything to look forward to in this depressing nightmare world we live in today, it’s the thought of legacy media outlets completely whiffing on blindingly blatant satire that simultaneously makes fun of historically terrible presidents and hysterically smug rock stars.
Sadly the Post, after a solid few hours or so of social media mockery, removed the Clickhole reference. At least we’ll always have Jon Hanrahan’s tweet preserving this beautiful moment for posterity. Or at least until some billionaire shuts down Twitter because somebody was mean to them on it once.
Ahem
This story has been updated to remove material attributed to a satirical Web publication, Clickhole. https://t.co/qxLXFS84Pw
— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 10, 2018